The Best Story Wins: How to Leverage Hollywood Storytelling in Business & Beyond

by Matthew Luhn

The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come. —STEVE JOBS

The room number of the CalArts animation department was and still is A113. If you’re a Pixar or Disney enthusiast (aka animation nerd) like I am, you probably know “A113” shows up in every Pixar film. From Mater’s license plate in the film Cars to Mike and Sully’s dorm room number in Monsters University to dozens of other hidden places in Pixar films. Why? Because almost all of the directors, storyboard artists, writers, character designers, and animators from Pixar attended CalArts. Alums also include the creators of animated TV shows like The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, We Bare Bears, and directors and actors like Tim Burton, Pee-Wee Herman, and David Hasselhoff. I even heard that the Hoff and Pee-Wee were roommates! Now that would make a great TV show.

When you share statistics, data, or information with people without a story, they only retain about 5 percent of the information if you ask them about it ten minutes later.

According to Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist, facts are 22 times more likely to be remembered if they are part of a story. It even works with the driest of facts. Adding a story may seem like a subtle move, but it begins to change everything.

Great leaders and speakers use this technique of tension and release all the time. They know how to take an audience on a ride from the ordinary world, up to what things could be, back to the ordinary world, leading to an epic ending that seals the deal.

When Jobs debuted the iPhone in 2007 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, he used this up-and-down kind of storytelling.

If you want to tell a story that is memorable—and moves people to act—you must take your audience on a roller-coaster ride of emotions.

Research tells us that the attention span of the average person is eight seconds. You have eight seconds to convince people that you’ve got something worth hearing about before they zone out, tune out, or check out. Be it a pitch to investors, a company presentation, or an advertisement, if you can’t catch the attention of your audience within eight seconds, you’ve already lost. So, how do you grab an audience’s attention within eight seconds? With a great hook. Like a gorilla in a window.

So what goes into creating a great hook? You need to catch people with something unusual, unexpected, action-driven, or that raises a clear conflict. When creating eight-second hooks, it helps to start with a question like a “what if” scenario. For example, “What if superheroes were banned from saving people?” That was the hook for The Incredibles, which took the “ordinary” world of superheroes saving people and turned it into an unusual situation. Your audience is now hooked and asking, “Why and how did they get banned?” Or, “What if a rat wanted to become a French chef?” This hook from Ratatouille is unexpected, because why in the world would a rat want to cook? Or, “What if the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs had missed?” The image of the asteroid about to crash into our planet from the movie The Good Dinosaur makes for a great action-driven hook. Or, “What if a child’s favorite toy is replaced by a newer toy?” This hook from the movie Toy Story raises a clear conflict. Hooks that set up an intriguing question work like magic. This is true not just for film, but also for inspiring your employees or motivating customers to buy your product or service.

To get your hook across in eight seconds you must be as clear and concise as possible. Don’t focus on how many words it will take you to convince people, but how few. Albert Einstein said it best: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Here are a couple of great opening lines to movies that have clear and concise hooks:

A hook is not a story. It’s just a taste of what your story could be. In order to transform your hook into a story, you will need to create a logline, which contains the four elements that have been used in storytelling for thousands of years: 1.A hero 2.A goal 3.One or more obstacles (sometimes this involves a villain) 4.A transformation

By the end of the story, the hero or heroes have changed, and if done well, have engendered a change in the audience as well.

Less than 15 percent of the population is open to trying new things without any outside motivation or a traumatic event forcing them to change. The rest of us don’t like to change, even when we know it is good for us. This is why most people prefer the path of least resistance when faced with change. We pick the low-hanging fruit, instead of working harder to get the juicier fruit farther out of reach. We don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Today, I’m going to stop smoking” or “Today, I’m going to start spending more time with my kids.” Instead, we put off change until something traumatic happens, like a heart attack or when our kids grow up and move away. So how can you get people to change? By telling them a story.

When fictional or nonfictional characters go through a believable transformation, the audience is changed as well. This process is called neural coupling. Neural coupling is when the brain activity of the storyteller and the person listening mirror each other; the listener is affected by the storyteller’s journey and the characters who are changing within the story.

