Telling Good Stories
Four elements of a good story
It’s easy to spot stories. They come bound in the pages of books, or with popcorn and a Coke, or while sitting around a campfire. They come in different sizes and genres, like fiction and fable. You can even find them in other, less obvious forms, like a painting or a dance.
Organizations also have stories. Like the stories you are familiar with, they also come in different sizes and forms. You might have your organization’s origin story or founder story that you share in a blog post or a video. Or you might verbally share cultural stories of employees doing something special within their team. You might even have stories in the form of product reviews or testimonials from customers.
Just like the stories you tell while roasting s’mores, organizational stories work to communicate an idea through emotions and are a powerful tool in expressing the essence of your band.
So, let’s look at four elements of a good story.
Good Stories Follow a Structure
In 1863 the German novelist Gustav Freytag laid out his analysis of the dramatic structure¹. From that analysis, we have Freytag’s Pyramid, or the dramatic arc. Since its inception, the arc has served as a guide for storytellers around the world and a way to structure stories into five acts.
Because most stories we’ve heard are built based on this pyramid, our brains are conditioned to hear stories in this way. And when we do hear them this way, we tend to like them more than when the stories don’t follow that structure. This also applies to the stories wedged in the middle of your favorite TV shows, commercials.
Marketing professor Keith Quesenberry and his research colleague Michael Coolsen reviewed more than 100 Super Bowl ads in a two-year span. They coded each one to see how many acts it contained. Then, they compared the number of acts with the rating given to the commercials in the top consumer Advertising Super Bowl Polls. They found a correlation: The more acts a commercial had, the more developed the story, and the higher its rating².
From Shakespeare to Budweiser, good storytellers know to follow this basic structure.
Good Stories Create Empathy
One day, David Ogilvy, who some call the father of modern advertising, was walking to his offices on Madison Avenue and passed a homeless man sitting on the curb. The man was holding a sign that read: “I am blind. Please help.” Ogilvy looked down and noticed the man’s collection cup was empty.
Ogilvy reached into his pocket and dug around. Instead of pulling out a few coins to throw in the cup, he pulled out a pen. He took the man’s sign and wrote: “It is spring, and I am blind.”
Later that day, Ogilvy passed the man again. He looked down, and this time, the collection cup was overflowing with money³.
I am not blind, and I could never fully understand the experience of someone with blindness. But I can, for a moment, imagine not seeing the cherry blossoms blooming, or the butterflies flitting around, or the flowers budding, or the green grass sprouting. When I start to imagine what it might be like to miss out on those sights, I start to gain a new perspective. I have empathy.
Empathy is a mental setting that allows us to feel for someone else and imagine their circumstances and conditions. Empathy challenges our core beliefs by mimicking personal experiences.
You can’t invite everyone you know to experience all that you have experienced. You can’t invite them to your factory to meet your amazing workers. Your non-profit can’t send all your donors to Africa to meet the beneficiaries of your work.
But you have stories, and stories generate empathy in others. So, while you can’t take your audience everywhere, you can tell them good stories. (By the way, at FiveStone we gain empathy through our research process.)
Stories lead to empathy by forcing the listener to encounter a new perspective. By changing their perspectives, you change their presuppositions. And in this, you finally break through their emotional armor and earn the right to challenge your audience’s core beliefs about how the world works.
Good Stories Lead to Action
The famous trial lawyer Moe Levine was once involved in a case where his client suffered a double amputation of his arms. When it came time for the closing argument, Levine addressed the jury with this short story:
“As you know, about an hour ago we broke for lunch. I saw the bailiff come and take you all as a group to have lunch in the jury room. Then I saw the defense attorney, Mr. Horowitz. He and his client decided to go to lunch together.
“The judge and court clerk went to lunch. So I turned to my client, Harold, and said, ‘Why don’t you and I go to lunch together?’ We went across the street to that little restaurant and had lunch.”
Levine paused, then said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I just had lunch with my client. He has no arms. He has to eat like a dog. Thank you very much.⁴”
Levine recognized that the shared experience of eating lunch provided an opportunity to create empathy. The experience of Levine’s client’s lunch was radically different from everyone else’s in the courtroom, something that the jurors may not have realized. But in that story, they were invited in and could imagine themselves having to eat like a dog.
The empathy that the story generated was so great that it forced the jurors to see the world in a new way — and they didn’t like what they saw. As a result, they wanted to fix it.
That single line — “He has to eat like a dog” — from a short story about lunch reportedly awarded Levine’s client one of the largest settlements in the history of New York⁴.
We won’t be arguing the closing of a court case, but we will be moving people to buy our product, volunteer at our organization, or give money. A good story automatically moves people to action.
Neuroeconomist Dr. Paul Zak conducted a study to find out what happens in the brain during storytelling. He told respondents the story of a kid with cancer who eventually dies. Dr. Zak found something interesting. When a story follows the classic dramatic arc and the story is engaging, even the simplest story can cause the brain to release two chemicals: cortisol and oxytocin.
Cortisol
Cortisol causes us to pay attention. In the study, the more distress a person felt, the more cortisol was released by the brain.
Oxytocin
Oxytocin is connected to care, connection, and empathy. In the study, the more oxytocin released by the person’s brain, the more likely they were to give money.
In Dr. Zak’s study, respondents that released both oxytocin and cortisol were more likely to share money to a charity or stranger, and the amount of released oxytocin predicted how much money they would share. The viewers were paid $20 to be in the experiment, and on average, the people that donated money gave half of their $20 to a cancer-related charity⁵.
The power of story altered the chemical reactions in the brain and led to action.
Good Stories Prove What You Believe
The stories we tell as a company must match the actions of our company — talk the talk and walk the walk. Your storytelling is your talk, and what your organization does and how it operates is your walk. If your talk and walk do not match up, then you’re not being consistent as an organization. The result is your audience won’t believe you and they will go away.
Your Core Beliefs help here (Why, Vision, Mission). They provide the checks and balances that keep your organization from pretending to believe one thing but doing another. They’re not a wish list of hopes or wants but instead, a deep reflection of who you are as an organization. Your organization must believe and behave with consistency, and your stories must reflect and reinforce this. The stories you tell are the primary way to illustrate that what you believe is what you are actually doing.
The importance of telling good stories is nothing new. We know this both anecdotally and through research. And, as an organization, they play an important role in validating your narrative. (see: Narrative vs Story)
My hope is that you will return to these ideas as a reminder of why story is important and as a way to continue telling good stories.
This is an excerpt from the book CULTURE BENDING NARRATIVES: Moving Beyond Story to Create Meaningful Brands.
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- Ohio University explains Freytag’s pyramid like this.
- Quesenberry and Coolsen’s findings are discussed here.
- The Ogilvy story is a popular account. You can read one version of it in The Idea Writers by Teressa Iezzi.
- The Moe Levine story is recounted in various places, but this article provided the basis for the version used here. The size of the settlement was not easily verifiable, but a Harvard Business Review article states that “Levine reportedly won one of the largest settlements in the history of the state of New York.” The whole article is accessible here.
- Pacific Standard gives a good overview of Dr. Zak’s study.
