How Successful Businesses Use Storytelling

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Gary Sanchez. At the why Institute, we've helped over 40,000 people discover, make decisions and connect using their why. This show will be much more powerful for you once you know your own why. So head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why. Today you're going to meet one of the leaders who've discovered their why with us and is going to share their story and the powerful lessons they've learned.

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. So if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys, and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. And so this week we're going to be talking about the why of challenge. So if this is your why, then you live outside the box. You don't believe in the norm or following the rules or drawing inside the lines. It is far more natural for you to rebel against the stereotypical or classical way of doing things. You aggressively seek unique ways of approaching the world and finding solutions that no one else has considered. You like to create and innovate, especially in game changing ways. You have eccentric friends and eclectic tastes and a large variety of both. You may have diverse interests with little in common with each other. And as an entrepreneur, you prefer to create a new market versus serving an existing market. You love to be different, think different and challenge virtually anyone or anything. That is two rogue or conventional people with your why often accomplish amazing feats. When you say you want to change the world, you actually mean it. Pushing the envelope comes natural to you. So my guest today, his name is Matthew Woodjit. He is a technologist, a marketer and a storyteller whose marketing pedigree spans over 20 years. He helps business leaders apply storytelling as a tool to unlock value for employees, partners and customers. He is the status quo challenger who is passionate about assisting others in leading their business to get attention and be heard, resulting in growth, transformation and influence. Matthew, welcome to the podcast.

Gary, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here today.

This is going to be awesome. Hey, give everybody like a five minute or three minute up to date. This is where I started and this is how I got to where I am right now. Let's just kind of real quickly bring everybody up to date on you.

Absolutely. So thank you everybody for tuning in as well. And hopefully you'll get some fun stories out of today and would absolutely love to hear your stories after the fact as well if anything resonates with you. So, you know what's really funny about going through the why for me is in my bio for the past decade, I've had challenging the status quo literally written out. So when I did the why discovery, I was like, that makes sense now. There was also a whole bunch of additional benefits of going through the Y discovery. It helped clarify for me that this wasn't just a way that I had chosen to see the world, but despite being a quote unquote challenger, that I wasn't alone. And it was nice to have that kind of validation. So for me, while I was thinking about this in preparation for coming on the podcast, and I was thinking about all the moments in my life where I've challenged the status quo and that's something I hadn't really done before going through the process. And Gary, my goodness, like, I could like dozens of examples and I'm not going to, I'm not going to share all of them. There's a couple really key ones. So there was this one experience I had. So we actually lived in the States a little bit growing up and. And so I was playing T ball in my formative years and the whole T ball team was in the process of going from T ball to baseball. And I was so excited. We all were, right. This is our first chance to actually stand up on the plate and pretend like we were a real baseball player. So I did that. I got up to the plate, I did all the stuff you meant to do. I kicked the dirt away from the plate and I got ready. I looked down and got my bat up and went to go look up at the pitcher and whack the ball hits me straight in the face and blackness just completely blacked out. I wasn't too badly hurt, my ego was pretty bruised and I woke up with my mum, my dad, my coach and the whole team freaking out. Is he alive? And that was the first thing I think they were wondering. And I was ok. And I got up and I dusted myself off and I was done for the day. Fast forward to a week later and we had another game and I just didn't want to go on. I didn't want to do it. And the coach was trying to convince me, my dad was trying to convince me for years. My mum said, I understand why you were doing it like that, but your sister didn't because my dad was Saying, just give it a shot. And the coach said, we'll put the tee ball, the tee out there and you can use the tee. And I was like, nope, nope. And my dad said, I'll give you $100. What could you buy with $100? And I was thinking about the most fancy transformer that I could think of. And I was like, that's what I would buy. But nope. And it was in that moment, and when I look back on that moment that I realized what I was doing is I was challenging the status quo. And the status quo was, this is what you're meant to do. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, go back out and play baseball again. And for me, I realized I just didn't really want to be doing baseball. And whilst that's a tiny little story and a tiny little moment in my life, when I look back on it now through the lens of challenging the status quo, that was a real inciting incident for me about approaching things differently and recognizing that I had the power to say, time out, no. Going to do something different.

Yes. So you grew up, you said, in England.

