Business Storytelling With Bob Keiller – Episode 46

Yesterday on a call, this chap who was head of quality for a business, he said. But some people are natural storytellers. What about those of us who aren't? I said, we've probably trained a few thousand people now in the art of business storytelling, and we've yet to find somebody who can't tell stories well, providing they know what the heck they're talking about, and we've given them the support as to here's a structure to use. When it comes down to it, socially, we are all storytellers and story consumers. That's what we do. I mean, the whole entertainment industry relies on our willingness and our need and our desire to consume stories. When it comes back down to it, if I can get people to reconnect in a business context with what they do naturally, then it becomes really easy.

So we're back with Digital Marketing From The Coalface And on the fourth of December twenty eighteen, I attended a course, um, about business storytelling, and it was run by Bob Keiller. And at the end, I gave a presentation where I actually told Bob and everyone else in the room that I'd learned all. Now, despite that, Bob's here with me today and we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about business storytelling and to get things moving. Um, for those that don't know, Bob, I'd just like you to give us a potted history and tell us a little bit about Bob Keiller. Okay.

Dave, I, um, I guess I started life in the borders. I, uh, aspired to be somebody who painted the album covers for heavy metal albums. So my passion was art.

And what about the heavy metal? Were you into the heavy metal?

I was into all sorts of music. Yeah. No, I was into rush and I was into Deep Purple, but I was also into the skids and the Sex Pistols, and I was into a bit of reggae as well. So it was the.

Sex Pistols I love. I mean, the I don't know if you saw the new series that came out on Apple, um, Bob Lasso on Apple TV. Yeah. And I think it was right at the beginning of episode one. They opened with a Sex Pistols number and I thought, I'm gonna love this. Yeah, yeah.

It just, it just hooks you in, doesn't it?

It really does. I mean, you and I are, I think, the same age and the Sex Pistols. Even now. I'll put the Sex Pistols. I love that music.

Although some of the people I take part in a kind of a group that listen to the same radio station every week on a Wednesday night, the evolution seventy seven group. So it's grounded in the music of nineteen seventy seven, and I think most of them would put the clash probably ahead of the Sex Pistols in terms of staying power. Yeah, I still.

It's grown up punk, isn't it?

It's grown up punk a bit. It's good. Yeah. It's good. So having done that and then realised that potentially the world of graphic art was very limited, um, decided to take a slightly different route and thought, I'll go and do computer engineering. And I wanted to find out how computers work, uh, right down to the kind of molecular level and how to program how to build them. And I ended up, um, in an engineering course in Edinburgh and, uh, quite.

Quite enjoyed the start of computing.

It was, and that's why it was probably more interesting than x eighty one type. Yeah. And we were talking BBC model B's and IBM PC's and all the other stuff that, you know, at the time seemed like cutting edge. And now you would kind of look at them and say, was that all they did? I mean, I remember the first time I came across floppy disks and the, the first floppy disk that I came across was a five and a quarter inch floppy disk that held three hundred and sixty kilobytes of data. And you thought, wow, how could you ever fill one of those? Mhm. And time has marched on, obviously. Now nowadays, capacity for, you know, you can buy a forty gigabyte memory stick to stick into your phone or into your camera.

That device that we're recording on just now has got a one hundred and twenty eight gig.

Gigabytes.

Yeah. That's as big as your thumbnail.

I mean, so, so things have moved on tremendously, but the underlying technology is still the same. It all goes back to, I think it was nineteen fifty eight Bardeen chuckling at the Bell Labs when they they realised that instead of having a a thermionic valve that you'll know from your music days, Dave in the in the big speakers and amps and things like that, they developed the transistor, right. And getting that transistor and being able to put that transistor onto a piece of silicon when the. Was it the it four thousand and four first came out fifty years ago. It was, uh, it was revolutionary. Mhm. Uh, and back then, the, the ability to get a few thousand transistors onto a chip was seen as being fantastic. And now, you know, we're up to the the gigabytes of giga numbers of transistors. Yeah. It's huge. Huge. So yeah, I did that. And then when I came to university, I went to join a company called Hewlett Packard who were into technology and computers. And I thought, yeah, this is what I want to do. And I quickly realised that actually, you know what, although I can do it, it didn't really excite me. I wanted to do something that was different. I didn't quite know what. So I went and thought, I'll go and I'll join BP. So I joined BP and I went offshore and I became part of the graduate training programme and it was different. It was a world that I had no knowledge of. And interestingly, my hometown in the borders, when I told people I'd joined BP, they thought I was working in a service station filling cars, and I didn't disavow them this for years. So for a number of years people thought I. He's working in a service station, which is a real shame because he was quite clever at school, I on his mother's side. which I thought was quite interesting. But, um, and I was at BP for a number about four years or so, and then I got headhunted and I got pulled out of there and I went into a small consultancy business where I learnt about business and I learnt about selling and I learned about failing, and I learned about customer satisfaction. I learned about cash flow and all sorts of different things. And a couple of years after that, I got headhunted out of that to go back and work offshore again, which was ideal for me at the time because my, um, kids were, were my first kid would just be born. Andrew had been born and Libby was on the way. And this allowed me to spend a lot of time at home when the kids were really young, which was great. Also, financially, it was very helpful. Um, but in that company, again, I quickly realised that if I stayed offshore, I would be there for decades and I would feel frustrated. So I moved back onshore, which meant taking quite a big cut in pay, but it was the right thing to do. And then ended up, uh, doing six or seven different roles with that company before I was headhunted out of that company to go and work for a service company, because this was a company that produced oil and gas. So I was now working for a service company, and in that service company, I did four or five, well, maybe not four or five, two or three different roles, until eventually I came to the point of realising the part of the business that I was running was underappreciated. Okay. And because it was underappreciated, I thought, there's an opportunity here potentially to, to buy this part of the business, which was ambitious, but I didn't know how to do it. I didn't have any money. I didn't know where I'd get the money, and I thought I might get fired if I asked. So I needed a co-conspirator. So my co-conspirator was my close friend, Duncan Skinner.

Yeah, I did know Duncan. Yeah. Great guy. What a great guy.

Great guy. So Duncan and I flew to Houston to speak to the CFO of the whole of the Halliburton Corporation. This guy called Chris Cote.

Mhm.

Who'd granted us an audience.

I was going to say, how did you get an audience with somebody at that level.

Without knowing what we're coming to ask for, he said. Yeah, I'll be happy to spend twenty minutes with you. So we went up to the top floor of this building, and our contingency plan was we knew there's a fair chance that we might get fired. Was that we'll buy return tickets so that at least we'll get home. And the return flight home was about nine hours, which would give us enough time to convince our respective wives that this was a great time to make a career change and to move to a different business. But we pitched it to Chris and we thought it through carefully. We thought through the story we were going to tell him, which was about really. They were trying to carve their business into two large pieces that was going to cost them a lot of money, and if they sold this business to us, they could use the proceeds from that sale to fund the bigger deal. And he could see the logic in that. And he said, okay, okay, where are you going to get the money and leave that with us? So then we went to try and raise the money. And the difficulty we had was that the business that we were running was quite complex. We did lots of things for lots of different people under lots of different contractual models. The contracts themselves didn't have any hard guarantees in them. They could be cancelled at short notice. And we worked in about twenty different countries, had about six thousand people. And we thought as an investor coming into that, it sounds too risky. So how do we give people the confidence that buying into this would be a good thing for them, and they would get a good return on their money? So I came up with a way of pitching it to the banks, and I walked in to a room full of bankers who I'd never met before, who didn't know me, didn't know the business, didn't know the sector. And I asked them to close their eyes and imagine themselves walking through a forest of giant redwood trees. And they did. And I painted a picture for them about the smells and the sounds and the textures. And then I asked them to imagine that they'd found a small Scots pine tree growing between the boughs of these massive trees that were, you know, booming out of the earth, and that they took that Scots pine, carefully dug up the root system, took it into a clearing, dug a hole, put it down, tamped the soil down, gave it a drink of water and stood back. I said, what's going to happen now? And they said, um, presumably it'll grow quicker than it did before. I said, yep, that's the business plan.

Wow. That's incredible.

And of course, we had the track record as well in terms of running the business. But that was the thing that got them hooked. They realised that this wasn't about magic beans. It wasn't about creating as yet undiscovered technology. It was about taking a piece of business and giving it space to grow. Mhm. Um, and in doing that, we were able to buy that business for two hundred and eighty million dollars and to grow that business five years later, we sold it for a billion dollars.

Wow.

Um, and then I moved into the organisation and bought the business from. I committed to staying for five years. I stayed for five years in one week.

Okay.

Um, and then decided that it was time for me to go and help other people. So since then, I've been working completely unpaid. Mhm. Four days a week, helping other people. And by helping other people, I mean people that can't afford to get the professional support that the bigger companies can afford to pay for. Sure. So I help early stage entrepreneurs. I help social enterprises, I help charities, charities, and individuals. And if I ever do work for some of the bigger companies, I charge them. And so that I can provide cost, cover my overhead costs, and then do everything else free of charge for, for, for other people. And that's the kind of mode I'm in just now. And I've got a good co-conspirator. My colleague Derek has a same kind of stage in his career. He's a good actor, he does great voices, and he's a really funny guy. But more than anything, he's a really kind guy. Yeah. And he loves the idea of being able to put something back. And both of us were fortunate in our earlier careers that lots of people helped us. Yeah. This is our our idea of kind of paying it forward is we, if we help other people when they get the chance, they'll help others too. So it's a kind of a it's putting something back into the economy and doing it because we can it'd be easy to go and play golf every day, but that would get bored.

