Enough with the Hero's Journey! Appropriate Storytelling for Business
That doesn't involve 1,000 pages of hobbits traipsing along the countryside.
A lot is being said these days about the importance of storytelling for business. I am an advocate of this too, as I believe (based on research) that humans digest and relate to information a lot better when it is presented as a story.
And yet, quite often I see this advice accompanied by The Hero’s Journey as a suggested template. As someone who writes fantasy novels (where people do go out on journeys), all I can say is: err, whut?
The Hero’s Journey is an idealised, theoretical structure collecting many elements into something semi-coherent proposed by Joseph Campbell, that is (a) highly criticised, (b) doesn’t exist outside of academic discourse, and (c) not really useful even for those writing hobbits-on-a-quest stories (or occult-detective-on-case stories). It’s practically Campbell’s wild speculation about the nature of quests and heroes, not something that you should use as a basis for writing business stories.
Let’s instead look at some alternative models that will make a lot more sense, and that you can apply to various opportunities for storytelling at work. Ones that will be short, punchy, and leave your audience engaged, unlike the swamp bits in the middle of Lord of the Rings.
What is storytelling in business?
Humans connects to facts in context, and do so much better when there is an emotional story around them. We just seem to be built for communicating via stories, probably all these millennia of sitting around fires. Whatever the deep psychological reason is, you can — and should — utilise it whenever you are trying to connect with other human beings and do more than impart factual information.
Consider building a product vision and using it to motivate your team, to align them on what’s the direction we’re heading, and getting them excited for the journey. Consider build messaging frameworks for sales, where launches and demos must resonate with the customer. Or presenting opportunities to the executives during your product review and asking for funds. Any CFO will tell you that you can put a spreadsheet with PnL in front of the board, but it’s the story behind the numbers that matters.
In more technical terms, there is the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom pyramid, though I like to replace that last part to “Actionable Intelligence.” You may start with a lot of raw data (daily temperature measurements), from which you extract information (averages over time), which you place in context (global weather patterns changing over the past century), to gain an insight and actions you could take. It’s similar in concept ot the ladder of inference, which we use internally to analysing observed reality (the data) to select an action — often jumping to conclusions. When you tell a story, you need to build this process up for your audience.
But not every story is for every listener. Don’t believe me? Think of your favourite books, and go check all the 1-star reviews on Goodreads. Or vice versa, pick a book you consider utterly trashy, and read the glowing reviews it got. That’s why, in product management, we need to not only tailor the story to the audience, but also keep trying variations or other stories to see what lands with a particular audience. We need to keep practicing telling our product’s story, and then continually adjust based on (usually implicit) feedback. It’s almost as if the story about the product is a product in itself 😉
Story context
As we’ve seen above, whenever you want people to remember something or align on a direction, you need to get them to have an emotional reaction to it. And that is best achieved via a story — but not any story, the right story for the context. Consider that different audiences (customers, execs, users, developers, analysts) have different areas of interest, different attention spans, different view points, cultural backgrounds, and — as all people in general — different tastes.
Consider these:
Hook: How long do you have to get your audience’s attention?
An ‘elevator pitch’ to your CEO is different to when a team gathers to listen and learn.
Length: how much time do you have to elaborate?
Is this a TED talk, or an all-hands about the new strategy?
Mental effort: how prepared are your listener to invest mental effort in understanding your message?
What is the one message you want them to remember?
Emotions: is your audience coming in charged, open to learning, or are you reaching out cold?
What emotions do you wish to make them feel to enhance your message?
Understanding where your users are coming from and what you are aiming for them to take out of the story is key. That’s why putting in a long-form narrative (think Amazon’s 6-pager) is key: you force yourself to collect all the data and information, and present as coherent knowledge for actionable intelligence. Once you have the full scope of that, you can then extract what you need for each story and use literary devices and other embellishments to make into a memorable story. A bit like how the long-term vision of your product is broken into bits to build and bet, or how your product’s positioning is the input into messaging and copy.
The sad thing is, I’m sure many of you are nodding your head in agreement — but won’t actually build a long-form narrative for your product or area. Why? Because it’s bloddy hard, and life gets in the way. But if I can get even a few reader to try it once, I’m sure the benefits of these exercises would be realised and carry over into future work.
