Was your company founded out of frustration? Frustration that your ideas weren’t being heard, that you could see a better way of doing something, that you wanted to be part of an organization you could be proud of?

Did you have any struggles along the way? Struggles getting your product to work, getting investors and customers to listen to you, finding people to work for you who shared your enthusiasm and vision?

Did you have any breakthroughs in the development of your company? Breakthroughs in finding groups of buyers who need your solution, in discovering how to improve your product for customers, in helping your organization come together as a team?

People are naturally more interested in learning about something via storytelling. We are more likely to hear, remember and act upon a narrative than an abstract description.

And we especially want to hear stories where the hero encounters challenges, where the expectations of the main characters crash into a harsh and uncooperative reality.

What are the stories of “expectations crashing into harsh reality” in your company? Are you using these stories to tell buyers what you bring to the world?

Every story must have a conflict, but it takes more than conflict to make a story. It’s the structure of the story that let’s you set the stage, introduce the conflict and resolve it.

According to Larry Brooks in his book “Story Structure – Demystified”:

But inherent to the notion of conflict is the architecture of how it is handled within the narrative. And that’s where structure comes into play. No structure, no story, either. Because structure is what turns conflict into dramatic tension, without which, again, you have no story. It’s the full circle truth.

Brooks is explaining story structure to writers of 300-page novels, but his ideas apply to any story, short or long.

He describes a four part structure: the setup, the response, the attack, and the resolution.

Part One: The setup

In the setup, the main character, or the hero, is living a life that is in balance. Brooks calls the hero an Orphan at this stage. The Orphan is someone we care about, but we don’t know what is going to happen to the Orphan. The first stage is about getting to know and learning to care about the hero.

At the end of Part One is the inciting incident. This is the incident which introduces the conflict or the obstacle. Once the hero has experienced the inciting incident, there is no going back. The hero cannot avoid addressing the situation. How the hero initially addresses the situation is the subject of Part Two.

It’s important not to set up the inciting incident or the conflict too early. You can foreshadow the inciting incident, but you want to wait until the reader cares about the hero before you put the hero into conflict.

Part Two: The response

Here the hero must face the consequences of the inciting incident. But at this stage the hero is not behaving very heroically. The hero is simply responding to the incident. The hero may try to run away, or use ways of responding that have worked for the hero in the past. In this stage the hero is a Wanderer. The hero is being acted upon by the antagonist or the circumstances, but the hero spends more time avoiding the obstacle than fighting it.

At the end of Part Two is another incident. In this milestone, the stakes get ratcheted up a notch. Circumstances force the hero to do more than simply respond using the old methods.

Part Three: The attack

Part Three is about the hero shifting from a Wanderer to a Warrior in response to the mid-milestone incident. The hero finds new strengths (internally or externally) with which to fight the obstacle. But even though the hero is now fighting back, the hero is not experiencing much success. This keeps the tension high, and the conflict unresolved.

Part Four: The resolution

In Part Four the hero becomes a Martyr. The hero begins to find a way to defeat the enemy, to overcome the obstacle. This is the stage where the hero becomes completely committed, where everything comes together.

At this stage, the writer cannot introduce any new information – characters or resources. This stage has to be all about using what the hero already has and knows to solve the problem, reach the goal, or save the day. It’s about tying up loose ends and bringing the conflict to a close.

Four parts – setup, response, attack, and resolution. Four stages of the hero’s development – orphan, wanderer, warrior, and martyr.

Once you internalize this structure, you’ll begin to see that every popular movie and book is structured around this sequence. They are popular because people everywhere understand this structure. Knowing this structure means that you can use it to tell the stories about your business – stories that people will read, remember, and act upon.

What is the one thing that a story must have?

Conflict. Without conflict it’s just a series of events that no one cares about.

As Robert McKee says, a story is when life gets thrown out of balance. A customer rejects the terms of a contract, investors threaten to pull out of a deal, or the new version of the product has an unexplained failure. “The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality.”

In other words, when there is a conflict between what you thought was going to happen and what actually happens.

When you communicate in business – whether it is to a buyer, an investor, or to your organization – your audience is most likely to listen, to remember and to act upon what you say if you communicate in the form of a story.

Yet look at most web sites or other business communication. What we read is the official story – the watered down, safe version – the one that is “carefully constructed to tell a version of events that is sanitized and thought to be unlikely to get anyone in trouble.” This version of the story has no conflict. Which is why so much business communication fails to engage the reader.

What are some examples of story that you could use to communicate with your buyers? Stories that have conflict and will keep their interest? Here are a few ideas:

• The story of a customer that faced an obstacle and was able to overcome it using your capabilities.
• How about the founding of your company? A founder sees a problem in the world, an obstacle. The founder realizes no else is doing anything about it and decides to build a company that can defeat this obstacle.
• Or when you went to get funding or to find your first customers. They didn’t believe in the value of what you had created. You had to work and work to get the funding or to win your first customers?