So I did. And you know, I spent a few years in England, came to the U.S. we came for 18 months, we stayed nine years. And I think my parents didn't realize what was going on with this because they really challenged the status quo for me in terms of what it means to grow up. So we were moving every couple of years. In many ways, I was kind of like an army brat, right. Which is a very common term in the US and we moved around a lot. My dad was with intel in those formative years of intel. And I think that reinforced for me that you don't have to do things the way that other people, that other people do. And our family didn't do things the way that other people did. I think all that my parents didn't realize it. And years later when I chose to come to the US for a six month assignment 15, 16 years ago, I think it was now the same thing happened and my parents were like, we only have ourselves to blame.

Okay, so you started in England, you came to the US for a bit, then high school and college were in England or give us kind of your story.

Yeah, so I, I always, I'm dyslexic. I didn't discover this until much later in life. I was actually also diagnosed with ADHD when I was younger. And so I was always passionate about both left and right brain things. I was super into astronomy and dinosaurs, but also into art and painting. And really high school was in the UK and I bounced around a lot. I had an American accent, yet I was proud to be English and back in England. So that caused me some interesting things and reinforced bouncing around these different groups. I had all these eclectic friends as you mentioned in the overview. Right. And so I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I started writing my first science fiction novel when I was about 16 years old. I wanted to make movies, I wanted to be a computer programmer. I wrote some Windows shareware around about the same time I was doing that. I was bouncing all over the place and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. My parents said you should get an engineering degree because if you get an engineering degree you can kind of do anything. And it's what my dad had done. It was a bit of a template for the family. So I got accepted into university. I did terribly at my A levels, which are the last two years of high school. And my university had a, what they called a foundation year, which was generally reserved for returning students, mature students and international students to get everybody up to the same kind of quality of maths and the basic sciences. So I did that. So instead of a three year degree, it was going to be a four year degree. And I started doing the under sort of the, and seeing what the undergraduate physics students were doing, which is what I was signed up to come out and do after my foundation year. And I was terrified. I was like, oh my goodness, this is not for me. And so I went to the registrar and I changed my degree to Computer Systems Engineering. And a couple months later watching like one of my best friends and best man Timur, who is on track to do the computer systems engineering degree and he was really good at it, I was like, that's no good. I'm going to set myself up for failure if I do that. So then I changed to computer science and I still wasn't really happy and I just started to get really concerned that this university thing wasn't for me. Well, it turned out that the university was piloting a brand new degree beginning for when I was going to start my actual first year after the foundation year and it was computer science with business administration. And I was like, that's interesting. I've seen my dad being an engineer and working at Intel. This is an interesting mix. And so I ended up doing that one of the first students to challenge the status quo of the traditional computer science degree. So not only have I found myself like when I look back on things of Challenging the status quo myself. But I've also looked for opportunities where somebody's doing something different and I'm like, you know what? I like the sound of doing it differently. And so the degree was very much for that. So I made it through my degree by the skin of my teeth, working intel in the holidays in IT type roles. And I was getting towards the end of university and I was like, you know what? I'm having a lot of fun at university and this is my final year. I was signed up for my final year and it turned out that one of my friends had signed me up to help out with the onboarding of all the new students with the students union. And so I go through this process and I became aware of the opportunity to do a year after my degree of a role called Communications Officer, that was President, women's officer, sports officer, these elected positions, paid positions, very common in the uk, different structure to the us and so I ended up getting elected onto the students union and did that job for a year and managed to stick around at university for an extra year without doing an mba, which was my goal at the time. And then I started working full time at intel and then this opportunity to come to the US came up and then I ended up coming to the US and yeah, so I spent some time working intel in the US and Microsoft in the us but then I really kind of burned out on corporate America and I kind of felt like there was a glass ceiling for me there and I couldn't quite place my finger on it. And I was. I knew I had ADHD and one of my sons has got adhd. And we were exploring the medication route and I asked myself, maybe I should explore this route. And so I started to explore that, thinking maybe this will help me shatter this glass ceiling that I'm experiencing. Well, that very week I had the assessment with a doctor. We had a family tragedy. Both my parents were killed in a car crash back in England. They got that phone call that nobody wants to get, let alone an ex pat on the other side of the world. And it's taken a long time to come back out of that. But one of the things that it really made me realize is the glass ceiling wasn't something that was artificial. And in my way it was that I was approaching things differently. And I really view losing my parents as this sort of midlife second epiphany or inciting incident to your storytelling lingo, which really made me step back and say what's important, what's really important in life. And within six months, I'd left Microsoft, where I was at, and spent a bit of time helping a friend get their agency off the ground. And then in 2017, I set up Go Narrative to help technology companies get attention, be heard, and sell more with the power of storytelling. And when I found the WHY Institute.