Play golf?

Yeah. Well, I play badly. Yeah. Yeah.

Me too. Yeah.

And I don't play that often enough that I'm ever going to get better. But you know what I've always said? Golf is something I'll do more seriously when I'm old. But my definition of old is always now plus ten.

Yeah. So I can go for that.

So I'm, you know, I'm never going to be old.

I'm with you all the way on that.

So that's the kind of career. But probably more importantly than that, I met my wife when I was twenty years old in nineteen eighty four, eighth of June, nineteen eighty four in Edinburgh. And we've been together ever since. And we've got three fantastic children won in the thirties and two in their late twenties, who are fantastic human beings, love spending time with them. They're all doing really well for themselves. They've all got great circles of friends and that. So you know, that for me is the is the real important part of the story.

Yeah, of course it is. Absolutely. Um, it sounds like the, the, the story about, you know, moving, moving the sapling, um, and helping it grow. Um, is, is you very much aware of the power of story? So what I was going to ask was, when were you first aware of the power of storytelling in a business context? Yeah, I.

I was always kind of slightly dissatisfied by the presentations that I'd come across and experienced. Let me give you an example. For instance, I joined BP back in nineteen eighty one, and as part of the graduate intake that year, we were all taken to this, uh, place called Verdant Court in Buckinghamshire, and all the. The top players from BP would come in and give us lectures on various subjects, as you might imagine. And I thought, well, I've been at university, I've watched some pretty amateurish presentations. We're now going to see the professionals in action. This is going to be really good. And I thought, hang on a minute. It's just the same as what I've seen at uni. It's still people back in those days talking to acetates on overhead projectors. But the same idea. There were text slides and people would ramble on and we wouldn't have a point. I thought, oh my goodness, maybe, maybe this is as good as it gets. So I fell in with everybody else, and I adopted the same techniques as everybody else, and I copied what I was seeing and I thought, yeah, I'm doing fine here because nobody's saying what I'm doing is wrong. And I thought, that's fine. And that served me well for a good yeah, you know, a good number of years. But then in two thousand and two, in fact, exactly twenty years ago from today or this this week. I was just about two weeks into a job in Halliburton. And at that stage, I hadn't really developed the role that I was in. So I had a bit of free time. And my colleague said to me, oh, there's a, there's a, there's a corporate storytelling course coming up. You might enjoy it. And I said, well, what is it? I said, well, it's to do with how you present. And I went, oh, I've done enough presentation skills training and that I'm really. I don't want somebody to tell me not to jangle my keys in the pocket or. I said so anyway. No, no, no, it's different. It's different. And I said, well, I've got the time. Why not give it a go? So I went along and it was delivered by a company called Articulus, an American based company. And it was a chap called Dan Riehl who subsequently became a good friend of mine. And that opened my eyes about thinking about communication differently. Now, it wasn't necessarily about constructing a story or using stories. It was about thinking about creating a story in somebody's head by thinking more clearly about what you present and how you present using analogies. Okay. Using pictures. Being less reliant on numbers and data. So that piqued my interest. And that's where the journey started for me. And I'd say it's a journey that I'm still on. Mhm. I'd love to say I've got the answers, but I've not. I've just got more questions. But but in the last twenty years, I have practiced and studied and read and tried different elements of, of story and storytelling in the context of business communication. And it's made a step change in difference in many places in terms of how you get the message across. Okay. Which is hardly surprising given that stories have been around for tens of thousands of years, and PowerPoint has only been about for a couple of decades. That's right.

So the idea that storytelling is obviously a very human thing to do, and not that many years ago. That's how most information was shared around a fire or whatever. But I know you're a scholar of the subject, so it's more than that. It's rooted in science. Is it fair to say?

Yeah. I mean, part of being an engineer. Remember I told you that I liked I wanted to find out how computers work, right down to that kind of molecular level. It was the same with stories. I kind of knew that the, the, the marketing was stories are a great way of conveying information. I'm saying go on and prove it. So I was always fascinated to find out, well, where's the proof behind this? So I started reading, you know, published papers from, you know, reputable journals from, from various to try and get to the primary research behind it. And some of this comes under the banner of narrative transportation theory. And there are various people, um, from London, from North America that have been involved in studying this to find out, do stories actually really form a better and deeper connection. Do they make us more susceptible to being persuaded? Um, what elements of a story are necessary to make it, uh, work for us? So all these things have been researched using primary experimental tests, uh, and then written up. And it's only in the last, I would say last twenty or thirty years that a lot of this has come to mind. Some of it is because we've now got access to things like fMRI scanners that people can be, um, we can monitor the response in real time as they're being told or asked to listen to different stories. So I became a student of all of that and said, that's all really interesting, but so what? How do you then translate that into a context of what do you do when you're pitching to try and sell a contract or a product to a customer? What does that mean? And that's been the interesting part of the journey for me is not just finding out what the underlying science is, but then translating it into a practicable and useful set of methods, templates, um, whatever you want to call them that people can apply and they can use in a practical way.

Okay. And that leads nicely on to my, in a nutshell question. In a nutshell, what is business storytelling? Right. It's not just relating a story so that you become my pal, is it? It's got you know, there's way more to it. Yeah.

Yeah. The crux of it is what story do I want you to have about me? Right. And therefore, what do I need to do to create that story? Because I can tell you a story about my product or my service, but it also depends on how I behave. It depends on how I respond to your questions. It depends on whether or not I'm reliable and I turn up on time. It depends whether I, I come in and, uh, with a smile on my face and say hello, or I come in and ignore everybody. So there's lots of things that go to this because as human beings, we take little bits of data and we join the dots. We create our own stories and we can't help it. We just can't help it. We see two things and we think, oh well, I know why that's happened. Whether we're right or wrong, it allows us to store it away because we've now got a package for it called a story that we can put it away. And so I now think that business storytelling, you know, actually using stories in the way you convey your message is part of it, but it's much more about the overall thing that says, what story do you want somebody else to have about you and your business, and how are you going to create that? Because if you don't create it, they'll create it themselves.

So I'm going to ask you for an example. Yeah.

Okay. So say for instance, I was, um, I was, I'm trying to think of a specific example where I can relate back to it. Okay. Yeah. So I'm, uh, I was asked to speak at a conference and it was a business breakfast and it was a conference that relates to the oil and gas industry. It's known as offshore Europe and offshore Europe are held, typically once every two years, a big conference. Thousands of people coming together and I was asked to speak at this business breakfast. Um, and I thought, I want to get the message across here that the audience go away with the story that we care about, how we behave in our business. Okay. So it was to do with values. It was to do with purpose rather than results or how good we were. And I, and I went back to the basics and said, what do I do here? So I had seven principles, seven values that were the driving force behind the business and how we behaved. And what I wanted to do was I wanted to get those seven values across clearly, and I came to the conclusion that I didn't need any slides, but I had seven props. Mhm. So for instance, I'll give you an example. One of our values was to do with financial responsibility. We didn't want to be taking huge financial risks and we wanted to be treated fairly. So part of the concern we had is if we were moving into new countries, how would we make sure that we were doing it appropriately, taking enough risk but not putting the company in jeopardy as a result of it. So I had a coat hanger, and there's a phrase in the UK, you know, losing your shirt. And I said, so I held up an empty coat hanger and said, this is what we don't want to lose our shirt. So I used props like that. And I kind of slightly kind of ironic way, uh, to get the message across. And at the end of the talk, it was well, well enough received. I never thought anything more of it. Sometime later, I'm walking through Aberdeen Airport and I'd just come off a flight and I'm walking back towards the baggage reclaim area. And it's that kind of awkward situation where there are people moving in both ways. So you're having to kind of, you know, jog your way around and find your way there. And this chap comes right up towards me and I thought, I'll move to the left. So he moved to the right. I move to the right, he moved to the left, and he comes right up into my face. He said, You're Bob Keiller. I said, uh, yeah. Uh, how can I help you? He says, he says, I was at a business breakfast that you presented at. I said, uh, when was that? He says, Offshore Europe. A couple of years ago. I said, uh, why are you telling me this? He says, no, no, no. He says, you had a coat hanger and you had a bench and you had a hat and you had a jar of honey. I says, yeah, yeah, I says, he says, it's about your core values, wasn't it? I said, uh, yeah, yeah. He said, you've got seven core values. And I can remember every one of them. I went, okay. I said, let me ask you a question. I said, uh, well, firstly, why are you telling me this? He said, because I never remember presentations and I know what you presented on that day. I went, wow, okay. I said, but let me ask you a follow up question. What do you remember from the other two presenters? And he went two other presenters. Was there, two other presenters? And I thought, okay, they had delivered perfectly competent, normal presentations, a deck of slides with words down one side and a big picture of something interesting technical on the other side. They stood at a podium. They read their notes. They were perfectly clear and legible. And yet he forgot they existed.