When you start looking for it, you start to see conflict everywhere. Which is not surprising, Business is all about conflict, addressing conflicts, resolving conflicts. Think about what you talk about when you come home at night or when you are with your friends. It’s all the conflicts that you experience at work.

That doesn’t mean that you are going to tell all these stories to your buyers. It just means that conflict is everywhere, so stories are everywhere. And the stories that you want to tell your buyers are the ones that create value for them. The stories that answer the questions or solve the problems that the buyer has at that stage of their buying cycle.

If the buyer is wondering if they can trust you, tell a story that shows that you have similar values, that you are interested in helping them solve their problem, that you have done this before.

If the buyer is asking if you have the capabilities they need, tell a story about similar buyers and how your capabilities helped them overcome their obstacle.

If you want to arouse the emotions and energy of your buyer tell a story. It will bring together idea and emotion. It will engage their hearts and move them to action.

In the last post we looked at why mental simulations are almost as good as direct experience when you want to learn something (or teach something). And we learned that a story can function as a mental simulation.

How can a technology company provide mental simulations through story that create value for potential buyers? One way is to tell a story of an experience that communicates your values and your abilities. As buyers read your story, they will be simulating the experience you are telling. It will closely resemble the buyer having the same experience you did.

Here’s an example: This is a story that High Speed CNC, a specialized machine shop, tells on its website of how it responded to a downturn in the economy. (I don’t know anyone at High Speed CNC. I just happened to come across their web site one day.) High Speed CNC used the extra time on its hands to improve the processes in its shop and become ISO 9001 compliant.

The page describing their experience has all the essential elements of a story: a protagonist we care about (the owner and his business), an obstacle (the economic downturn), a narrative sequence, and a larger meaning.

By the end of the story we’ve learned some things about how Joe Munich, the CEO of High Speed CNC, does business:

• He values his people and tries to keep everybody together during a downturn.
• He looks for ways to improve the company’s capabilities in ways that are good for the customer.
• He is conservative in his financial practices. It will take more than a strong financial wind to blow him over.
• He’s willing to make capital investments in his business.

If High Speed CNC had simply claimed these characteristics on their web site, we would have been dubious. But by walking us through his experience of becoming ISO compliant, the characteristics are much more credible.

And because it’s told in the form of a story, we are more likely to remember the story and be able to share it with others.

If you wanted to learn to cook a new dish, it would be great to have a chef in your kitchen to teach you. The chef could walk you through each step of the process. As you made mistakes or had questions, the chef could answer them and correct you.

The direct experience would involve all of your senses. You could smell and taste the raw ingredients as they transformed into something new. It would involve you physically as you chopped and stirred, mentally as you worked to understand the method, and emotionally as you interacted with the chef.

You would naturally create a story about this experience that you could use the next time you wanted to make the dish. It would also be a story that you could tell others, one where you could re-create the experience – the smells and tastes, the motions of the work, the feelings you experienced.

And it turns out that your listeners could learn how to make the dish from your story almost as well as if they had been there with the chef.

Why are stories which simulate an experience almost as good at teaching as experiencing the event yourself?

In Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick they explain that we are not simply passive recipients of a story. We become involved with the story as we identify with the characters and the storyteller’s world.

The Heath brothers describe research which indicates that we create a kind of geographic simulation of the stories we hear. We organize objects in their proper spatial location.

They also describe an experiment where participants were asked to mentally simulate the events related to a problem they were trying to solve. These subjects did better at coping with their problem. Better than the subjects who did nothing and better than those who visualized what it would feel like to have solved the problem.

Why does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Brain scans show that when people imagine a flashing light, they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their skin, they activate tactile areas of the brain. The activity of mental simulation is not limited to the insides of our heads. People who imagine words that start b or p can’t resist subtle lip movements, and people who imagine looking at the Eiffel Tower can’t resist moving their eyes upward. Mental simulation even alter visceral physical responses. When people drink water but imagine that it’s lemon juice, they salivate more. Even more surprisingly, when people drink lemon juice but imagine that it’s water, they salivate less.

The Heaths go on say that mental simulations help us to manage emotions. They help us to solve problems. And they can even help us to build skills.

The takeaway is simple. Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation.

This is the role that stories play – putting knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence. More like a flight simulator. Being the audience for a story isn’t so passive, after all. Inside, we’re getting ready to act.

In the next post we’ll look at how you can use stories to create a simulation for your potential buyers, a simulation of what it would be like to work with you.