Robert McKee and Emotional Business Storytelling

| 29-07-2008 | Blog | Written by Matthew Bennett

You like stories because you live a story – or a series of them; and so do your clients, employees and business partners which means the better you can tell convincing stories, the more you’ll be able to sell your business.

Can you tell emotional stories? (malik williams, Flickr)

Life is dramatic and then you die. In between, according to McKee, the basic elements of your life’s stories seem to go something like this:

You have a protagonist who exists and has a certain characterization; your protagonist lives some kind of normal existence but …
… he has a fundamental, unfulfilled desire and then …
… an inciting incident occurs! Something happens that provokes your protagonist and makes him want to change;
If only life were so easy! There must follow an accumulation of antagonists, opposing forces and pressure as the harsh reality of life gets in the way of your protagonist’s dreams and desire to change;
Your protagonist struggles to overcome these opposing forces and you see his character develop. You discover some interesting things about your main man as his character contradicts his original characterization and you begin to see who he really is, until ….
… you reach the climax, the final scene, which puts your man to his ultimate test and leads to …
… your protagonist’s victory or failure: he overcomes or succumbs to the opposing forces, adapts or not to harsh reality, restores balance with fulfilled desire;

Oh, and the story must be believable otherwise you’re wasting your time.

Your Audiences Are Your Characters

You have lots of audiences for your company’s stories and what’s more they could all be characters in your story because they are all part of it:

your boss (unless you are the boss)
business partners
employees + employees families
shareholders
clients + potential new clients
suppliers
potential new clients
the bank manager
the tax inspector (best not tell too many stories here!)
a journalist or a blogger who rings you up for an interview…
etc…

How many of those people struggle all day, every day to try and achieve their dreams and improve their lives?

Emotional Business Storytelling Technique

McKee’s first piece of advice, of course, is to ditch the a-z Powerpoint slides full of numbers and logical rhetoric and start thinking about the emotional, easier to understand human stories that make up your company.

Research and data are vital to a good business tale but include the information within the dramatisation of the story.

Aristotle would tell you to mix pathos (emotion) with logos (logical arguments) and I imagine if you were to mix in some ethos (being seen as an authority), you would be on to an even bigger winner.

McKee believes that if you do it right, the actual presentation is less important than your strong, well-constructed story.

It is crucial to not include only positive things in your story because everybody knows that’s not how life – or business – happens, so by including negative events in your story, you’ll win points with your listener for honesty.

The negative, antagonistic moments are the most important parts of the story because they help a character – through their reactions to the bad times – define themselves.

Global Business Storytelling

Hollywood is renowned for action-packed, multi-million dollar blockbuster hits. It is also known around the world for producing ‘typical American rubbish’, especially amongst European film lovers, so what about successful global stories?

Spain’s El País newspaper wrote about a conference McKee gave in the Spanish city of Málaga and his views on international storytelling are revealed as he talks about Spanish movie mogul Pedro Almodóvar, poet Federico García Lorca and “the two conditions that any story must fulfill to be a hit anywhere in the world.”

According to McKee, a global story must: