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Blogging Storynomics 9 | Three-act structure and the business of storytelling

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Wheat Field with Cypresses, Vincent Van Gogh
THREE-ACT STRUCTURE

One of the more curious bits about the intense interest in storytelling for business, is that the two most learned writers in the realm of dramatic storytelling, Robert McKee in America, and John Yorke in England, are taking on business storytelling. Both have quite a lot to offer. Both have deep expertise and experience in the real world of drama, including television and cinema. I took a Story for Business course with John Yorke, which I have to say, was seriously eye-opening. It changed a lot for me. I would not be writing these posts, reading these books or thinking about my business the way that I am, were if not for John Yorke and Nick Parker, who helped design John Yorke’s program. That program lives at The Professional Writing Academy in the UK. They do a terrific job. I highly recommend it.

Onto today’s business — three-act structure in which I’m pulling from John Yorke’s book, Into the Woods.

Excerpt from John Yorke: Three-act structure is the cornerstone of drama primarily because it embodies not just the simplest units of Aristotelian (and indeed all) structure; it follows the irrefutable laws of physics. Everything must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Screenwriting teacher Syd Field first articulated the three-act paradigm breaking act structure down to these constituent parts: set-up, confrontation and resolution, with a turning point toward the end of the first (the inciting incident) and second (the crisis) acts.

CORPORATE STORYTELLING

I want to be careful about diving too deep into drama and in screenwriting. My aim here is to use McKee and Yorke to help us figure out storytelling for business. I want to make sure we’re tacking close to the wind. The reasons that this kind of story structure makes sense for us as business writers are several. This approach helps us to ask better questions. What happened? Who’s story is this? Who or what got in the way? How did the protagonist surmount the obstacles? What are the stakes? This way of working points the way to creating something that is compelling. And there’s an underpinning, a framework to build the story on. So I’m going to offer up another story from the Lucid Content archives.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” –Maya Angelou

A client of mine is a gardening / nursery company in Eugene, Oregon. The patriarch of the family (let’s call him Frank) founded, owned, and ran the business for years. Their mainstay product are DIY greenhouses. Here’s an abbreviated version of their story.

Frank takes his family on a short vacation. He leaves a small, translucent box, (a fruit tote) upside down on his lawn. On his return, the grass beneath the tote, is thick, rich, dark green. Trapped, warm air created a greenhouse effect. He learns what the plastic is, orders sheets of it, then goes into his home workshop and in short order, builds a sort of backyard, do-it- yourself greenhouse. Presto! Successful family business. Over the years, thousands of units sold and shipped across the country. The business takes over family life, even the the family home. Teenage daughter HATES this business and everything about it. All is going well until… A supplier of the plastic, the very material that the greenhouses are made of, ships defective material. (We have our antagonist.) Many customers are impacted. The business owners by now are older, they’re tired. Everything they have built, including their integrity, their relationship with employees (unusually stellar) is in jeopardy. There’s a lot at stake. They consider shutting down. But wait! But the once recalcitrant daughter is a grown woman. And, surprise, she is a Master Gardener with an MBA in Business. She BUYS THE COMPANY. Her first efforts fail, the crummy manufacturer won’t help her identify which lots were bad, making it almost impossible to find affected customers. She can’t produce the greenhouse kits until she has a better supplier. In the interim, she ships a comparable – competitor product so her customers can get their needs filled. Finally, she finds a new manufacturer, doubles the 10-year warranty to 20, and in the process, finds a way to make whole those customers who had received bad product, and, ushers her parents gently into retirement and shifts her greenhouse kit marketing campaign to…cannabis.

Act I: formation of the company.
Turning point or inciting incident: Manufacturer ships defective materials, company survival at stake.
Act II: Daughter buys the company
Crisis point in Act II: Daughter cannot identify all the customers who got bad product, reputation at stake…ships competitor product…
Act III: Daughter finds new manufacturer, doubles warranty, finds affected customers, makes them whole, parents retire…

Whether we want to structure our stories along certain well-traveled paths or not, it’s often the case that stories organically conform to certain types of structure. Even David Mamet says so.

Excerpt from John Yorke: In simple terms, human beings order the world dialectically. Incapable of perceiving randomness, we insist on imposing order on new phenomena, any new information that comes our way. It’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis. As David Mamet says: ‘Dramatic structure is not arbitrary — or even a conscious invention. It is an organic codification of the human mechanism for ordering information. Event, elaboration, denouement; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl; act one, act two, act three.”

 

Image credit: The Dance Class, Edgar Degas 1874

Blogging Storynomics 8

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So we’ve been blogging our way through Robert Mckee’s Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in a Post-Advertising World. We covered rational and emotional communications in the first post…we talked about the importance of story, the notion that story is the remedy for what ails business communications…we hinted at the difference between narrative and story and then we truly unpacked the narrative – story definitions.

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy

We talked about human consciousness and how story-making emerged to help humans make sense of everything around them. We touched on the eight stages of story design (rather intricate engineering from the Mind of McKee.) We looked to John Yorke’s book on storytelling, Into the Woods. We got into binary values in storytelling: truth/lies, good/evil, love/hate, success/failure. Time and space showed up in blog post six. And in the last post, number seven, we talked about the inciting incident — the event that launches the story.

This next bit that is coming soon from John Yorke, is quite interesting too. I speak of the Three-Act Structure. But for now, just plain old structure…

Excerpt from John Yorke’s book: I smacked my little boy. My anger was powerful. Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the hand. I said, ‘Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you.’ I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He said no. Like trumps.

Yorke continues -> ‘The Hand is a chapter in a short story, ‘Eating Out,’ by the American miniaturist Leonard Michaels; it’s also in effect a complete story in itself. If all stories contain the same structural elements, then it should be relatively easy to identify within ‘The Hand’ the building blocks with we should now be familiar.

Protagonist — the narrator
Antagonist — his son
Inciting incident — awareness of no feeling in hand
Desire — to explain his action
Crisis — ‘He asked…if I wanted him to forgive me’
Climax — ‘I said yes. He said no’
Resolution — ‘Like trumps.’

So I’d like to jump in here and bring this back to a business story situation. In an earlier blog post, I talked about an inciting incident that involved Boeing 787 aircraft. What happened was that a couple of years after launch, a number of these new aircraft experienced problems…lithium-ion batteries had overheated. The entire fleet — worldwide — was grounded by the FAA. That is an inciting incident for the ages. Here’s the opening to the case study I wrote for Base2 Solutions a few years ago.

The Right Teams Get the 787 Flying Again
Base2 Joins Experts to Help Solve Boeing Battery Issue

Boeing faced a huge operational and public relations debacle. The FAA had grounded the 787 Dreamliner. Incidents involving lithium-ion batteries took place on two separate aircraft. Engineers from Base2 joined teams of experts working to find and resolve the problem.   

When 15,000 people watched the rollout of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner on July 8, 2007, expectations ran high. The plane was more fuel-efficient than other planes its size. Composite materials made up 50 percent of the primary structure of the plane. And, it relied more on electrically generated hydraulic power for primary flight controls. The first plane shipped in September of 2011.

Then in early January 2013, the FAA grounded the fleet. Two lithium-ion batteries, used for back up power for flight controls, had overheated or vented. The FAA ordered a thorough review by technical investigators.

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Business stories — and especially case studies — can easily be structured around a time-honored storytelling structure. In this story, is the protagonist the new, but flawed (isn’t the hero always flawed?) 787 Dreamliner? Or is it The Boeing Company? It’s The Boeing Company—whose world has been suddenly turned upside down. It’s The Boeing Company who will have to face down the antagonist or forces of antagonism: the FAA and the problem batteries.

So we already have the beginning ingredients we need for a story. But it gets better. We also have values that arrive in the form of a positive / negative charge. (Ha!) There is success/failure, competence/incompetence, safety/danger and, profit/loss. Right? And by the way there is time and place. The meaning of this story is defined by the period of time that the story describes. Place is simple: the fleet of 787s.

One last point. I loathe the tiresome case study structure of problem – solution – outcome. Just seeing that makes me want to gouge my eyes out. However, that underlying idea that a) something strange or weird or bad happened and b) he/she/they/someone had to work to get things back into balance, and c) balance restored, planes flying again, FAA satisfied, profits and safety secured…it kind of does have a problem, solution, outcome framework underneath it all…

It’s very much a three-act structure, which we’ll dig into more in the next post.

Thanks for reading. 🙂

Photo credit: Icarus, Empire State Building 1930 Lewis Hine photographer

The business of storytelling

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The nine-year old storyteller and the VP of Marketing

Photo by Jenn Evelyn-Ann on Unsplash

When Lori met Chloe

A good story weaves a spell. It takes us on a journey where we see — and feel — humans in action. In this (fictional) case study, a VP of Marketing learned the power of storytelling from a surprising source. A nine-year old girl.

Once upon a time, a small, prestigious hospital on New York City’s Upper West Side — let’s call it New York MED — fell on difficult times. For years, New York MED had been known and admired for talent, boldness, and breakthroughs. But now New York MED was known for mistakes; in surgery and the billing department. Finances were shaky. Several high-profile physicians and a CEO left for competitors. For nearly a decade, a once great hospital was lost. The worst moment came when a prominent New York MED surgeon was embroiled in a lawsuit and lost.

What’s our message?

At the very least, new messaging was clearly going to be needed and marketing proposed an approach along the lines of — “New York MED has the city’s best heart surgeons.” “New York MED is the leading teaching hospital in the Northeast.” “New York MED. Think of us as family.” All of which inspired no one.

Internally, PR fought with the VP of Marketing. The PR team wanted to emphasize New York MED’s storied history. The marketing group felt that expertise and caring were most important. Confusion reigned. More people left.

The problem of claims and assertions

We’ll get back to our case study in a second. But let’s quickly note the bald assertions above. It’s an enduring problem in marketing. “New York MED is the leading teaching hospital in the Northeast.” It sits there like a dead fish — like a billion other claims that every business everywhere makes. “NY MED. Think of us as family.” I don’t feel persuaded, do you? There’s no hint of emotion, no sense of life, of movement, of genuine connection. There’s no story.

Stories tell us who we are

Here’s why storytelling in business is on fire. It’s because the old ways, the claims, the assertions — nearly all of advertising — are on life support. No one’s buying. There’s wide agreement on the need to do something different, though not on what direction to take.

There’s a mountain of evidence that show stories can transform nearly every aspect of business writing. That’s because our brains are wired for stories. Stories are how humans transmit and reveal who we are, how we operate, and, what matters to us. Stories are how we connect.

The inciting incident

A well crafted story has a protagonist, an antagonist (sometimes referred to as the ‘forces of antagonism’) and an inciting incident, that thing, that event, that launches the protagonist into a new, disorienting world and onto a journey. And the story begins.

So here’s the rub. In a business setting, there is a world of difference between asserting that a physician (or a hospital) is dedicated and brilliant and expressing that in story form. In story form, you show the physician (or hospital) in action, living out their dedication and caring. Which is what a nine-year old storytelling patient named Chloe, taught New York MED’s VP of Marketing. Let’s pick up the story.

When Lori met Chloe

In spite of redoubled marketing efforts, New York MED still struggled to re-establish its position after a devastating lawsuit. Nothing changed, until one fateful winter’s day, when Lori Smith, the besieged VP of Marketing, met Chloe, a smart, freckled-faced nine-year-old cancer patient.

Although Chloe had a terminal illness, she was spirited and creative. She was an Instagram superstar with 750,000 followers and supporters. Her charm and bravery — her story — had captivated hundreds of thousands. And Lori, for all her professional training and experience, was nowhere near the storyteller that Chloe was.

‘We are gonna fight the bad guys’

On her good days, Chole took selfies with her caretakers. She posted her work on Instagram. She was especially fond of Kathy, a London born radiologist. Under a photograph of a bald and smiling Chloe with Kathy, was Chole’s caption:

“This is Kathy. She’s from London. I LOVE how she talks. She takes pictures of my brain. She says my cancer cells are the bad guys, and that we are gonna fight the bad guys. She hid her new puppy Buddy, under her coat and snuck him past the nurse’s station into my room so I could meet him! Hi Buddy!”

When Chloe met Lori, she took a selfie of the two of them. She asked Lori, ‘what’s your job?’ Lori, angry about her workload, her responsibilities and lack of success, stumbled around for awhile and finally said, “I identify potential markets and deliver the appropriate messages. I’m not very good at it.”

Chloe looked out the window for a moment, returned to her iPad and tapped out her caption. “This is my new friend Lori! I think she tells stories.”

Two weeks later Lori got the news after another contentious meeting where it was made clear she needed to deliver results. Chloe had died in the middle of the night surrounded by her family.

Lori finds the golden key

It was only in subsequent days that Lori Smith, grieving for young Chloe, and dejected about her job, sat at her cluttered desk, and found her way to the treasure that was Chloe’s Instagram feed. She scrolled through dozens of touching and poignant mini stories that told the world about Chloe and her caretakers at New York MED. There was a post with Chloe and Joshua. “Joshua cleans my room. He was supposed to be working tonight, but he held my hand for two straight hours because I was so sad.” There was Bing, an oncologist from Shanghai, who, Chloe wrote, “taught me to say ‘my favorite food is ice cream’ in Mandarin.” And there was Margaret, a night nurse. “This is Margaret. When I can’t sleep, she sings to me.”

Lori Smith stopped at the image of herself with Chloe. As she read the words, ‘I think she tells stories’ it finally began to dawn. She thought, “I think I know what we need to do. Finally.”

Did Lori Smith realize she was on a quest? Not likely. Did she realize that the lawsuit was an inciting incident that launched New York MED into a world of confusion about its identity and mission? Did she know that she was a character in a larger drama filled with inciting conflicts, crises, and resolutions? Unlikely. But somewhere inside, she did know that she’d found a person wiser than herself who instinctively understood that humans connect through the stories they tell. Chloe held the golden key and Lori knew it, saw it and was changed.

For business writers, thinking and working in story form, changes everything. It gives us a much deeper — even profound — understanding of the forces at work in human affairs and, gives us the means to shape our narratives to engage and connect with our audience in a noisy world.

As the great E.M. Forster said, “Only connect.”