Learn the Struggle-Search-Solution framework for building stories that land with different audiences. The same core story works for change management listeners or professionals facing uncertainty, depending on which purpose you choose. Map your opening hook, conflict, and resolution to match what your audience needs to hear.
Chapters
The next piece is story purpose. Story purpose, which is on the sheet. So what's the story purpose? Now, this is tricky in some ways because my square root of change agents, when I asked you what was the beauty of the story, you know, first thing you said, Paul, was square roots, great formula. I'll use that, which is great. Amber's was confidence. So, so this is the importance of story building, right? I could take— so the story purpose, I will tell that story differently if the point is, if I'm in front of change management people and I wanna talk about the square root of change agents, if I'm in front of professionals and I wanna genericize the purpose to saying having confidence when you feel ambiguity. Oh, okay. That, that's a different story title. But this, the square root problem still is there, but I have the story changes. This is why story building's a competency. Is this making sense? It depends on your purpose. So take a few seconds here and what's the purpose of your story? So then what I'd like you to do with that, with those purposes and, and, um, Nate, I know you, I think you have the checklist. Do you have the, you have the checklist? Yeah. Okay. What I want you to do, because you have two purposes, I want you to draw a line across and do struggle, search, and solution for one of the stories and struggle, search, solution for the other purpose. It's the same story. Mm-hmm. But you're gonna have a different struggle, a different search, and a different solution based on the different purposes. That make sense? Yeah. Oh, so good. Okay. And so Paul, the components of your story So, so struggle. So they, they have this great hook at upfront, right? But then the struggle is what's the opening scene? So what's the struggle that you're throwing people in? It's the opening scene to Saving Private Ryan, right? It's just like, so what's the struggle? And, um, you have to be in the conversation that's in your client's head. So, so what's that struggle that they're experiencing? And draft that piece. The search part is now there's dragons to slay and there's the ups and downs. Um, Nate has a good one for this. It's like we lost this person and nobody did anything, and then we lost another person, or this person complained, and it's like, oh, these are all the barriers along the way that says, wait a minute, this thing is escalating, right? So, so what are the flagging straight? What are the, the, the conflict that happens along the way? You want people to feel that tension, and it can't be easy, right? It can't be easy. So that's the search part. And then the solution part is there's a magic moment, and this is what I'm trying to get Nate to go to, is there's, there's an aha moment in this thing. It's like, oh, oh, Oh, and Paul, I can see yours is just like, you know, I was struggling, I was going through all this stuff, I had all this anxiety, I, I was working on this stuff, I was trying to satisfy the needs, I was drafting all the stuff, and then, yeah, yeah, yeah, I asked somebody, like, oh, that was easy all along, right? So there's, there's a drop the mic moment. Okay, so spend a little bit of time doing your struggle, search, and solution for your story, and go.