Yeah.

And the thing about it, it wasn't a couple of years before. It was eight years before. So he had remembered the content of the presentation eight years afterwards. And for me, that's kind of proof that the story I'd created in his head stuck with him.

Yeah. It's powerful. You just reminded me of something. Um, in a strange way. I, when I, when I went to university as a mature student, and to my surprise and great delight, I particularly enjoyed studying law and I didn't I didn't do a law degree, but there was a law component of it, civil law. And I've just realised why I enjoyed civil law so much, because civil law is all based on stories. It's based on Stevenson and Donoghue is the story about duty of care. Yeah. You know, and there was a caterpillar or something in the woman's. And when I was in the exam because I've always got by with exams, but I'm not. I'm no Einstein, but I remember in a law exam writing something like fifteen pages of A4, I couldn't write quick enough. And all of these stories just kept coming back to me. Isn't that fantastic? Now why? Yeah, because that subject resonated with me as it was story after story after story.

And if I asked you to remember to, to try and commit to memory a fifteen page script that wasn't in the form of a story, it would be tough. It would be. It would be tough. Yeah. So the fact that it's already in a format that allows people to remember it and to bring it back. There's a there's a great example that I think it was Professor Uli Hassoun and some of his colleagues. They, they took some, um, what would you call them, participants in an experiment? And they, they showed them an episode of, of a TV programme. It was to do with Sherlock Holmes. The programme itself was about forty minutes long. And then they asked them afterwards to recount what they'd seen. Mhm. And they went through it scene by scene by scene. And some of them took over twenty minutes to say what they'd seen, which showed that. And they tested us a few weeks later. But it showed that when things are presented in a narrative form, we find them easier to remember. What they also did was they sent they gave them information that was deliberately out of order and asked people to say, can you remember that? So there was no narrative thread running through it. Mhm. And people couldn't remember any of it at all really. So it showed them beyond any reasonable doubt that when you've got a reason for doing things, you can remember it. The other aspect of that is people that are these so-called memory champions, you know, they can they can remember the order of a deck of cards within ten minutes. Mhm. The technique they always use is they attach a story to each element in it, and then they recite the story, which means they know what cards coming next and that's how they do it. So it's a, it's a technique that's, that's deep rooted. And it's maybe not surprising that if you're in a business presentation and you want the audience to remember something, tell them the story that they can take away.

Mhm. Mhm. That just reminds me, um, in not being not very gracious, but we all know people who are great at telling stories, but it's like not interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess, you know, I guess what I'm trying to say is like, make sure the stories are, you know, make sure they're relevant. Interesting. Not too long. Using props, that kind of all of that stuff. Because it's very easy to assume that people are drawn into the story you're telling. And actually they're in another place, another place.

Yeah. I mean, the way we talk about stories is typically say, look, you've got to have a simple structure to the story with a beginning, a middle and an end. But for me to buy into the story, I need to believe it's true. Mhm. I need to care about it. And you need to give me enough in the structure for me to remember it. So for me to believe it's true, true, there has to be enough detail, enough dialogue, enough, you know, enough description in it for me to care about it. There needs to be a reason for me to empathise with somebody in the story. Otherwise it's a so what? Why are you telling me this? And for me to remember it, you need to get me hooked at the start. Yeah. There needs to be drama in the story or conflict or tension. And ideally, if there's a twist or a surprise somewhere in the story, then I'm going to say, all right, so the story I told you about meeting the chap at the airport, I didn't reveal the fact that it was eight years after the event until right at the end of the story.

Which gives it even more impact, obviously.

Similarly, when I told you about the the Pine tree, I didn't reveal the amounts involved until right at the end, because I know that's the kind of shock factor in that story that involved two hundred and eighty million dollars. Yeah. Uh, which is a quite an outrageous amount of money to tell a story about a pine tree.

But it worked.

It worked.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons at the start of this, you know, I might seem a bit random, I said on the fourth of December twenty eighteen. And I remember that from when we did that. Like because suddenly like, okay, so that was that's an actual date. Yes. Something happened then. Yeah, that's, that's one of those switches that's getting people. Yeah. Okay. This is a true story.

It's going to be a true story.

For whatever reason.

And sometimes people get, they say, well, I can't tell true stories about business because then I'd have to mention real people's names and real companies, and then it would all become to do with it would be inappropriate. I'm saying, no, you don't. No you don't. So, for instance, if I was going to tell you a story about working for a company, I might not need to tell you the name. But if I told you where they were when it happened, the type of business they were, you're now thinking, this sounds like a true story because I've given you enough detail to think, ah, right. Fascinating. I did an experiment once. I was dealing with a group of entrepreneurs down in Edinburgh, and there were sixty of them in the class. And I told them the story, and the story was about, um, this lady who was telling me about her grandparents and how her grandparents were Polish. Sorry, her grandmother was Polish, her granddad was English, and in his later years, when she had lost her eyesight and she couldn't read her Polish novels, he'd learnt how to read in Polish so that he could read novels to her, sitting in the conservatory of an evening, and how she used to laugh and roar at his bad pronunciation and getting it wrong, she says. But the funny thing was, a few years before that, he couldn't read English because he'd never been schooled. And so for him to learn that at a late age was just fantastic. And she's got fond memories. They're both dead now. Fond memories of sitting, listening to them, laughing to each other and crying with laughter and just enjoying each other's company. Because granddad had learnt this new technique late in life. And the moral of the story was, don't ever think that you can't learn something new. Age is not relevant in this context. No, and I told that story to sixty people and I said, look, so how many of you think that story is true? And fifty nine people put their hands up and one person at the end said, no, I don't think it's true. I said, why do you say that? She said. The character in the story, the Polish girl, you gave her a Russian name. I called her Tanya.

Okay.

I said, so what do I call her the next time she says, Katya? I said, Katya is fine. Yeah. And I said, yeah. I said, I wrote that story this morning on the train coming down from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, and every single one of you believed it to be true because it had the essential ingredients of a true story. Mhm. I said, so, you know, there are techniques here that we can adapt that they're powerful if used inappropriately, but used correctly. You don't need to give everybody everything for them to believe a story is to be true. You just give them enough information.

Yeah. I think detail I gave a presentation, I think it was a group of people that were doing, um, like a, either a weekend long or a week long course on innovation and thought actually contacted me. He'd been asked to give a presentation, and I, um, he didn't want to do it. And he said to me, do you fancy? So he and I worked on it. Okay. And we had several sort of smaller stories leading to a conclusion. And one of them, because I'm a retained firefighter. So one of them, he decided he wanted to bring in some of the things that I'm involved with. He thought it would be more authentic. And so he told the story of true story of what happened in Wales. In Blaenau, there was a tragic accident. Two firefighters lost their lives. But we started that by painting a very vivid picture. It's six o'clock in the morning, it's February. The I don't know what it's twenty seven, something like that. It was bleak. It was dark. Yeah. And the pages went off and the firefighters, because they were returned like me, they turned up to the station and we went. And you could just see people like because it was at a dinner. So they were sort of talking and you could just see them turning and it just brought them, oh.

It's got them in.

Even now it's kind of making me, you know, kind of feel like, oh.

No, You tell a story? Well, yeah. Um, and people are hooked. And, you know, one of the challenges I give people is to say, look, actually, you know, the TV production companies that create the John Lewis Christmas ads or the Super Bowl halftime ads and that, you know, they spend huge amounts of money creating a story. I said, we don't have that liberty in business. We can't do that. But if you tell people a story and you tell it well enough, you've got them. You've got them imagining what you're talking about, you've got them in synchronicity with you, and you've got them listening to say, well, tell me what come next. Yeah, tell me what come next. What happened after that? And then you give them the information at the end and they go, oh, wow. And what they've just done is they've just filed that away in their memory to say, I'll remember that story for a long, long time to come. Or you could throw a few slides together with a few texts, bits on it, and you could show them a few graphs that don't mean anything and hope that they get the key message. You know, there's different ways of doing it.

There is. Yeah. And there's well, there's only one that's really affected, though.

Yes, indeed.

Yeah. So what um, what different types of stories do we tell? I mean, I'm thinking we tell stories to try and persuade people to maybe buy something from us or to trust us, or we tell stories to people, to just get ourselves in the room so that we have an opportunity. Maybe I'm just trying to understand because in, in a digital marketing context, um, which were sort of loosely talking around with the From The Coalface podcast. Sure. Where, you know, we're predominantly trying to help people tell a compelling story so that when somebody arrives on, say, your website, they go, well, I like the sound of, I like what these guys are saying. And then they make a phone call or fill in a form and make contact. There might then be an opportunity comes from that.

So, so there's a temptation for people to say, my story has to be my complete story of how I got here and why I do what I do and how we do what we do. Right. And I'm saying, if you try and do that, you'll end up writing a story that's either so bland because you've cut it back so much, or it's so full that people are never going to read it. So I think you come back to what is the unit for me? Generally speaking, if it's a story that you're telling, it's a story you can tell in one or two minutes. Mhm. Because people are going to be able to listen for one or two minutes without interruption. Mhm. Now, there are times where you can tell a story that's longer than that, depending on the setting. But if you've got a one or two minute.