It was kind of like a no duh moment. It was like, this is brilliant. I love the Simon Sinek video. Eleven years ago, I loved that it was a big part of my first official storytelling role was at Microsoft as chief storyteller for the Microsoft Dynamics business. And Simon Sinek's video was a real north star for me as I coach the team on how to focus on the why and how the heart or the limbic brain is so important when it comes to decision making. And that all the details and all the speeds and feeds, as we say in the tech industry, really just was one part of the equation. And that was very much a moment for me. So when I discovered the WHY Institute and what you've done, codifying that, I think is absolutely brilliant. And it fits perfectly into what we happen to do. And we're already exploring and we're working with Dan to figure out how we can get some good synergies going. But for me, it really was epiphany that there's so important, there's so much noise in the world, right? If you have two equal partners, entities, companies, options on the table, who do you choose? You choose the one that you care the most about, that you like the most, that resonates the most with you. And if one of those entities has figured out their why and embraced it and built it into their story and their customer stories and their employees stories and their partner stories, that company's going to have an unfair advantage when it comes to winning people over.

I love it. Well, you're speaking my language. So tell us about GO narratives. What brought you to storytelling in that journey of yours, how did you end up saying, I want to be involved with storytelling?

Yeah, it's really interesting. I actually was offered a job as chief storyteller by a friend and prior GM of mine, Fred Studer. And he knew that I like telling stories. He knew I'd written two science fiction novels. He knew that I journal every day. And he also would see me obviously operate within the business. And they needed a chief storyteller for this business unit. And so he reached out to me and I thought, wow, this is going to be. I love storytelling. This is going to be fun. This is going to be easy. Right. I couldn't have been more mistaken when it came to the easy part of it. And that's because I discovered that whilst we all, A, natural born storytellers and B, we're surrounded by stories every day, the stories we tell each other, the movies we watch, the podcasts we listen to, we're dripping in story. Yet businesses really struggle to apply it in a repeatable way. And I just started to ask myself the question, why is that magic word again? Why? And what I've realized is storytelling isn't storytelling. Storytelling isn't about storytelling. It's not about the telling of a story. That's an artifact of how our brains work. It's an artifact of the fact we are evolved from the tribes that survived. And those tribes that survived were the best at sharing the information. What I like to call storytelling, it solves a value problem. Where the poison berries were, where the shelter was, where the water was, where the good hunting grounds were, and the tribes who communicated that information effectively survived, and those who didn't died. And so we actually come from a long line of people who figured out accidentally how to best transmit, retain and act on information and ultimately to share it. And that's where stories come from. Stories are a byproduct of that and storytelling itself. And then movies, books, poems, computer games, the theater, all those are even further downstream artifacts. And here's what I discovered when I tried applying this to business. All the advice out there is tailored to the crafting of those downstream stories. Pixar's got this wonderful the 22 Rules of Storytelling. There's the seven types of story of the hero, the hero's journey, journey, return, all these types of stories. So we tried figuring it out as we apply it to things like movies and film. And there's a lot of work that's gone into that huge amount of analysis. And just there's so much wonderful content out there. But when business people try and apply it to business.

Even the 22 rules of storytelling from Pixar is a nice evening read. Try and apply that in your business. The next day, try, use that to rally the team. The raconteurs of the world like Fred Studer, who's a natural born storyteller as well, they can stand up and lead their teams and craft organizations and craft marketing campaigns and lead those campaigns naturally, because they're natural born storytellers. But. But I just knew that there was an opportunity for us to get more scale, to unlock this power. And so I've dedicated my life and my career to helping companies do that by going further upstream. And that's what we help with. We help define the strategic narrative. We help our customers understand their why, their company's why, their customers why and how they ultimately take that to market. So we end up doing both that strategic narrative work and, but also figuring out the Personas, doing the research, going out there and taking the hypothesis a company has about the stories that their customers would care about, testing it, pressure testing it, helping them then develop the right value proposition and positioning to wrap around that strategic narrative, figuring out what the journey looks like for the customers, building the content models for that. So again, storytelling isn't storytelling, it's structure. And if you get the structure right, you can create this unfair advantage for your business. And that's what we help with.

So what is the structure of a good business story?

It's super, super simple.

We've developed a framework called the 3D framework. The 3D framework allows you to see a story from all angles whilst being incredibly simple. Now, the beauty of any of this stuff is once you get the simple, you can start to pull the thread and go deeper and deeper as you need to, but you don't need to try and pack everything in explicitly. And this is what a lot of companies fear and end up doing is they have the slide deck, the pitch deck, and it's all this detail and people don't even know where to start. And so we've done that with the 3D model and use story structures as well. So it's very simple. Three words. Desire, difficulty, denouement, fancy French word. I'll get to that one in a second. But desire. We all want something, whether we're thirsty and we need a drink of water or we have a massive competitive situation in Asia and we need to figure out how our business is going to adapt to that competitive situation. We want something and implicitly we are heroes want something. And so that the hero is packed into that D. We don't talk about the hero to start off with. We talk about your customer and what do they want then? Even if you want to go get a glass of water, you got to go get the glass of water. If I really needed a glass of water right now, I'd have to go and leave this room, go to another room. And so what's the difficulty there? I've got to go through these steps. The example of going into Asia with a different competitive strategy, you can bet your bottom dollar there's a lot of difficulties involved that stand in the way of doing that. That leads us to the fancy French word of denouement, which the literal translation is the untangling of the knot. And so the untangling of the knot includes everything. And really, there's three key things. It includes how did the person or the company resolve, solve the problem. Secondly is what steps did they take to go through, and then what outcomes did they have that were successful? And any vendor, any software provider, any technology provider plays a part of that. But the 3D is a forcing function to say to companies, stop talking about yourself. Focus outside in on your customers. And that's why I chose that word denouement, because it reveals all those elements. It's not just conclusion or outcomes or action taken or products bought. It's really focused on the outside in. So 3D's desire, difficulty, denouement. And my challenge to all the listeners is in your next dinner with your family tonight, if you're lucky enough to be in quarantine with your family or the zoom drinks that you have at the end of the day, use a 3D. Listen to your friends, listen to your family talking, and identify when they talk about something that was wanted, what stood in the way, and how did they overcome that? You do that and you unlock a whole world of story power.

We're taking a quick break to give you a chance to find clarity in.

Your life instead of just listening.

Ready to put an end to your frustration, Ready to unlock the code to your personal and business success. I know you can, because I have, and I'm giving you my exact system. It's time for you to discover your why, how, and what. Head over to why institute.com and get started. Let's get back to the show.

So can you give us an example? Share with us a business story using that framework so we can see it or hear it in action.

Wow. There's so many potential options there so we could take. Let's stick with the example that I was going with. You've got a massive competitive threat in Asia. So you're a multinational company. Let's say we work with a lot of technology firms. So let's say you're a cloud service provider and.

You want to expand within the Asian market. You're already there and.

You don't know exactly what you should be doing, but you know you need to expand. You've got your sales team dialed in. You've got the marketing team figuring out the segmentation. You've got your objectives, you've got your goals. You've got some growth goals. You know, 8% 10%, whatever for the next year and something's not working and you don't know what it is.

You look at the market and say, okay, so what are the cultural things we need to consider? What are the global issues we need to consider? How is the Asian market fit in and relate to the other markets that we serve? What is special and needed by the Asian market that maybe we don't necessarily have a clear understanding of? And so those are the difficulties, these are the things that are standing in the way. And as you hear this example, hopefully another thing that's coming to mind is this isn't about the telling. This is a problem solving tool. Story is a problem solving tool. And then the untangling of the not could be. We've identified three key issues. Number one, we're not being culturally sensitive. We need to make sure that we've got not just localized how tos, but we also need to approach things in a way that is more relevant for the market. So we've got these go dos, we need to go and figure out and get them baked into our product for the Asian market. Number two could be from a technology perspective, the way that people were subscribing to our technology and being reminded about.

The renewals and the overages and the cost impacts that the way we were doing that didn't work for the market. So we need to modify the software to be more empathetic to those cultural issues that we identified in step one. And then the third part could be, we now understand better how we can create balance between our different markets, our different data centers. For example, maybe we, we actually now need to invest in a new data center in that market because of some legal reasons. And this is something that's happened a lot in Europe with cloud services, with some of our clients. So that would be an example of how you can use it as a problem solving tool. Now, how would you then perhaps craft a story to talk about that? Well, you could craft a story that could be sliced and diced in many different ways. The famous turkey dinner, right? So you come up with that core idea and then you can create videos and you can create blogs, and you can make sure the webpage reflects the right thing. And so it could be something along the lines of you want the very best in cloud services and you want it to work in a way you're used to working with all of the other things that you use and maybe mention a few points that are relevant for the market. And as we know, the challenges that stand in the way are making sure that you can get access to the right software, that you can deal with the right regulations. All of that is packaged up in a way that is going to help you get what you need. And to do that, what we recommend is go through these steps. And one of those steps might be a certain certification. It might be accessing other resources and oh, here, here's our product which can also help with it. And when you take all those things together, you'll be able to access and use this cloud service in a way anywhere within Asia that's going to bring value to your business and you know, is going to be respectful of your specific needs within, within your country and your marketplace.

Ah, see, now I'm getting it. I wasn't understanding the story you're talking about. I'm. I'm thinking of it in more in terms of like a marketing story or.

You know, the hero's journey like you were talking about earlier. This is more of how do we tell the story of our company and where we're going or what is the framework that we use to be more effective in getting people to understand what we're about? Or is that, is that right?

Yes. I love to talk about life being a series of overlapping Venn diagrams and where story exists, story exists in the overlap between the company and the customer. In that example, which was literally just made up on the spot, I didn't want to reveal any client secret sources. But in that example, it's a structure that can be used to define how you talk about your company outside in respecting your customers, whether it's on your website and the videos you create and so on. And then you could also use that as a filter to then go and find, for example, which case studies do we want to publish? We want to make sure we publish case studies which match to what we've just defined. Because that's going to reinforce what we're trying to say through the voice of real world customers. Now that's the starting point. We also have a narrative framework which is a step up, which talks about the transformation that's going on in the world. It's the trip storytelling, methodology, transformation, reasons to believe, innovation, problems and stories. And it's really about taking a bird's eye view of what's happening in the world, in the markets, what shifts and changes are happening, how's that impacting your customer, maybe at a company level, all the way down to the individual level. When you understand that and you understand the reasons to believe the facts, the figures that justify and prove the transformation, the innovation that you bring, the secret sauce that you bring that maps into, helping with that to solve the problems that exist because of that. And then the stories that you should tell that articulate that, and those could be a customer story. It could also be a metaphor, an anecdote, or a simile that represents what you're talking about. So we often create strategic narratives for our clients, which include that framework breakdown. But also one of the things we do is we find zeitgeist and historical meta narratives that people can use to help get the message across. So, for example, one client were very, very focused on quality control. And quality was very important to the CEO. Big part of his why, probably the right way, and I haven't taken him through the process, but quality was very important. And so the meta narrative that we picked was post the narrative was.

Quality Project Management. The story that we told was the story of Dr. Stephen Deming, who went from the US to Japan after the Second World War and helped the Japanese auto industry reconstruct itself, which led to the invention of the Kanban approach to project management, which then led to Agile Project Management, which we're all using today. And so we found this story based on the why, Even though at the time it was implicit, not explicit. Moving forward, we're doing it explicitly and then finding that story that really resonated and so that he was able to talk about that, tell that story, because that was a very easy way to connect with other people that they would understand. And then he could say, that's what we believe in and that's how we're going to then help you, is we're going to. We believe in quality through and through. And that's what you're going to get from us. And this was an IT services firm.

Yeah. What I think I'm hearing you say is that the story that you create using your process, the 3DS, almost like creates the theme of what's really going on. And then from there you can reach out and look for other stories that people can relate to, like you just did, to connect on a better. On a. On a level of this is what we're all about. Just like the story of the doctor that went to Japan. Is that accurate?

Exactly. I'm a big fan of the word filter. And it's a metaphor, right? We use metaphors all day, every day. And the metaphor I love to use there is a filter. Once you define your strategic narrative, you can use that as a filter not only in the stories you find and Tell, but actually you can turn it upstream and you can say, should we make this business decision? Does this align with our strategic narrative, our core belief system and what we're trying to do with the world? Should we develop this product? Should we invest in inventing this technology that our engineering team has hypothesized on? Yes, it passes a filter. No, it doesn't pass a filter.

I love that. So why I'm listening to this now or there's people listening to this right now and they're saying, so why do I need a business story or why do I need to storytell my business? What would you say to them? What is the advantage in using story?

It's very, very simple. If you have two options for a product or service and they are tool intents and purposes identical, why do you choose one over the other and you choose one over the other? Because we make our decisions, as you know, in our limbic brain and then we justify with the data in our neocortex. And so if you haven't figured out what you stand for and haven't figured out the stories you should tell and what your customers stories are, which is incredibly important, we're all living our own story. Right. Your day, my day, or all pieces of our story, it's the same for our customers. And so we want to make sure that we're respecting and joining them on that story. And so the company that has done the due diligence, done the legwork to figure that out is going to get an unfair advantage because people are going to get them, understand them that much quicker than a company that hasn't gone to that effort.

It puts it in a format where the limbic brain can, can see it.

Exactly.

Yeah. Without that, it's just what you do.

Yep. And I love the, the that, that analogy because one of the things I like to think about is reaching into people's brains and pressing the right buttons. And you got to reach all the way into the limbic brain.

Yeah. And so you've given people a framework to be able to create the story, to connect to the limbic brain, to get them to, to make it feel right, to get them to make a decision so that then they justify it with the neocortex and feel great about purchasing.

Exactly. And the beautiful thing about this, and when you stop looking at storytelling as just the telling of stories and you start to look at story making and the fact that we're all living our own stories every day, is you view the customer decision making journey very differently. You Stop looking at it from your own perspective. Our brand, are they aware of our brand? Are they considering our brand? Are they going to decide to go with our brand? That's a very inside out, that's very ego driven.

In fact, we have a model called the arrived decision model. Are they aware of the change in the world? Are they aware of the opportunity or the problem?

Have they realized the impact that's going to have on them? Have they visualized.

Have they internalized how they're going to what this means for them and their business and their life? And have they then visualized what to do about it? And then have they then decided to make a change and then become an evangelist for your product? And so when you look at it like that and you look at the steps through that journey, there's something really fun that we do with our clients and that is we ask for their content and we will do a content audit, we do an analysis of their content. And by and large, most content, especially technology companies, but most B2B companies, most content is created for the decision phase in the journey and for the very beginning. So companies will do advertising, they'll do some big marketing campaigns, and then they'll create a bunch of white papers and data sheets. And now not every company does this. And there's plenty of folks who are even listening to this who are making the effort and are committed to the customer and making sure there's a good experience. Don't want to diminish any of that. The reality is most companies aren't thinking this through end to end. And so when you think about that journey, you should also, and you can think about it from that relationship of the limbic brain to the neocortex. And what that means is early on in the journey, you need to front load emotionally charged content. And then as that decision making journey goes along, you want to dial the volume down on the emotional and dial the volume up on the detail and the rational to help them then justify. And if you do that, you actually come up with a content matrix across the journey for every Persona. So we'll do this, we'll develop the Persona, we'll do the research. Where do they go? What information do they want? What are their pains? What are they scared of? What are they excited about? So we do all that analysis and then we create this journey and then we create this content map, this content architecture model, which is really a content strategy to make sure you're putting the right pieces of content along that journey to keep moving people along. Because every Single moment within that journey is a transformation. Somebody's either deciding to get a bit closer to you or they're deciding to go further away. And if you're intentional about this, you can stack the deck to make them want to come to you.

Well, I love this. Can you give us an example of a company that does this really well?

So companies that do it, do it really well. I think one company that does it really well from a.

Particular, from a B2C perspective is Adobe. Is Adobe. So Adobe have invested in not just the detail content, and they have so much detail content because they've got these wonderful demos, right, how to use the products and all these white papers, all this detailed stuff which you do need. They've also engaged early in the experience. They have the Adobe Ambassadors program and they have these other resources, other content, and they create these moments along the journey to encourage people to move in that direction. So that'd be one example. Another example, which arguably, based on how they've been performing the market in the past few years, might be a bit more complicated than it seems. But ge, GE actually have been really good historically at storytelling and making sure that they're not just focusing on the data and the decision element, but also on the emotional element. Even in the space of buying like jet engines, there was a wonderful video they did about five, six years ago called Lightning in a Bottle, where they literally set out to try and capture lightning in a bottle. And it was this wonderful content marketing that was entertaining and interesting and relevant to their brand, but it wasn't pushing the brand and buy this, go buy a jet engine. And as much as I'm not going to buy a jet engine, I shared the content, Right. And then that creates a network effect into other folks. And that is precisely the power of story. Because a great story is irresistible. And you want to share it because you learn something from it. You took something away, you would change a little bit. And you want to then share that with other people. Because it's what we do, it's how our brains work.

Yeah. It's like when we see a great commercial on TV or we want to tell somebody about it, hey, did you see that commercial about such and such? And then we share it.

Yeah. Think about the Super Bowl. I mean, there's a cultural moment about brand stories in our lives. And yeah, it can seem obvious for some companies that are very B2C, especially like consumer goods, because they have to, if they don't appeal to the consumer's heart, limbic brain, they're going to lose instantly. But there's a lot of B2B companies that think they don't need to do that. And you can have a certain degree of success within the curse of knowledge within the forest. But as soon as you start getting outside of the forest and you want people to know there's trees falling in there, you have to do more than just giving them speeds and feeds and data and facts and features and benefits and pains solved with certain proofs. You have to reach in and grab their hearts, their limbic brains.

So give me. I don't know if this is a fair question or not, but as you've been talking, I've been thinking about what is the most important thing in being able to tell a great story that connects to the limbic brain, where people will share it? What have you seen as that ingredient that you have to have? Is that a fair question?

It is a fair question. And I follow and interact with a lot of other fellow storytellers on Twitter. And I saw this great tweet the other day, and it was a recycled tweet that he had done actually in 2000, a blog he had done in 2015. And he said, conflict is story. And that's why that second D difficulty is so important. The single most important thing about any story is you would the hero, the person you were going along, you were doing something and bam, something forced you out of your situation. Really simple one would be you're driving down the road.

You'Re driving safely, you're paying attention to your surroundings, and who hasn't been in this situation? Out of nowhere, this crazy idiot cuts in front of me, forces me to slam my brakes on. Luckily I knew what was behind me, so nobody hit me from behind. I'm like trying to understand everything that's going on in the environment, what this crazy person doing, worried about my safety, worried about the safety of everybody around me. And then he blasts off ahead and then I see the blue flashing lights and he got pulled over and luckily he was brought to justice. There we go. That's the Something's happening and boom, something comes in and knocks you for six. Now that's a pretty simple story. What do we take away from that story? Now look around your environment. Make sure you're checking behind you as well as in front of you. There's data in the story, and that's something that people sometimes forget. Not only do stories need people and difficulty, there is a place for the data. Stories are literally a vehicle for delivering data, for delivering information. That's why it solves a value problem. Is it a poisonous berry? And if I can tell you a story about the person who ate the poisonous berry and got really sick and almost died, or did die, and the person who didn't, and I can tell that in a compelling way, then you're going to remember that, and you're going to remember that that particular berry was a bad berry next time you see it in the woods.

How do you tell a story in a compelling way? What does that mean? Because I get it when I'm working with organizations as well and we develop their why, how, what for their business and then we create the story around the why, how and what. It's not nearly what you do and the depth and detail and breadth that you take them, but the point of it is to tell it in an emotional and compelling way. And what have you found as the way that you teach people to tell it in a compelling way?

Understand the structure. You don't have to be a raconteur, right? I'm quite a high energy person.

And I can get, and I'm quite passionate and I can get in passions. And there's plenty of people who are like that in the world. There's also plenty of people who are introverts 24 7. And you don't have to be an extrovert, you don't have to be comfortable with standing up on a stage in front of a thousand people to tell a compelling, engaging story that works. And that's the magic in understanding the structure. Again, the 3D is a really great place to start because if you make sure that you're clear on who we're talking about and what they wanted, what stood in the way, what those challenges were, be very clear on that. And then how they untangle that knot, solve the problem, what they learned, what action they took, what came about because of it, then what you've done is you've effectively, you've got all the parts there that are going to be able to be remembered and then acted upon. And so that's it, the structure. Don't worry about the fact that I get really passionate and excited about talking about storytelling. I can do that to help others. But really what we're doing is a vehicle to help you understand the structure so you can keep applying it again and again. And we often stick around to help out over time because unlike riding a bike, this is more like Abe Lincoln's axe. If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend four hours sharpening my axe. You have to keep coming back and practicing this. And that's a big learning that I found over the past decade of getting this stuff, figuring it out, and codifying it all.

So now have you gone through discovering your how and your what?

I have.

So what is your why and your how and your what? Because I hear it coming through, so I've got to.

I'm going to say the whole thing in one sentence.

Yeah, Yeah.

I challenge the status quo to find a better way to clarity.

See, and that's what the storytelling is all about.

Exactly.

Yeah. You're getting people to challenge the way they talk about their business. You're going to show them a better way to do it that's going to be clear for their audience so that a decision can be made. Right. That's the most important thing about clarity. When you're clear, you can actually make a decision.

Love it. That's a really great point. Making that decision, having that forward motion. Exactly. And we challenge storytelling. Like, one of the first things I said today was storytelling isn't storytelling. That challenges people's concept of storytelling and marketing not needing storytelling in it. We challenged that. We challenged literally was looking at a presentation today from a prospect who was asking us how we could help them improve their content. And I see a beautiful presentation. There was clearly a structure. They talked about a lot of the classic, traditional things that you should have in one of these presentations. So a lot of detail as well. And so the conversation we had with them was to challenge. They don't have to do it that way. We can help them find a better way to do it and that all the legwork they've done has a place. We can help them find the right place for that, and then that will result in them being clearer from the very beginning all the way through that experience. And, Gary, that's why I love the Y Institute so much. Why I just really have, like, glommed onto it is because it makes so much sense. I've been living and breathing this for so long. My own case study, like, going through the certification to become wise certified, to be wise certified, I really was validation for me. And that impassions me to want to help others even more by helping them not just from a business perspective, finding their company's narrative and defining that, but making sure that as a part of that process, we help them become more confident because it's there. We just have to uncover it.

And it's a lot of what you're doing is exactly what I did, which is putting words to feelings. Words to thoughts. I think I know what my why is. I kind of know how I do it, and maybe I know what I bring. But when you really know, like, now that you really know, now you can use it. And that's what you do with your stories. Right. You take this mess of stuff that a business has, and you're like, let's put this together in a story so we know the strategic narrative, and then we can take that and find the right way to tell it so that it's clear to your audience so they can make a decision to join you.

Exactly. And make that as easy as possible for them. This is something that I've learned just in general in business over the past couple of decades and has become so poignant for me now, is you either make the effort to figure this stuff out for your business, or you're delegating it to the customer. And I promise you, in the attention economy, where we're exposed to 700 marketing messages a day, there's something like. I think it's like a quarter of a trillion emails we send as humans every day. Like, if you want to cut through that noise, then you can't delegate your customer to figure out why they should go with you. Do the legwork, do the due diligence. It's an investment that will pay off in. Pay off massive dividends.

I want to show you something. I'm going to. I'm going to grab something out of my bag right here behind me that I carry with me. And it is. See if you know what this is. It is right here.

Oh, brilliant.

I just. Original ipod. I just donated an original Zune to Goodwill because I was like, I just have to get rid of some stuff. But what story do you tell with that?

Yeah. So the date here is October 23, 2001. And so do you remember what Steve Jobs said when he stood up in front of the audience and he introduced the ipod to the world? Do you happen to remember what he said?

10,000 songs in your pocket.

1,000. But yeah, it was. Yeah, it was 1,000 songs in your pocket. That's right. Why did he do that? I'll give you a hint.

Okay.

Who do you know who was in the audience?

It was the media.

So if he just stood up and he would have said, this is our new MP3 player. It's got a screen, it's got a dial. You can randomize the songs, you can skip them, and it holds a thousand songs.

What the media would have done is taken that and interpreted it. However they wanted.

Exactly.

So he says, 1000 songs in your pocket. What do you think the media is then going to go say?

Thousand songs in your pocket.

Yes. He taught them how to talk about.

His product because he had done the due diligence to understand what do people want? They want access to all their music. They just want their music. They want their music. What's the difficulty? They can't take their music everywhere. And it's hard to like, there's these other ways of doing it, but it's not easy. And the denouement was, we've made this super easy. So, so easy. You can put it in your pocket and you can just pull it out.

Perfect. That's a perfect story for you to tell, for people to get your storytelling ability, because that's what this was all about. And without that, you're going to leave it up to the consumer or the media to say whatever the heck they want to say.

Exactly.

If you teach them how to talk about your product, they'll do it. If you don't teach them how to do it, who knows what they're going to say? Or will they say anything at all?

Yeah, you're kind of leaving it up to the fates at that point. Rolling the dice.

Yes. So, Matthew, I know we're kind of running to the end of our time here, so if people want to get a hold of you and they say, you know what? My business needs our story. We need a better way to connect. We need a better way to grow. We need our strategic narrative. How should they get ahold of you?

Go to gonarrative.com and have a conversation with our storybot, which looks a lot like me.

And what would that conversation be like?

Our storybot will give you some options for instant advice and a few other options. You can go and hear some of what I've shared today directly from the bot. And you can also send us messages and get access to our ebook, the Definitive Guide to Storytelling in Business. We have another book in the works as well, hopefully to be launched next year. But gonarrative.com is a great way if you're social and into social media. I'm on LinkedIn and also on Twitter as well, so you can find me by searching for my name.

I love it. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. This has been fascinating. I love what you guys are doing. You're speaking my language and I'm sure we're going to do a lot in the future.

Thank you so much, Gary. Really appreciate you having me on the show. And thank you, everybody, for listening as well. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to today's show. But before you go, let me ask you a question. Would you like all of your communication to be easier and more productive? Take the essential first step to clarity now@yinstitute.com.

Sam.