The value of telling stories

Joseph Bradfi eld, PR and Communications Advisor at Sussex Innovation, explains why some of our most respected business leaders are often intuitive storytellers, and how you can learn to become one too

The nature of a founder’s role involves being a person of many talents – even when they have a crack leadership team around them, it’s their job to ensure that all those moving parts are pulling in the same direction. Not only do they need to grasp the fi ner points of their company’s finances and operations, they’re also its public face.

You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t communicate it properly, it’s very rare that it will get off the ground. As a fi gurehead for the business, you need to be the one doing the convincing – enabling your team to share one vision, and helping everyone from customers to partners and infl uencers understand why it deserves to be a reality.

Human beings are social animals, we are hardwired to share stories. A well-structured narrative can hold our attention, shape our opinion, and stick long in our memory. Social, political and religious movements throughout the ages have succeeded or failed because of this factor; a compelling foundational story and people who are adept at telling it. Successful businesses are no different, and in today’s attention-driven economy, the value of a powerful and incisive story has never been more apparent.

At Sussex Innovation, one of the foundational pieces of work we do for growing businesses involves understanding the story they have to tell. It’s a critical factor in informing everything else that makes a strong business – its culture, values, raison d’etrê.

Our starting point for a strong foundational story is the ‘Golden Circle’, a concept developed by the author Simon Sinek in his book Find Your Why. The most important takeaway from Sinek’s work is that far too many businesses frame their offering in purely functional, rather than emotive terms; “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

The golden circle is a simple tool for shifting your language from ‘what’ to ‘why’. Every organisation on the planet knows what they do, the products and services that they package up and sell to their customers.

Some of these organisations also communicate how they do it. These are the strengths that make them special and set them apart from the competition, often described as their ‘unique selling point’ or ‘competitive advantage’.

Very few organisations express, or even truly know why they do what they do. ‘Why’ isn’t about making money, that’s just the result. Why is a purpose, cause or belief that underpins the whole reason your business exists – a problem it sets out to solve, or a world view it seeks to challenge. By starting with ‘why’ – at the centre of the golden circle – and building out, you can establish which of your strengths are most valuable to maintain, and which of your products are most critical to your success.

Just as a good screenplay or novel is built around character motivation, a business narrative that starts with ‘why’ is always going to be more compelling. There are a few other narrative tricks that you can use to help engage people in your story and build on this strong start:

Every journey begins with a call to adventure, the ‘lightbulb moment’ that sets our hero off on their path. Think about the time you first began to understand your ‘why’ – what led you to notice the problem that your business addresses?

Stories thrive on conflict. Without conflict there’s no momentum, the story never goes anywhere. One big error that many entrepreneurs make, whether they’re pitching for investment or being interviewed in the media, is to never acknowledge their mistakes or failures. When we recognise that things sometimes don’t go as planned, how we’ve learned and grown as a result of our failures, it gives our story real weight and emotional stakes. It makes the success at the end of the journey hit home harder.

The ultimate source of conflict is a clear antagonist. Who or what stands in your way? Is it the bigger business in your sector that you’re trying to knock off their perch? Or is there a person, organisation or system that embodies the problem you’re setting out to solve? Be bold about calling out the ‘big bad’ and explaining what sets you apart in opposition to them.

This programme is part of the national Peer Networks initiative, overseen by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The scheme is managed in East Sussex by the South East Local Enterprise Partnership and East Sussex Growth Hub, and has received funding from East Sussex County Council.