Story, it was good at that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

As is Eddie Izzard, as is Billy Connolly. There are lots of people who are raconteurs. Um, Stewart Lee's a great practitioner of it and they really are good. But for me, in a business context, if I'm going to tell you a story that is going to take a couple of minutes, I speak at one hundred and eighty words a minute, so I only need three hundred and sixty words. The only sixty words fits on a page. So we're talking stories that are a page long. Yeah. Now, if I want you to read a story, um, you can probably read it three hundred words a minute. So if I want a one minute story, I just need three hundred words. There's even fewer words. So we're not really talking, you know, complete novels here. We're talking about stories that are small in dimension. And the thing for that for me is, is if you can make them consumable and make them fully formed, then they stand alone. But if you've got ten of them and people think, well, that was interesting, I'm going to read the next one. Yeah. So you can have stories that do tell the complete story of who you are, how you got here, what you stand for, what you do, how you help other people, what difference you've made, how you've innovated in your products and services. So there's lots and lots of stories you can tell, but they don't all have to be one single, sprawling narrative that ties together. Now, the other side of that, you can tell stories there that are definitely there with a view to saying, look, this is what we did to help somebody just like you very recently. This is the problem they were having. This is what they realised. We came in to help them. They introduced the change using our product or service. And this is the outcome. And here's the proof behind it as to why it's true. And you think, what a great story. So that's clearly about saying, so why don't you buy the same as they did? Yeah. But there are other stories there just to build goodwill. Mhm. You know, to say, look, this is a story of something that we were involved in. We don't necessarily want you to do anything with that information. We just want you to know that's the kind of people we are or the kind of sector we are, or the kind of employment opportunities we operate. So the stories for me can be used in different contexts. If you're going for a job interview, what better way to explain a talent or skill or a competency you have than to illustrate it with a story? So if somebody says, give me a, you know, tell me a time when you exhibited good leadership. You say, well, let me tell you a time I exhibited some poor judgment and poor leadership. Oh my God, you've just humanised yourself. When I'm empathising with you, and you're going to tell me a story that actually tells you something about you're not bad at the old leadership thing. And you've told me a way I'm going to remember it. So when it comes to me looking at all the candidates for this job, the ones that have told me the best stories are the ones I'm more likely to remember. So they've got context all over the place. Sometimes people think, but we've got stories on our website. They're called case studies.

Mhm.

And I'll look at them and say, that's not a story. Mhm. That's a bland, sanitised version of aren't we great? Mhm. We're brilliant. We did this, we did that, we did that. I'm bored. I'm not going to read it. Mhm. Whereas if you tell me a story and build in the source of empathy and the source of drama and the stuff that you didn't get right, and all the other things in there, I'm going, wow, well done, you guys. Brilliant. What a great piece of work. And keep it all. So I can read it in a minute or two. Mhm.

Keep it concise. Yeah. That's right. I mean, what we've started doing with some of the blog posts on our, um, on our website is we've been putting on a video version as well and just say, look, if you don't want to read this, here's a two minute video, that kind of thing. And then and again, trying to tell a really nice, short, snappy story in two minutes. I think that it's quite powerful and Google loves videos as well, so it doesn't help your search ranking. That's right. Um, so thinking about the, the structure of a story and I'm now drawing on, um, the time when we did the course back in December twenty eighteen, uh, do you, do you want to take us through either the, the stuff we went through on that, on that? Yeah, sure. Or whatever, any sort of modification on it. I kind of, I sort of tool or a toolkit, if you like, that people can use to construct content in a way that's going to engage, draw people in as opposed to like, say, a bullet list of, sure, we can do X, Y, and Z, and this is what we charge.

So here's a simple structure. It's only got five bits to it. Uh, if you go back to Aristotle, he said that a story has to have three parts a beginning, a middle and an end. And to which you could say, well, that's a bit obvious, but doesn't really help me. Mhm. And then if you look at other people that have developed, you know, story structures, there are lots of people that have written books about the structures behind films and behind plays and behind novels and screenplays. But the problem with them, most of them run to a number of different steps that you're not going to fit into a one or a two minute story. Probably the, the, the kind of the most obvious example of that was Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Uh, and he wrote this book basically saying that he'd looked at all the cultures around the world, discovered that there are certain stories that reappear across different cultures. So he came up with this, this concept of the monomyth, the myth that's in every culture. And it's about the hero, the reluctant hero, being drawn into some cause, going to a dark and strange place, overcoming difficulties and fighting demons, and then coming back as a reformed and changed character, which, of course, George Lucas used as the basis for Star Wars. And J.K. Rowling, as you know, quoted as being inspired by that for. And I'm thinking it's great, but there are seventeen steps to the hero's journey and I'm thinking, well, for a one minute story, it's just too complicated. Yeah. Yeah. So I kept looking at various screenwriters and professionals in this area, and there were a few of them had nine step processes and eight step processes. And I was reading a book called The Storyteller's Secret by a guy called Carmine Gallo who writes, you know, a lot on, on presenting and communication. And the usual thing it was all about stories are really effective. I'm like, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm reading it all and it's great stuff. And I'm thinking, I kind of know this, but tell me how how to structure them. And then on page two hundred and twenty two in that book I've done eventually comes out and he says, you could, of course, adopt the process that Pixar use. And I'm going, huh? So Pixar, I've got a seven stage process and their seven stage process. If I remember the stages, it starts off with Once Upon a Time, you know, and then it goes on to, Um, every day he or she, you know, introducing the main characters until one day, you know, turning point and, you know, overcoming struggle and ever since then, and, you know, it's all the kind of traditional headings that you'd expect to hear almost in a fairy story. Mhm. So the first time I looked at that, I thought, well, maybe that's got legs, maybe we'll try that. So I converted it into a kind of a more business terminology and tried it out a few places. And I thought, yeah, it still feels a little bit clunky. But interestingly enough, you mentioned Thor earlier on my friend Thor. At the same time, Thor decided he was going to take this away and he was going to try it. He was doing a, a camp with some kids, uh, near Banchory and it was wet. So the kids, instead of being outside running up and down hills and climbing trees and throwing stones and rivers, um, he said, we'll have to do something that's a bit more, uh, subdued. So he said, right, we're going to do a storytelling workshop. So he gave them this rudimentary format that we developed. And when we got back together, I said, did it work? He said, yeah, yeah, it did, but there was the kids kept missing a couple of bits out and I'm saying, ah. So we simplified it and said, right, what we've got now is a simplified version of Pixar structure that is basically you would call it the person in the whole plot, which is the plot behind the most commercially successful films where somebody's living their life. Something happens to change that life. They find themselves in a place of difficulty or challenge. They struggle to overcome the challenge. Eventually, they resolve that challenge, and there's a lesson to take away from it. So there's only five steps to it setting, turning point, overcoming struggle, resolution, and implication. So it's a lovely little simple structure s t o r I that you can remember. And that's the basic ingredients that we tell people that if you think about that as the the scales on a musical instrument. Mhm. Once you've learned how to play the scales, you can start playing tunes. Once you start playing tunes, you can start improvising and playing jazz. But let's start by learning the scales. So we're not trying to say to people, there is only one format for the story. Mhm. Um, a couple of studies have shown using large data sets that when you boil things down, both in the word of film and in, in books, there are actually only about six or seven original plots. Mhm. And what we've taken is one of them, which is the person in the whole plot, which is the simplest one to do in a short story that says, let me talk to you about some challenge that we had to overcome. And let me give you the story behind that. Okay.

So in a in a business context, um, I mentioned to you before we started recording the book, they ask you answer, which comes up quite often when we do these podcasts. So in a business context, people have questions, problems they're trying to solve. Mostly when they go to Google, they've got a problem and they're trying to solve it. So are we are we saying that using this technique, like if somebody types in a particular problem and I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but something like a bit, you know, like a, our account, our accounting system doesn't work very well. You know, what are the best accounting systems? Is it even in those contexts, worth pitching a story like about the company who were down a hall, they and, and it's a bit obvious or.

It can be. It depends ultimately on the context. It depends on the context. If somebody is asking for a straightforward question, which is better? Yeah, Windows or Mac operating system, you're not going to say, ah, well, let me tell you a story about the time I know a chap developed his own operating system. Yeah. Well, you say, yeah, I just want the answer to the question. I know him as well. Yeah. So there's, you know, sometimes people are just looking for I want a straightforward answer to a straightforward question. So don't, don't flannel about. But if people are saying, you know, what led you to use that system instead of saying, well, we did a complete evaluation. We thought it was the best. Tell them the story behind it. Yeah. Tell them the story and say, look, we started off like you. We didn't know. Um, and then we made this mistake. And then we realised that if we didn't get it fixed, we were going to run out of cash. Mhm. So we, we jumped in and we made the first mistake. Then we got that wrong. Then we got this wrong and we thought, shit, if we don't get this paid, we can't pay payroll by the end of the month. Mhm. No, the drama is building here, by the way. I'm just making this up as we go along. And then eventually we realised that if we tied that, if we employed that cheaper, simpler system off the shelf and we did away with all the fancy formatting, we could do all the core things we needed to do, take money into the business, get it out of the business, pay our taxes, pay our people. Yeah. And it did all those things really, really well. And so we did away with all the fancy labeling, went back to the basics, installed it within two days and it worked first time. So that's why we use that accountancy system now. Yeah. Huh. There you go. So you've told the story, recommending a system on the basis of showing the story of how we got here.