When stories are done right, they can generate a powerful dose of empathy. What exactly is empathy? Empathy occurs the moment we imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes, adopting their point of view, which creates a personal connection. When you share success stories about yourself (or about other people) struggling to obtain something, your audience roots for you to reach your goal. This in turn inspires them to pursue goals that may seem too difficult in their lives. Your transformational experience—your success story—can inspire others to change and take action, like trying something new at their company, improving the way they communicate with their customers, or becoming a more confident leader. The deeper you take your listener into another character’s life experiences and heart, the more powerful and transformative your stories can be.

The hero of a story doesn’t even have to be a human for us to feel empathy. We respond to any characters—be they toys, cars, robots, or even rats—that are faced with change. The characters just need to be relatable, with easily identifiable human traits.

A character’s arc looks like this: 1.The story starts on a normal day. 2.The character is launched into an unfamiliar world, encountering characters and obstacles that challenge their way of thinking. 3.By the end of the story the character returns to where they started, but is notably changed.

Here is another way to look at the character arc: Who the character was / what the character learns / who the character becomes

A, B, and C Stories Stories can also show more than one character changing.

•Your A story should fill up 60 percent of your story •B story, 30 percent •C story, 10 percent

For thousands of years, great leaders in entertainment, politics, and business have used storytelling to inspire their listeners to try something new. What transformational stories can you share that will inspire people to learn about you, your company, and its products, solutions, and services?

Which leads us to a critical question—who is your audience? Who are you trying to connect to?

He had changed his mind because I had sold him more than a toy store. I was selling him on me, and my dad. A big part of your story or message is about you, who you are, your personality, your track record, your voice, your background, and your passion. Before you prepare a message or casually deliver a story, you must define your audience.

Universal themes connect with all genders, ages, and cultures. For example, we are all born with the fear of being abandoned. Where is Mommy? Where is Daddy? Our existence is reliant on our parents or parental figures.

The desire for love and belonging is one of the six universal themes that have been used in storytelling for thousands of years. The six themes: 1.love and belonging 2.safety and security 3.freedom and spontaneity 4.power and responsibility 5.fun and playfulness 6.awareness and understanding

At Pixar, we would collect data by setting up audience previews, showing prerelease versions of our films so we could learn if we were effectively connecting with people. Do they know who the main character is? What the main character wants? What the theme of the story is? We listened and then made changes according to their comments and feedback, which helped us as filmmakers improve our story.

Life is more than just reaching a destination. Life is about the journey. While striving to make the best movies at Pixar, we had forgotten to enjoy the ride. It’s the difficulties, surprises, left turns, and time taken to slow down and look around that bring you closer to true meaning and the things that make life worthwhile. We had discovered the theme and emotional juice for Cars, along with rediscovering ourselves along the way.

Allowing yourself and characters in your stories to be vulnerable to an audience creates empathy and authenticity. When sharing with others what your company is about, or your role within the company, or the products or solutions you provide, don’t forget to share the obstacles you have faced along with the successes. When people feel connected to your humanity, they can really begin to root for you.

Next time you give a presentation, lead a board meeting, or deliver a pitch, use personal anecdotes and reflections drawn from your own experiences that show you are vulnerable. CEOs and leaders and salespeople of all kinds often forget that this is what makes a great leader and/or hero. It’s not only about strength or raw talent but also being human and authentic. It’s not perfection that creates likability and authenticity, but instead, vulnerability and persistence.

Let your audience discover the message on their own. “I want to give the audience a hint of a scene,” said Orson Welles. “No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion, and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”

As Frank Capra said, “I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.” The trick, if you can call it that, is having people discover the moral on their own. If you do it right it feels more like solving a puzzle than being told something, because each person arrives at the solution in his or her own unique way. You only provide the right clues.

The moral of a story is akin to a company’s mission statement. Instead of inflicting another boring mission statement on the world, choose one to three words along with visuals that represent what you want people to feel when they encounter your products or services.

Whether you are creating a ninety-minute film, with an act 1, 2, and 3, or a thirty-minute sales pitch, you need to have a clear beginning, middle, and end, or you’ll run the risk of boring, confusing, or frustrating your audience. The three-part story structure is also referred to as the setup, build, and payoff.

