How storytelling works

An introduction to the science, structure and techniques of storytelling.

This was a talk I gave to my colleagues at an away day about storytelling. It’s mainly about communicating things internally within companies, less about communicating to customers.

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So I wish I’d had slightly more time to do the talk, unfortunately I’ve just been off for the last two weeks, on holiday.

We went as a family down to Italy in the car, which is a pretty big hefty drive, around 18–20 hours or so spread over a couple of days.

The way we normally arrange it is do it is to drive mostly during the night, and with three kids in the back, there are two golden rules.

1. Ensure that all essential electronic devices are charged sufficiently
2. Once they fall asleep, for goodness sake, don’t wake them up.

Now I keep myself awake during the drive mainly by eating. I eat a lot of food. Sandwiches, crisps, biscuits, sweets. Lots of them.

In the middle of one of those crisps I bit my lip. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. The stupid, sleeping, kids.

A couple of things happen when you bite your lip, firstly you get a little kick of adrenaline, and one of the side effects of adrenaline is that your perception of time slows down, so everything that happens next seems to happen over a much longer period of time.

The next thing is that your nervous system kicks in so that your lip can tell your brain that something has happened.

A message goes from your lip to your brain to say. “Ouch…listen we’ve got a situation here, you’ve told the jaw to bite, but it’s really causing some issues down here”

Once this is received by the brain, it can send a message back down from the brain to the jaw to say. “Ok jaw, great job and everything, but we need you to stop now please.”

The most awful part of this whole affair is the part in the middle. The message has gone from the brain to the jaw, but until it arrives, it’s going to continue to bite down on your lip. You know it’s going wrong, but you can’t do anything about it.

This feeling of helpless pain is a feeling that I’ve experienced over much longer periods of time in design reviews. In those sessions where people simply aren’t engaged, or aren’t ‘getting it’.

You’re sat there suddenly realising it’s not going to plan, people aren’t engaged, not interested, not hitting their buttons. But have to continue for the remainder of the 30, 45 minutes, hour that the meeting.

I’d pay or do anything to not feel this. It’s awful.

If you’ve ever felt this, then storytelling can help

On the other hand, although it’s fairly selfish, one of the best feelings is when I’m in a discussion with some people and someone recalls something I’ve said from a year or more ago, and how it changed their view on something. They they proceed to tell me about it. “David it’s like that time you told us about ….”. They’ve remembered something I’ve said, it shifted their thinking, and they can say it back to me in pretty much the same way I told it to them.

Again, I’d pay good money for a tool that would let me feel that more often.

I think storytelling is that tool. You can have fewer occasions biting your lip. More people changing their views because something you’ve said, more people remembering it.

Military Research

This isn’t some touchy-feely-hippie-huggie principle. The people who have invested the most into researching how stories affect people are the military. (Predominantly the work of Kendall Haven, who literally wrote the book on the science of story telling.)

For all the money they spend on military hardware, they’d always rather not to put their own soldiers at risk. If you can change a regime through shifting an internal mood of a country rather than through bullets, then you’ve achieved your goals without putting your own people at risk. The story you need to do that needs to be incredibly strong.

It can also help shift or replace the internal stories that radicalised citizens tell themselves, as long as you can structure a better story to replace it with. Even veterans with experiences that have affected brain function can benefit. If memories have been lost, then understanding how to effectively give memories back in a way that will stick is hugely important.

The result of the research is a much better understanding of how the brain processes and uses stories and story structure.

Three big ideas come out of it, the Neural Story Net (NSN), the Make Sense Mandate (MSM) and the Bank of Existing Knowledge (BEK). Let’s take them one by one.

The Neural story net

Whenever you take information in through any of your senses it doesn’t pass straight into your conscious brain. Instead it passes through something called the ‘Neural story net’. The job of this area is to process everything coming in and do whatever it can to turn it into something that makes sense.

Make sense mandate

It’s got total freedom to do anything to that information to make it fit. To make it make sense as a story. This liberty is known as the ‘Make sense mandate’. If information comes in and it doesn’t make sense, then it can change it any way it wants. It will:

• Make assumptions
• Make connections
• Reverse the meaning
• Ignore parts, add parts

Often all of the changes above will be wrong, but that doesn’t matter as long as the messages coming in now make sense.

For instance, if I use sarcasm to say ‘oh man, David’s talk was sooooo interesting’ then my brain takes it, literally reverses the entire meaning of what’s being said, then passes it through to conscious brain.

Bank of existing knowledge

If the sensory input being dealt with doesn’t have a direct obvious meaning, then my ‘BEN’ kicks in, the ‘bank of existing knowledge’.

The BEN Is the store of previous experiences and knowledge that adds context and relevance to whatever is coming into the brain.

The less context that is supplied with the story you’re telling, and the less relevant the story is, the more work this area will have to do to plug all the holes, and make sense of things that aren’t crystal clear from the get go.

It will create relevance and context from what’s available. The less relevant, the further it has to go into unknown territory of it’s own knowledge to find something that can relate. In turn this probably means your story will end up being misinterpreted.

It feels like an overworked slightly crap Product Owner who is constantly expected to be sure about everything they’re asked about, whilst making wild conclusions based on 1 dodgy metric.

I had an example of this reasoning on our recent holiday car journey.

We had stopped off briefly for food and a piddle, then all piled back into the car. I started driving off with one of the sliding back doors open. Everyone shouted and we stopped really quickly, but one of my twins called Gracie said ‘if you drive off with the door open, Keira (other twin) could fall out and die…and then we’d have to get a new person’

That to me is a perfect example of how her story net had taken some information, processed it with everything that she knows, and produced a story that makes sense:

Keira could fall out, she might die, I’ve no idea what happens when someone dies, but if we lose important things, we can generally get a new one. Therefore we’d get a new person.

This stuff is really important for communicating in companies. Unless you really think about who the audience is, what they currently know about, then what you tell them will go through this process, and they’ll be filling in and distorting information left right and centre.

So that’s the brain processing bit, but there’s also chemicals being released left right and centre depending on what mood is being created.

At this point in the talk I shared some personal stories to illustrate the chemicals that are released when we tell different types of stories. However the stories involve other people who might not want them shared, so the best place to look is this video instead by David JD Phillips.

What *is* a story?

So that’s some of how the brain reacts to story, and chemicals that are released based on stories. But what the hell actually *is* a story?

Often I hear people saying ‘what’s the story that we want to tell with this presentation?’ which mainly talks about what order do we want to present the information? I think ‘storytelling’ is something larger than that.

There are a variety of definitions, but one thing is pretty constant, and that is the structure that a story is set up with.

Story structure

Story structure is pretty simple overall. There’s 3 blocks.

The beginning, this sets up the characters that will be involved in the story, lays out their goals and motivations, and sets up to the promise of the story to be told.

Then there’s some kind of inciting incident which kicks off the bulk of the story, which is the middle. This is where all the challenges and problems will be faced, leading to a climax and finally the resolution.

There are the key attributes of a story that can influence its effectiveness.

• Characters
  People involved in the story
• Traits
  These are the things that let you control your audiences relationship to the character
• Goals
  What they are trying to achieve
• Motives. Now this is absolutely key.
  Why are they trying to achieve the goal? If the motive isn’t clear, then the NSN will try and infer one. And most of the time it’ll be wrong.
  That falling out with a friend or family member, because auntie beryl thought you were ignoring her at the family day, but in fact you were just quiet because you were upset about something at work. THAT’S THAT.
• Conflicts and problems
  Interesting thing here is that often the larger consequences in the physical world. Losing money, breaking something, are less impactful than the personal, social, mental and emotional ones.Rejection, ridicule, belittlement, failure etc.
• Risk and danger
  What could go wrong for them?
• Struggles
  How they battle against the problems they’re presented with
• Details
  The small aspects of the story that make it ‘real’ to the audience. Something they can inhabit.

The essential things for influence are to make sure a story is relevant to the audience, they can identify with the right character in the story, and there is some sort of emotional engagement.

It’s vital that the ‘make sense mandate’ is controlled, you’ve thought about the audience’s context and known knowledge and haven’t assumed any ‘family stories’. These are references, or knowledge that mean something to you and a small group, but no one outside that.

Give as little opportunity as possible for your information to be twisted, altered, holes filled with other irrelevant or incorrect knowledge.

Good example

One of the best examples I’ve heard is from someone who was at the BBC when the General Experience Language (GEL) was being sold and embedded within the organisation. One of the most effective ways to get across what it was for and why was a story.

In the 1930s there was a tussle going on over our electricity infrastructure. One group wanted to build a national grid. they envisioned a universal electricity source working the same way up and down the country to make electricity cheaper, more uniformly available, and help manufacturers only have to build something once.

However the country was set up with groups, either generators or electrical tool makers like light bulbs who thought their electrical setup was better. 300v and 10amps in Aberdeen, 120v and 30v in Bristol.

Eventually the idea of the national grid was accepted by parliament and implemented in 1936.

GEL is the National Grid for design within the BBC.

This story has so many good things about it.

Firstly, the assumed knowledge is good — we all know what the national grid is. It’s electricity everywhere.

The risks are real, the consequences are huge.

There is a hero (the person trying to create the national Grid) and a set of antagonists (all the embedded electrical producers with their self interest)

The motives match our own, so we assign with the characters in the story. It’s fantastic.

So that’s some key concepts in story telling. The most important thing is to practice, and share. I don’t see any other way of getting better at it!

Let me know if you want to try too.

There is so much to this area, I’ll try and go deeper into some specific areas in future.