That's right. And I guess those stories we can tell them in a way that makes the, makes the, uh, the customer the hero. I mean, we mentioned, um.

Storybrand Donald Miller.

Yeah, we mentioned that before. And the whole idea of storybrand is around telling great stories with the customer as the hero. Yeah, that, that kind of is exactly the same as the stuff you're talking about.

It is. I mean, it is there's a temptation that when people start telling stories about their own efforts, that they put themselves center stage and say, aren't we brilliant? Yeah, we've developed a fantastic product or a fantastic service. And you think that may be true, but ultimately that's not going to sit as well as if you're able to go into somebody and say, I could make you the hero for solving this problem in your business. That's right. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to help you on the journey. I'm here to be your mentor rather than to be somebody who's going to say, get out of the way. I can fix this for you.

We often work when we're working with businesses. we often look at what they look at, the language that they're using, whether it be on a website or anything. And it's, it's all we, this, we that, we, this and we, we often say, look, could you rewrite that as you, you, this? And they're like, well, what do you mean? Yeah, how? But this is what we do. Yeah. And they don't get it.

It's, it's a difficult one for people to get their head around. Uh, and an interesting one on that, for instance, is, you know, if we can show people what we do, we don't need to tell them. Mhm. I saw a fantastic, um, video that was put together by a company that makes software for call centers, analytical software, hardly the sexiest product in the world, naturally. But they, they, they filmed this little story video showing how this call center was responding to failures in this company's system and how the data was allowing them to get the customers and, and quell the problem and calm down the outrage and fix the problem. And they did it as a little dramatisation. Yeah. And I said, well, that four or five minute video tells me enough about that software that I now understand what it does and what benefit it provides. And they never once told me how fast it ran, how many servers it needs, or how much training it needs, how much it costs, etc. so using it to show people using a story to show people what you do means you don't have to tell them. So when Derek and I, for instance, are doing our training on business storytelling, there's no point in it where we say, let us tell about our background.

Mhm.

Because there's no point because people are not interested in it. We just show them what we do and they say, oh, wow. Right. So they can see it. And if they're really interested in finding the background, they can go onto LinkedIn or they can go into Google or Amazon, whatever they want to look, and they can find plenty of information. But it's not about us. It's about making them the hero on that journey as well and saying, look, we're here to help you on that journey.

That's right, one hundred percent. We recently, um, did a test and we there's a thing you can do with websites. You're probably aware of it called split testing. So you're not sure what message to, to say. So you try two different ones and you use a Google Optimize tool and say, show fifty percent of people this and fifty percent of people that. And we had something like on the hero text on our home page was something like, you know, helping businesses thrive online, something along those lines. And we changed it. We wanted, we wanted to get the message across. First of all, we thought like, we're big advocates of plain English. So we want to let people know that we do digital marketing, but we don't want to say we do great digital marketing because that's all about us. So we tested a thing which a digital marketing for businesses who want to grow faster. And it was something like one hundred percent more engagement. As soon as we had the message, it did say what we did, but it was it's actually saying who.

We.

Do you for. It's for you. Yeah, it's all about you. And the engagement just went off the scale in terms of how long, you know, how much the rest of the site they looked at, how long they stayed on the site, getting in touch with us and that kind of thing. Language is so important, getting this right stuff right. That was almost, uh, you know, it's not a haiku, but it's almost a like a mini story. Yeah. It's like a story that you know exactly what you're going to get if you go into it sort of thing.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean it, we chatted about this before we came on here, Dave. Is that like the getting that language right and getting that message right can make all the difference. And one of the best examples was back. You know, I think it was the year two thousand where Apple were developing the first iPod. Mhm. And at the time everybody thought Sony would be the ones that would that would lead that market because they had all the technology, they had the contracts, they had the distribution channels. And Apple were at the time, um, relatively unsuccessful. Um, people.

Forget that.

Computer company that had kind of lost their way a little bit and had fired Steve Jobs and then hired them back and were kind of still rationalising their product line. And what they did was they found a way of, of, of making a high capacity, compact disc player. But when they were looking to say, well, what's the story we want people to have about this? They said, what's the story? And they were going through different options. And I'm saying, is it to do with the technology? Because the technology allowed them to play four or five different formats of music, which was quite unusual at the time. And they said, well, that's interesting, but I'm not sure if it's compelling. And then somebody said, well, it's not the design because look at it. It's a nice compact design. And and then they said, well, yeah, but it's based on a nineteen fifty eight Braun radio combined with the click wheel of a Bang and Olufsen telephone bill. Six thousand telephone. It's no, no, it's the software interface because because there's no keyboard, people have to navigate it using the wheel and the push button. And then the story goes that they were coming together and they said, look, we need to make up our mind quickly about how we're going to market this. What's the story we want people to hold about this? And I said, we're looking at it from the wrong angle. We're looking at it from our side. We need to look at it from the customer side. What does it give the customers? A thousand songs in your pocket. And that was it.

Yeah.

You don't say anything more. And they sold forty million units on the back of that. And it led directly to develop of the the next generation iPods and then the iPhone and the iPad beyond that, which have obviously transformed Apple's fortunes.

Absolutely. I mean, I own an iPad. I'm writing on it right now as we talk. So you can see I do. But I remember when the iPad came out thinking, what on earth are they doing that for? Who on earth wants a computer without a keyboard on it? And do you know.

The inspiration for the iPad, Dave?

Go on.

Back in the late nineteen sixties.

Mhm.

Um, a young graduate called Douglas Adams was lying in a field somewhere. I think it was outside Innsbruck in Austria.

This is. Thanks for the fish, Douglas Adams.

Yeah, yeah. So Douglas Adams is lying on his back, staring up into the starry sky. And in his pocket, he had a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe.

Okay.

And he says, Wouldn't it be great if you could do A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? And he envisaged this book that would be the source of all information, and it would be like a flat pad that you would go into and it would come up okay. And I think it was fifteen years later, engineers at IBM basically said, why don't we've got the technology now didn't exist when Douglas Adams wrote the television screenplay and the radio show and all this stuff. The book and everything. Um, why don't we create this kind of, uh, this pad technology? And everybody said, but what's it for? Mhm. And it was only a number of years after that, that Apple picked it up and said, if we get people to tell the story about it, this can become a fantastic tool that people can use for all sorts of different reasons, because we've taken away the need to have a keyboard and the need to have a clunky power supply and a mains cord, and we've given somebody a tool. So they reinvented it. But it was originally came, I believe, from Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Yeah. And my my mother, who's, uh, eighty six now, eighty seven this year, I think, um, she spends more time on her iPad than watching the TV. Now, she would never have sat in front of a computer with a keyboard and, you know, not interested.

It's made it accessible. Yeah, it's made it accessible.

I mean, I visited her at the weekend and she said, she said, I'm always so careful about how I put it down. I don't want to drop it. I'd be lost without it.

Yeah. What a great what a great thing to say. Yeah. And I remember back in the it must have been uh, must have been the early nineties. No, it must have been the mid eighties. There was a, a professor, a guy called Feigenbaum wrote this book about the fifth generation of technology. Mhm. And remember when that was and he was talking about old people being kept companions by technology and being able to retrieve their memories and their their songs from their youth. And, and he talked about all these things. And it was, it was science fiction at that time. Yeah. Edward Feigenbaum was the guy's name, if I remember rightly. And I thought, wow, I wonder if any of this is going to come to fruition. And of course, now it's there, you know, and artificial intelligence is beginning to creep into all sorts of different aspects of our life.

You know, I know it's something you're really interested in, isn't it? Artificial intelligence.

I like the whole concept of can it be put to good use or is it there to manipulate us? Yeah, yeah. And, and I think it depends like, like most great technologies used for good, it can be fantastic. And it's also got its downside.

Yeah, it's big news with marketers just now because the big thing with content marketing, digital marketing is, is producing lots and lots of content. And it's hard. People can't write, people struggle to write. I mean, it, it surprises me. I enjoy writing reasonably good at writing, I think, but people struggle with it. So there's lots of AI tools that now will you need a two thousand word blog post? The AI will write it. I just wonder we've tried them, we've played with them, and it's garbage that they produce. Now, I've also heard other people say. Well, I've got a website. It's hugely successful. Every piece of content on it was written by AI. Have you have you used any. Have you tried AI to tell a story? Have you given it the ingredients and said, right, tell me a story.

I've not tried it. David is the honest answer. But interesting. But an interesting aside to that is we were working with a group of entrepreneurs recently, and part of what we do is we get them to film videos, submit the videos, and that gives us enough time. And this is something we hadn't because we used to do this in person. But now during lockdown, we said, well, we can't do it in person, so send your video in, which actually allowed us to watch the video four or five times, which meant we were able to analyse it in much greater depth and more detail and give them better feedback. So to some extent, the learning experience improved. But part of the process of what we do is we take the video and we transcribe it and the transcription you're just using off the shelf software normally is pretty good, but we had an entrepreneur recently was from Ayrshire with a quite a strong Ayrshire accent.

I know what this is going.

And it came out as absolute gibberish and it was. I was crying with laughter and I'm reading it and I thought, hang on a minute, this is how English people must hear people from Ayrshire. No wonder they struggle to understand in different parts of Scotland and Ireland or whatever. But it kind of showed me that, you know, the the software was good up to a point, but you still needed human intervention to do it. I haven't used the kind of the authoring software, and I'm not tempted at the moment because I don't need to. And I've got I've still got about a million stories to tell, so I'm not sure I need somebody to, to, to pull additional stories out of fresh air to create them. I mean, saying that I've got in a previous role for ten years, I wrote a blog to everybody in the company every week. Mhm. So I've got five hundred blogs that I did at the time. And lots of these have never been told outside that context. So their story is sitting there waiting to be republished and retold. Mhm. Um, I've got lots of stories that I've used in presentations over the years, and I've got every script of every talk I've done back to two thousand and four. So I've got a whole mine treasure trove of stories there. And I've also got a separate library of stories are the ones that I use time and time again in different presentations. So I've got lots and lots of raw material and stories there that I can use and put out there when I need to. So I don't think I've got any need really at the moment to try to, to automate that process.

Um, I, I, uh, going back to what you said about the transcriptions, I mean, we've used a service called rev dot com, which is really good. Now you've got a choice with Rev whether you get it automated transcription, which is a machine or a real person does it. It's not even expensive if you get a real person to do it. But I think Julie, one of my colleagues, she did test drive the automated one and she was in fits of laughter. It was it was so wrong. It was crazy.

Yeah, but. But actually, they're getting better. Yeah. And I would say now that for me, often what I'm not looking for is a perfect transcription. I'm just looking for something that tells me. Where did they say that? Mhm. Was it thirty nine seconds into the talk or was it a minute and a half in? Right. And it gives me a almost like a rough route map, which is fine, but every now and then it throws up things and I'm thinking, oh my word, this is just out. You know, I have no idea what it said. But if somebody's speaking in a what you would call a Non-regional dialect, it actually translates pretty well. Yeah. And gets it over ninety percent right most of the time.

Right. Does it. Does how does it do with your accent? Because you've got great, very clear, easy to understand accent. It struggles with mine. Yeah. My rounded vowels.

It struggles. Yeah. No it seems to pick it up pretty well. Yeah. There's the occasional word that it'll truncate to them together. And you think, no, these are separate words. Yeah. But I mean, I guess like yourself. Where were you brought up?

Where was Barrow in Furness.

Barrow, right in the south end of Cumbria. There now, which has got a very distinctive kind of regional accent. Well, I was not too far away from there in the middle of the borders. That's right. And when I'm with my friends in the borders, we speak the local dialect. So I learnt pretty quickly, having left the borders, if you wanted anybody to understand you about anything, you had to kind of try and modify your speech a little bit. Yeah. To speak a bit more clearly. Sure. And that's certainly stuck with me in terms of from a business context. All the time. I try and speak as clearly as I can. Yeah.

My, uh, the worst example I ever had, I was in Australia and I was trying to buy a can of Coke. So, and, and the guy was actually English. He was working there. And, and in the end I said, Coke like that. Oh, Coke. Straight away he genuinely with my coke. I've got a very, very rounded vowel sound. I know I have. I mean I get I get the Mickey taken out of me all the time, um, by, by people because I live in Aboyne, so I'm in, in the country. Yeah. Um, so yeah, my accent is a source of hilarity. Another thing I've noticed, and I'm stating the obvious, but it amuses me whenever you do transcription transcriptions. And I've tried to, um, to record something to create a piece of written content. Okay. Just, uh, once you get the spoken word back and read it, it makes very little sense.

So there are two different languages. Yeah. And this is, this is often, um, where I'm helping people with business storytelling. I'm saying write your script as part of your design process, but it's not what you're going to say. It's to get the thoughts in the right order on the page, in the right quantities. It's not about actually forming the words. So don't wordsmith it. Don't try and make it into excellent prose. Do that standing up in front of your video camera and work out what you're going to say there. And don't even try and remember that. Be spontaneous. Be yourself. Yeah. Because if you try and remember it, you'll remember the written version and the written version invariably comes across as sounding unnatural. It sounds like sales. Yeah, we are the foremost company at in our market place. And you're going, hang on a minute, you wouldn't say that. No, you might write it. Yeah. And actually, when it's written you think, okay, that's fair enough. But when you say it, you say, nah, you wouldn't say those words. What would you say? And we call it the coffee test. What would you say to your friend over coffee? How would you describe that? And I say, well, I would just say that actually we're doing better than everybody else. Fine. Say that. Yeah. Say that instead.

Mhm. I mean, how much is I mean, you're a very engaging person to talk to. And how much of that is just you? I mean, if this is just you, that's a huge advantage. I played in bands since I was a kid. I enjoy standing in front of people talking. I get nervous, as you should, I think. Yeah, but I really enjoy doing it. I have no issues with it at all. A lot of people really do struggle. They do. So they'll tell a bad story simply because they're just.

Well, I think partly because nobody's told them what the recipe for a good story and the ingredients for a good story is. Yeah. Nobody's giving them feedback. Nobody's told them that the story that they're telling, they're actually is kind of duff and doesn't do anything, doesn't have a message, doesn't have any drama, doesn't have any surprise, blah, blah, blah. You go back and you say, well, once you've taught people how to do it. Yeah. I was asked this question literally yesterday on a call. Okay. This chap who was head of quality for a business and he was probably in his fifties, he said, but some people are natural storytellers. He says, what about those of us who aren't? Good question. I said, we've probably trained a few thousand people now in the art of business storytelling, and we've yet to find somebody who doesn't who can't tell stories well, providing they know what the heck they're talking about. And we've given them the support as to here's a structure to use. I said, so one day we're going to find somebody who's not a natural storyteller. But when it comes down to it, socially, we are all storytellers and story consumers. That's what we do. I mean, the whole entertainment industry relies on our willingness and our need and our desire to consume stories. Otherwise there'd be no need for Emmerdale or Star Wars. Mhm. Because they're just made up.

That's right.

And yet we love them and we pay money and we buy the merchandise for a story that somebody's written down. Wow. So we're in or we're enthralled by stories. And we always have been, ever since an early age. So when it comes back down to it, if I can get people to reconnect in a business context with what they do naturally at home or socially or with friends, then it becomes really easy because I'm saying, tell me a story about something you know about, you care about, and you want to get a point across and tell me in your own voice and just make me interested in it. And I've not found anybody who can't be taught and can't learn that basic skill. Now it doesn't turn them into a natural stage. Front of stage rock on tour. It doesn't give them any craft skills in that. But you know what? As humans, it doesn't matter. No, because we're used to listening to stories that come in all shapes and sizes. And therefore, as long as somebody's giving you something to say, a reason to keep saying, oh, go on then. So what happened after that? And why was she involved? And oh my goodness, you didn't, did you? And then what happened? Oh wow. Before you know it, you're listening to the whole story and everybody can learn. And I call it a teachable skill. It is a teachable skill.

What about what about the pitch? What about pitching as a story? I mean, I'm, I'm kind of trying to guide you towards a story that you told, um, that you told a group of us wasn't just me, um, around trying to get under the skin of a business and find out the problem that they're trying to solve and tell them a great story around how you're going to solve that problem. I'm thinking about, um, I can't remember the country, but it was around about getting, getting local.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. I mean, so let me share the story with you. Yeah, that'd be great. So, um, I'm trying to think of the time, the when it would be probably about two thousand and seven. And we just set the business up in two thousand and six by borrowing those two hundred and eighty million that I talked about earlier on. So it was quite an early stage business. So the future of the business was still a bit fragile. At this case. We needed to hang on to our existing customers, win new customers, and demonstrate to the people that lent us all this money that they weren't going to lose all this money. Um, and there was an opportunity came up in Chad, in Africa, huge contract, um, ultimately for a company called ExxonMobil, but they were in, uh, a joint venture with two other companies. So the, the customer was called Ipse, which was an acronym for the people that were involved in it. Mhm. And, uh, this contract, if we'd won, it would be a big five year contract. It would be a real statement that we were able to hold our own in a market that was filled with companies much bigger and much longer in the tooth than us.

Mhm.

So I went and spoke to the manager that was running the kind of proposal for that contract for us, a guy called Ricky and I said, Ricky, be honest with me. What do you think the chances are that we're going to win that contract? He went, well, it's a it's a long shot, really, isn't it? It's a long shot. I'm saying, well, why why do you think that? He says, well, he says, you know, it's fundamentally a French speaking, French speaking country. And there are two big French companies already in place there. And the contract that we're we're bidding for is effectively the combination of their two contracts. So they're already incumbent. They're already in place. They've already got people on the ground. The chances of any new party, ourselves included, is going to be tough. I said, okay, that's disappointing to hear. I said, so, but what is it the clients really looking for? He said, well, I guess they'll be looking for a good service at a good price. Hang on a minute, I guess. Mhm. What have they said they're looking for? He went, well, we've not really spoken to them directly. Okay. How's your yellow fever certificate? Sorry. I said we're going down to Chad. He went, oh, right. So Ricky and I flew down to N'Djamena, and we turned up at the the boss of the client organisation, a guy called Ron Royle, and he said, hey guys, it's great to have visitors. We don't get many visitors down in this part of the world at this time of year. Um, but what can I do for you? I said, well, Ron, the reason we're here is, you know, you're going to be coming out to market in the near future, um, for this big contract. We like to think that we could, you know, potentially win that contract if we get everything right. But we need to know what do you want? He said, what do we want? We want a really top class service, a really rock bottom price. And he's laughing away. I said, yeah, yeah. I said, I was kind of expecting that. I said, but tell me, Ron, I says, picture yourself five years in the future. I says, what would the ideal contract look like? What difference would it make? And he said, ah, now you're talking. He says, because the problem we've had so far is the contractors that are servicing us. They tend to bring in lots of expatriate personnel, which means that they don't train up the locals and they give them menial jobs. And okay, some of them are security, some of them are drivers, but they don't teach them how to be managers and leaders and accountants and HR professionals. For us, it would be fantastic if somebody could come in with a plan to really develop the local workforce. And not only that, instead of buying in lots of, you know, goods and services and supplies from overseas, what if you could develop some local suppliers and create jobs in the local infrastructure and create futures for the children here locally? And went and he was enthused by this. And we just sat and listened and wrote notes and notes and notes and notes and notes. And we got back. Uh, the bid came out a few weeks later and it didn't say anything about this at all. Mhm. So we put in what you would call a compliant bid. We answered all the questions about supply and about costs and about insurance and about guarantees and about health and safety and training and people and all that. But then we also put in we put in a localisation plan. Yeah. So this is our vision for the contract. We want to do all the things that Ron said he wanted. And almost as soon as we put the submitted the bid, they came back to us and said, can we talk to you about this localisation plan? Well, we said, yeah, what do you think? They said, we love it, we love it. But we do have a question. Why is it a five year localisation plan? Because it's a five year contract. So would it be better if it was a seven year contract? Yep. Sure would. Um so they gave us a seven year contract.

Yeah.

That nobody thought we could win. And we condensed that into a simple thing is, this is the Spice Girls principle. Okay. Don't ask a customer what they want. Ask them what they really, really want. Okay. And you've got to go and listen to them. Yeah. In the context we were in anyway. Sure. We needed to go and listen first hand and get past the usual defensiveness. We just want a great product at a great price. And for you to be best. No, no. Think ahead. What would you what would you really want out of this? So when we got there, we set the contract up. We spent a lot of time teaching people language skills, driving skills, technical skills. We had an academy set up. We had a training school for the children. We put money into local villages. We tried to set up local supply chains and live up to the vision that we'd sold them. Um, but actually, if you just looked at the paperwork, you wouldn't have got any of that. No.

So that's this idea of really trying to get inside the customer's head and find out like the Spice Girls. I love that what they really, really want. You want them, I think, to be saying nobody's asked us that. Yeah, yeah yeah. Don't you? Yeah.

And sometimes we don't ask because we don't think it's right to ask, or we think somehow we're going to be breaching a confidence by asking or we're still. We kind of know. Mhm. Yeah, yeah. We know what they want. You think? Really? How would you know? How would you know if you haven't asked?

Yeah. That's right. I mean, we don't respond to it's very often I'm not a huge fan in our space. Yeah. I don't think people get great value. Yeah. But we will always respond and say we'd love to come and speak to you. And if they don't want to speak, no, just answer the question and give us a price. Probably not.

Probably not because they're probably looking for a check price against somebody that they already know and know their story. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Dave. Yeah. I would do the same.

Just to sort of round this off. And it's been fantastic so far. What, what about the limitations that we did discuss this briefly before we started recording the limitations of storytelling? Is it is it just the obvious thing when there's just no room to tell a story? I mean, I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, look, there's sometimes when people are asking you for a straightforward answer to a straightforward question, you know, is it seven or is it eight? And you say, well, let me tell you a story behind that number. Yeah. People are gonna get cheesed off at you pretty quickly. So I think everything's in context where I look at story and storytelling. It's a building block. Yeah. And like any building block, you have to fit it in a structure. Um, so if I was going to do a pitch, it wouldn't just be a case of going in and telling the customer story after story after story. I'd be telling them a story to get their attention. Maybe then I'd be telling them about what benefit we can provide for them. Then I'd tell them how we can deliver the benefit in a different and unique way from everybody else. I might tell them a little bit about why we're credible in this space and why they should do it. Then I'd give them a story that maybe says, and here's what we've done for somebody else. So that would be the evidence or the social proof behind it. And then I would, uh, I would ask them to sign the contract or give us a business. So it fits within another structure rather than being a standalone entity. Mhm. But I think the beauty of it then is, is that if you know that it's like a set of Lego building blocks and you can build it into anything you want. Yeah. The, the thing is start collecting Lego building blocks and start building your collection of blocks, because you never know when you can use the same block in a different context at a later date. Of course. So that's kind of what I kind of try to say. People start building not just the stories behind your own personal experiences, but the stories behind your colleagues experiences and the stories that you've heard about other people doing that. You can see, well, that represents an analogous situation. So the story of Scots pine trees or the stories of, um, you know, historical figures and, uh, doing things in a different way and you think, yeah, at some point that will become a story that I can use for sure. Have you got time for me to finish off with that last one? David, I told you before, we've.

Got as much time as you need. Bob. Absolutely.

Because an example of that, two examples that. But the one example I'll give you, because it's relevant to the situation as we speak about the tensions, the military tensions in Eastern Europe. Um, let me set the context. I was asked to speak at a dinner and it was the the Association of Reliability and Safety Engineers, although I don't think they used that as the acronym that they went under. Maybe the words were in a different order. Um, and Maggie, who was the local, uh, chamber president, had come to me and said, Bob, can you speak at our dinner this year? I said, uh, I'm not sure, Maggie. why? She said, well, we've had a couple of heavyweight intellectual speakers at the previous dinners and actually the dinners supposed to be a celebration. And, you know, everybody's got partners with them. So the female engineers have got their boyfriends and husbands and vice versa with them. And it all fell a bit flat because they spoke for way too long, on way too dry on a subject that was way too deep and would really like to be a bit more kind of light, but still relevant, she says. And remember, you did a talk at the Society of Chemical Engineers, the Institute of Chemical Engineers, um, a few years ago. Could you just do that same talk again? I said, well, it wouldn't be relevant, Maggie, because there's a different audience. And I said, what do you really, really want? She says, well, the problem we've got is, and this was at a stage where, uh, there was a bit of a downturn in oil and gas industry and a lot of the reliability and safety engineers were feeling as though their jobs were potentially under threat. So there was a sense that their self-esteem was being kind of under a bit threat there. You know, nobody values what we do. And I said, okay, Maggie, I yeah, I'll agree to do this. I get what you're what you're looking for. So I was looking for a story that talked to the importance of people having a good, strong understanding of issues around reliability and fallibility and, you know, systems not being perfect. Mhm. And it took me back to a story that I had written, um, not long previous to that was about a chap called Stanislav Petrov and Stanislav Petrov saved your life. And he saved my life because back in September nineteen eighty three, when Karma Chameleon by the Culture Club was top of the charts, Stanislav Petrov. His job was. He was the supervisor of a tracking station in Soviet Russia. Now, tensions between the East and West at that time were the highest they'd ever been since the Second World War. Uh, a civilian jet had been shot down over North Korea a couple of weeks previously. There'd been, you know, hundreds of people had died. There was a massive NATO exercise taking place in what was then West Germany, which the the Soviet Union thought was a precursor to an invasion. So how how similar is that to to where we face today? Yeah. Um, so tensions were high. Stanislav Petrov had a background in reliability and safety engineering. And his job was if we detect the Americans launching nuclear missiles was to phone Moscow and order an immediate retaliatory retaliatory attack, fundamentally get the missiles off the ground before they get shot at in situ. Mhm. And, of course, it never happened. Thankfully, it never happened. But on this day, on that day, the alarm went off.

Okay.

And the lights have just gone off in here as well, which is kind of spooky. Um, on that day, the alarm went off and his team are going, uh, we need to phone Moscow. And he went, well, hang on a minute, hang on a minute. He says, how many missiles have been launched? And they said, uh, one. He said, no, it doesn't make sense. He says, there's no sense in anybody launching a single nuclear missile. That's like walking up to Mike Tyson and pinging him on the side of the face. It's not going to end well. So he said, no, it must be a system error. So we're not going to call. And of course, the problem they have is if an ICBM is launched from the American Midwest, it only takes twelve minutes to reach Moscow. Wow. So you've not got a lot of time. No, this is not a three hour journey or a four hour journey. Mhm. Um, and then somebody said, boss, another alarms going off. There's a second missile and a third and a fourth and a fifth. So his team are now on red alert. They're saying, right, we need to stop, guys, stop stop stop. Five missiles doesn't make sense either, right? It makes no more sense than one. He says there's a common mode failure here somewhere, he said. But if there were five hundred missiles, that might make sense. If there was five thousand missiles, it would be completely logical. But five missiles just does not make sense. So I am not going to phone Moscow. And they waited and they waited. And of course, you know the outcome. Nothing happened. And they found out later that the sun reflecting off cloud formations looked exactly the same as missile trails. Gee whiz, I said, but because this guy had a background in reliability and safety engineering, he understood the limitations of complex systems, particularly those that were joined together. So at the dinner I told that story and I said, what the world needs more than ever is people that understand complex systems and their limitations, people that are reliability engineers, people like you. So I took the story out of my library and was able to use it for Maggie for that day. So for me, it illustrated the point here is that once you've got the story in your library, you never know when you're going to use it.