Once you get acclimated with the cycle of setup, build, and payoff, you can dive in deeper. In filmmaking, we break setup, build, and payoff down into six “story stages”: •Exposition •Inciting Incident •Progressive Complications •Crisis •Climax •Resolution

The exposition is the setup of your story. This is where you share the ordinary world by showing the Who, What, Why, and Where. •Who is the main character? •What do they want? •Why do they want it? •Where does the story take place?

In many stories, the crisis moment is motivated by a mantra. A mantra can be a saying, an image, a memory, or something that the heroes read, remember, or reflect on in the course of their journey. No matter how it is represented, the mantra compels the main character to reflect on what they’ve learned. Almost every movie has a mantra, whether stated or not, at this crisis stage of the story. In Star Wars the mantra is “Use the Force,” and in Ratatouille it is, “Anyone can cook.”

The incomplete story spine looks like this: Once upon a time . . . And every day . . . Until one day . . . And because of that . . . And because of that . . . And because of that . . . Until finally . . . And since that day . . .

Here’s how the story spine and the six stages of story structure correlate: Once upon a time . . . . . . . . Exposition And every day . . . . . . . . . . Exposition Until one day . . . . . . . . . . . Inciting Incident Because of that . . . . . . . . . Progressive Complications Because of that . . . . . . . . . Progressive Complications Because of that . . . . . . . . . Progressive Complications Until finally . . . . . . . . . . . . Crisis and Climax And since that day . . . . . . . Resolution

It’s sometimes hard to come up with the perfect story to illustrate the point you want to make, whether in an ad, a sales pitch, or a board meeting presentation, especially when you are under a deadline. One technique is to have a bunch of stories “on file” that you can draw from when you need one. When you have time and are relaxed, write down some important moments from your life using the story spine. Then group your stories into different categories according to themes, like coming of age, self-sacrifice, and overcoming the odds. When you want to enhance a pitch or a presentation, just make sure you choose a story that shares the same theme as your content.

Your personal stories are a great way to inspire and impact your listener while still delivering the important facts and figures.

No matter our origins, we all see ourselves as the main character of our own life. It’s an important part of our human psyche. Just as we share the same set of organs, instincts, impulses, conflicts, and fears, we also all see ourselves on a personal journey through the beginning, middle, and end of our lives. No matter what culture or time in history we’re born into, we have always cast ourselves as the heroes, in our own stories; our own lives.

From birth to death, our experiences in this life, in this mind and this body, are what make us unique. This is why the hero as a story vehicle resonates so deeply with us. We connect to the hero journey, because it is familiar, and in fact is a mirror and metaphor of our own journey, or the one that we would like to take.

In Greek, protagonist means “first fighter” (leading fighter, main fighter) involved in a struggle, or “one in agony.” When considered in this light, whether the protagonist is a hero or a scoundrel is irrelevant. In fact, the ancient Greeks venerated great warriors as heroes no matter which side they fought on. Heroes are the vessel that we use to tell a story. The hero’s struggles and movements, and their point of view, reflect the egocentric reality of our own lives because we only truly witness life from our own perspective.

Joseph Campbell, in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, defines a hero as “someone that has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”

To crank up the empathy dial to eleven, add that your hero is also an orphan.

One technique that screenwriters use to create likable heroes is setting up a “save the cat” moment at the very beginning of their story. “Saving the cat” is when you show a character performing an act of kindness for a lower status character.

A company or leader often uses this “save the cat” technique by demonstrating small acts of kindness, like donating time and money to environmental and social issues, which creates an authentic bond with their current customers and future customers.

The most beloved heroes and leaders in fiction, nonfiction, entertainment, and business are the ones who are vulnerable. They struggle, they fail, they prevail.

When leaders give up on their dreams and goals, the audience begins to dislike them. You must communicate to your audience that your hero will keep fighting for what he or she believes in, till the bitter end. As Walt Disney said, “The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.”

Heroes—be they fictional or real—need a supporting cast that helps the hero grow and confront challenges. Sometimes these characters provide advice, encouragement, or even physical objects that empower the hero to overcome obstacles and acquire their goal. At other times, characters become obstacles, keeping the hero from reaching the goal.