Story frameworks
Now for the mechanics of storytelling. Kurt Vonnegot gave a lecture many times about the Shape of Stories, which you can watch YouTube here (it’s 5 minutes and highly entertaining, so I’ll wait for you; or a slightly longer version here). While he was prescient and people do analyse the cadences of stories using AI these days, it’s the simple, basic cadences that are important because people relate to them.
Besides that cadences, stories need relatable characters. In out case, we can often place the audience directly in the story. Any salesperson will tell you that it’s not about your product features, but about showing the customer what value they provide to their specific problems.
Now that you have your full picture (the long-form narrative), your audience and their context (length, punchiness), and the message you want to convery, it’s time to consider how to craft a story. This is usually where you’d pick a framework like The Hero’s Journey, except as we said — it sucketh.
Since you aren’t writing literature, here instead are some simpler cadences you can choose from.
Fall down, get up
The simplest and quickest of structures, and judging by how half of romantic literature (‘boy meets girl’ stories) and most sitcoms are using it, probably the most accessible. Our protagnist SB (aka ‘somebody’) gets into trouble — one that is top-of-mind to our customers — and then gets out of it using our product. No fuss, direct and to the point.
A variant is SB almost gets into trouble, but our product saves them just in time. As long as the intro is enough to set up the ‘oh-oh’ feeling in the audience, it’s fine.
This format is useful for problem statement, vision narrative, marketing/sales pitches, and the like.
Three-act structure
Anything longer than the above, and we’re getting dangerously close to literary lengths. But if you did want to write a long form with exposition, complication, low points, high points, and resolution to make your literature teacher from school proud, the 3-act structure is probably the simplest and best.
I do like Dan Wells take of it as a Seven-Point Structure, but do remember that you’re here to send a message to the audience in a way that lands quickly, not write gripping thrillers. These longer forms (Dan Well’s 7-point or Campbell’s Hero’s Journey) are more useful when analysing literary works to find where to improve by heightening tensions, adding stakes, and generally keeping the reader on their toes. When you’re actually writing, best follow Vonnegut’s advice: start as close as possible to the action (ie the relevant business problem), and focus on the emotions.
Zoom in, zoom out
There’s a famous quote in journalism circles, that:
“You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.” — Richard Price
The idea here is that to comprehend something big, we make it relatable by linking it to something small. You start by zooming in, possibly using the ‘fall down, get up’ structure above using a known or relatable persona. Then you pull back to show the full data and whatever else that gives a scale and context to the problem.
Winter is coming
Popularised by Andy Raskin in his The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen column. The basic premise is that the world is changing and there will be winners and losers. In a way, the idea is the opposite of the zoom in approach above — you start with how the whole industry or whatever is on the verge of a seismic shakeup, and your audience better listen up before they end up in the loosers bin.
I would say that most good stories are about some kind of change. There’s the ‘inciting incident’ (see the 3-act structure) that represents a break from the status quo, some motifs of trying to restore balance (depending on how long you wish to drag your audience through this), and a climax where the new reality sets in.
While Raskin talks about a change in the world, it doesn’t have to be this way. You can show a single person’s life changing to showcase how your product introduces a new equilibrium to their life. The important aspects are a protagonist we care about going through some change.
But forget the Frameworks…
Stories are about emotions. Before you pick the framework, ask yourself what you want your audience to feel that will enhance the message you are sending.
Are you trying to inspire and uplift them? A good ending is a must
Are you trying to drive them to action? Perhaps the winter is coming analogy
Pitching a new idea? Zoom in to make it relatable, then zoom out to the TAM
Think of the emotions your audience is walking in with (do they know you? trust you?) and which emotion you want them to leave with (inspired? worried?). Then pick a language that will evoke this, the right kind of metaphors, and practice in the medium you’ll deliver it.
In summary…
As we said above, no story is for everyone. This started as a rant against the Hero’s Journey, but the main idea is that you need to think about language and emotions that complement and anchor the message you are sending to your audience. Write a long-form narrative of your product’s context, listen to customer interviews for how they speak about the problem, and then use their language back.
If you try a metaphor and it doesn’t resonate, just try another. And another. Take that moment to reflect on your message and delivery, and analyse where it’s failing. Try a tweaking different things to make your audience feel heard, make them care. Have a library of stories, not just one. And then deliver your message in a cloud of feelings. Until it lands.
ps For those still reading, Leo Tolstoy once classified all great stories as (two-thirds) of this: