So, we have seen what a story is, in part 3. We use the definition from Herrstein Smith:

Someone tells someone else that something happened

We know why. We know that it makes sense to tell it, rather than pure data. But the last question remains: what’s a Business Story?

I’ll follow in this Shawn Callahan, whose brilliant “Putting Stories to Work” was the conceptual bedrock for the curricula at IBM. Shawn was an IBMer and now he has a consulting firm just for storytelling, Anecdote (http://www.anecdote.com/). I cannot recommend it enough.

So, we know that the definition for story is someone telling someone else about something. This is our ur-Definition, our Abstract Class, in OOP speak, our Platonic Ideal. But we need to make it more concrete and contextual: we need to understand a Business Story. And a Business Story is a subset of the Story class.

A Business Story has the following elements:

1. Either a TIME marker or a LOCATION marker that makes sense in a Business context. While you can have regular stories hanging in the air (”Once there was a prince…”) in a Business Story you need to provice tangible context, either in the form of a place, a time or a combination thereof. So “At Google in the early ‘00s…” is a good marker, while “Pete told the board where he worked…” begs the question “Where is that?”.
2. There has to be a series of connected EVENTS. This is the “something happened” from Herrstein Smiths’ definition. What’s more, the events have to be connected in a way that makes sense in a Business setting. “When I was at JP Morgan we established a pattern for detecting fraud which allowed us to reduce the expenses on the process by a 30%” is a good story. “When I was working with the government on fiscal transparency, we hired a mystical preacher who did a magical purification every week and there was no more corruption there” may be a good story, but for a García Márquez magical realism novel.
3. There has to be some PEOPLE INTERACTING, talking or working. This is the “Someone tells someone else” part, with the caveat that it might not necessarily mean oral speaking. We might mean sending a mail or a brief, etc.
4. There has to be something NEW or a moment of INSIGHT. Unlike general stories, Business Stories have a clear motivation: to provide clarity and insight to our work. While there’s infinite reasons why someone might tell a story, Business Stories are always about illustrating or helping our work.
5. Finally, and connected to 4: there has to be a BUSINESS POINT to take from the story. This can mean a lot of things: perhaps it is profit, perhaps is better customer engagement, perhaps less attrition rates. But a Business Story has to stick to the Business context.

So here’s the formula for a Business Story


If you can craft and relate a Story like this, this will make you a Business Storyteller. On our next post, we will discuss some easy Story patterns.

So…why do we keep telling stories? We’re professional, evolved people in the 21st century. Why are we communicating via a medium that a literal caveman would and could use?

Let’s go back a little bit. Say, a little bit as a little one million years back. That is the median date for mastering fire by our ancestors. There are people that think Homo Erectus did use fire 1.5 million years ago, but let’s stick to a conservative, cool one million years from now.

Now, while evolutionary speaking this can be sees as a blink of an eye, it is still a long, loooong time. From one million years ago, our ancestors were telling each other information across a fire. Now, this is of course so long ago that we cannot assign a date for the beginning of Storytelling. And since stories are mostly oral, we don’t have any document to back it up. But current research points that Homo Erectus already had language and stories. We know that Homo Sapiens already had the anatomy of modern man almost three hundred thousand years back, and most anthropologist believe that we have storytelling since. But the first storytelling that has left a document is found in the Lascaux caves. It has been drawn about eighteen thousands years ago.

This, of course, is not the accepted date that Storytelling began. Most anthropologist assign a date in the neighborhood of one million years ago. But still, let’s take this as a starting point. How many years has Excel been around? Twenty two years, as of 2017. And Powerpoint? As of this date, twenty years. So, for twenty two years we have been looking as spreadsheets, versus eighteen thousand at least for stories. Evolution is not on Excel’s corner.

We have evolved as Storytelling animals. We’re nothing more that Storytelling apes, that have created for some reason pants and donuts. Stories fulfill an important role, in our ape society: they allow us to share quickly information in a way that is more difficult to forget than pure data.

In this way, Stories are a highly effective vector for sharing information, more effective than Excel or Powerpoint. We’ve evolved this way, so…why should we not use stories? We’re working against our own nature if we don’t.

So..bottom line: you’re a storytelling ape, as I am.
Embrace it.