Find Your Villain
“Are you serious?” asked the executive, “Storytelling?” they repeated incredulously. The CFO had requested our assistance in making them a stronger leader. She expected frameworks on decision-making, insights on AI progress, and perhaps a soft-skill like how to better deliver feedback. But storytelling? She was a CFO, not a CMO. She dealt with numbers, not words. This was out of her comfort zone.
At All Hands we believe that storytelling is one of the most important yet overlooked elements of an executive’s job. Decades of neuroscience have shown that the human brain is conditioned to digest stories, not facts. When you hear a story, your brain releases dopamine, the chemical related to attention and oxytocin, the chemical related to empathy. If a leader wants their team to buy-in and behave like the owners they are, they must be good at storytelling.
Does this mean that everyone must know about your hole-in-one or the details about your latest fishing expedition?
Hardly.
Like any tool, a good story is a tool to be leveraged with intention and forethought.
And there’s no better place to use storytelling than with strategy. Simply put, a good strategy should read like a good story. But as we highlighted previously, far too many strategies currently read as lengthy to-do lists. Here’s how to do better.
First, we encourage all executives to watch this brief video of Kurt Vonnegut, the foremost American storyteller of the 20th century, articulating the shape of a good story. There are four elements.
The scene: Every good story provides some background context on the protagonist. It does not jump right into the action. Every good strategy should answer the question, “Where are we today?” in order to ground the employee-owners in a shared reality.
The villain: Every good story has some element of misfortune that must be overcome or a villain that must be vanquished. Every good strategy should state clearly what the villain is. This need not be your foremost competitor; it can be the status quo. Steve Jobs, perhaps the most masterful storytelling executive, painted the picture of a horrid, repugnant beast that must be excised from this world when he announced the iPhone in 2007: the fixed keyboard.
The triumph: Now that the villain is sufficiently powerful to grab the reader’s attention, the storyteller must introduce the solution that defeats the villain. With strategy, this is the focus. Steve Jobs did not defeat the fixed keyboard by trying a smaller keyboard screen and a portable mouse and a stylus. No. He understood the triumph to be multitouch technology, which allows fingers to navigate a glass UI. There was one solution that rallied engineering, design, and ultimately marketing and sales.
Happily ever after: Everybody loves to know that the protagonist lived happily ever after. A good strategy will lay out what happens after the company has triumphed over the villain. This delivers the clarity of the larger picture that all employee-owners are working towards.
When we work with teams, we ask for their story. Does everybody agree on who the villain is? Does everybody know the triumph? Is it clear what happily ever after means?
To conclude our story about the CFO, when our engagement finished, she reported that the storytelling session was her favorite. She turned balance sheets into narratives, and rallied the team behind some hard changes that the company faced. The skeptic had become the true believer. And she lived happily ever after.