That's right. That's right. And that will be one of those potentially airport moments for you in the future. Someone's going to come up and they're going to tell you about how that had that impact on them.

Honestly, it happens quite a lot when people come back to me and say, that day you told that story, I'll never forget that. And I often have forgotten all about it. I'm good. Wow. Yeah, yeah. That's fantastic. Similarly, the way I, because I get the pleasure of hearing lots of other people telling their stories, we hear some stories now that we think, oh my God, that was in tears or there was crying with laughter. And you think, what a great place to be me in the receipt, the receiving end of other people telling me their personal stories, showing their own vulnerability and doing things to to express what they do in, in the workplace. And you're thinking, I'm proud to be part of this because some of the stories you've told us are just fantastic.

And do you think, I mean, we all we people do business with people. And I think some people and maybe smaller businesses are guilty of this. And I think maybe our business has been guilty of like you, maybe it's imposter syndrome or it's just lacking confidence. And, and so you, you, you kind of steer away from personalising the message and telling great stories when in actual fact, that's more likely to have a positive impact and show the human side of your business. And well, exactly. The story you recounted about, about, about Chad, you went down there, you took the time. Even just taking the time to go and listen to them would have been a huge bonus. Yeah, I would have imagined, you know, but I think that's I think we forget that. I think that we forget the whole, the whole people side of business, which is why business storytelling, some people like, well, what do you mean.

When you're selling into large organisations, they often set up procurement processes that are there to kind of almost dehumanise it to.

Public sector.

Public sector, they try, they try and turn it into a turning the wheel process. But at the end of the day, it's likely that you're going to find yourself face to face with somebody in that process. And as you say, that's when if you're a human being, you want to make sure that people understand that. I can only get you to care about what I'm talking about. If I show you how much I care about it. And there's no better way of doing that than wrapping it up in the form of a story.

Absolutely. I guess, you know, one of the challenges there is authenticity, which is why, you know, using the techniques that you talk about, there's ways of making sure that the authenticity comes through because, you know, we're not necessarily only telling stories of things that happen to us like, like the example you just gave, but recounting stories that have happened to other people, making it authentic. Um, yeah, I think that's where I think that's, that's something that I, I think we need to do in our, in our business a lot more. And I think not just because we're a small business. We work in the marketing space since oh yeah, marketing is any old blarney sort of thing. But that's not that's not what we're about. But how do you get across to people that no, no, we, we, we, we are different. We really do care. We are going to take an interest in your business.

But but there is that danger, of course. Oh, but we care about our customers. You say, oh your competitors don't.

I know exactly. Yeah, exactly.

We go the extra mile. Oh we go the extra cliche. Oh do you. Okay. We leave no cliche unturned. And I get it all the time. So I'm a, I'm a stickler for avoiding the hackneyed phraseology that sometimes appears in, in the world of, of some sales and marketing and saying, don't tell me all that stuff about what you do. Just give me an example to show me what you've done. Yeah. And if you can do that, then I'll make my own mind up as to whether or not this is the right thing for me. And I, and I just, I worry when people make claims about, you know, but but we're different. I'm saying show me your different. Don't tell me you're different, in fact, that you're having to tell me you're different. Makes me suspicious that you might not actually be that different.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you think maybe the language that you use is the same? I mean, if I'm if I read stuff that's not plain English, if you know people using words that you just wouldn't use, you know, ordinarily and they're trying, you can just tell they're trying to sound clever. So clever stories are never used language like that.

Well, they don't, they don't. I mean, we were talking about this yesterday because um, part of what we talk about is, you know, some of the techniques that you can bring in from, um, you know, the ancient art of rhetoric practiced by Cicero and everybody else on the lines and that there are still a number of techniques in there that if you want to bring it in, almost like seasoning in a casserole, if you use it sparingly, it can add add flavor to a script or to a story or whatever. And the obvious ones are the tricolon, where you use three things in a row, you know, the triple or, or analogy being the other obvious one. But there are other techniques in there. Uh, and, and one of them, you know, the whole idea of rhetoric, you say, is it okay to ask a rhetorical question? And you say, well, am I supposed to answer that or not? Yeah. What's the best ever rhetorical question? And you say, is it a bit solipsistic in here or is it me? And and I know when people look at, they go, what? I'm saying, well, you know, solipsism and they go, no, I'm saying solipsism. The belief that nothing exists outside your own person. And they go, never heard of it. I said, ah, maybe that's why the joke doesn't work. Yeah. Is it a bit solipsistic in here or is it just, oh no, forget it, I get it, but it's it comes across, you know, if you're trying to use language that's too fancy, who are you doing it for? Because you're not doing it for the audience. You're doing it to try and show off and therefore don't do it one hundred percent.

That's right. Well, this has been a delight. Is there anything I haven't asked you that I maybe should have that you can think of, or have we? We've kind of talked about so many different things.

I guess if there's one thing here is that the basic unit, the building block of story translates across different media. I think it works well when you're telling it face to face. Therefore, it also works well in video. Yeah, because video is just another form of capturing that whole audiovisual living experience. Yeah. When you translate it into writing, as we've said before, there's a difference between the written language and the spoken language. And the closer you can keep it to the spoken language, the better. But there is a convention that we need to make it read and scan properly. Otherwise, it looks as though it's half done and not properly finished off. Um, and I do think that there's a, there's a space for the principles of storytelling in the context of we're bombarded with information now in the written form. Mhm. And, and most of it we tend to ignore. Yeah. Because it doesn't get through that filter of being of any interest to us. And I think if we can get back to that idea and say, well, a story, a true story, well told that's relevant to the audience is always going to be a great vehicle for a message.

Mhm. Yep. I mean, in digital marketing circles were kind of torn between wanting to abandon the written word and recognising that without the written word, the search engines are not gonna put our stuff in front of people. Well, which is why, you know, doubling up using video and the written word.

Yeah. I mean, I was talking to some of the guys at LinkedIn recently. Uh, the support team there and they were saying, look, you know, be good to get you back doing kind of regular, you know, articles on LinkedIn. I said. And, and I was asking them, I said, are you still doing articles or is it more video? Now, they said, no, you need the articles as well because the articles tend to reach further. Yeah. Um, videos are good as well. So it's an and rather than an or. Yeah. So I've put my, my toe back in the water and done a few articles on LinkedIn. But for anybody interested in more of kind of the background to the storytelling element, they can obviously go onto my LinkedIn profile and look back at some of the articles that I did a number of years ago that are still relevant in the context of storytelling and presenting and a communication. More recently, I've started doing articles that are more generic, business focused, but I will come back to doing more about story and storytelling as I build up the kind of momentum and build up the readership to try and make sure that the articles actually land with the audience.

Yeah. And obviously, as we're surrounded by video equipment, that's a big part of what you're doing going forward.

Uh, what do we do partly now is rather than try and say, we have to stand in front of people to, to, to share ideas with them or get them to read big, thick books. We say we'll package them up as e-learning modules and allow people to consume them in their own time. And if they can do that, then when the time we have with them, whether it's online or in person, it can be creative and interactive and it can be a learning experience rather than a, a one way. Um, you know, lecturing experience. Yeah.

Well, that's been a delight. Um, this is Digital Marketing From The Coalface. We've been talking about business storytelling. If you want to come on the show and talk to us about some aspects of digital marketing communications that interests you. We'd be delighted to hear from you. If you've got any questions you want to send in, feel free to send them in and you can go redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface or redevolution.com to get in touch. In the meantime, I can't thank you enough, Bob. It's been a delight. Thank you.

Thank you Dave.

So when I was heading home after recording that excellent podcast with Bob, I realized that I hadn't explained why I'd stood in front of Bob and Thor and a room full of really great people, and suggested that I'd learned all. Now, at the end of the course, which was a couple of days, or the workshop, if you like, we were all asked to give a presentation, and when I gave my presentation, I decided to pick out some of the stuff that we'd been told to think about around business storytelling and tell a story that explained what I'd learned. So I actually learned a ton of stuff while I was doing the workshop. But being me, I was having a bit of fun and it was that kind of atmosphere in the room. Um, I decided to have some more fun with it, and each of the points I've made I wanted to make, I pulled out the first letter, so f, u, c, k, etc. so by the end of it I'd actually explained how much I'd enjoyed the workshop and how much I'd learned, but it spelled out an acronym, which was f*ck all. And that's why we laughed about it. And I wanted to explain that, and I meant to explain it while I was talking to Bob, but I got carried away once we started talking about business story time.