Storytelling is typically thought of as an art form within the world of entertainment, with the goal of getting and keeping the audience’s attention.
Outside Hollywood, in the business world, attention isn’t enough. You need to motivate other people to make decisions and do things.
Storytelling for business is better understood as a set of principles and techniques to empathize, influence, and persuade. It’s how you bring other people on board with your ideas and get things done.
The default assumption is that storytelling for business derives from storytelling for entertainment. That entertainment storytelling is the foundation, the underlying substrate for advertising, marketing, selling, PR, entrepreneurship, leadership communication, etc. This is why a central aspect of successful business communication is thought to be getting and keeping the audience’s attention.
And yet….
If you could influence and persuade someone without needing their attention at all, would that be a good outcome?
In business, that would be a terrific outcome. Skip the meetings, skip the presentations, still get the results you want. Huge success.
In entertainment, it would fail because attention is the point. The audience pays to have their attention grabbed and held.
Let’s consider storytelling as a foundational concept from which BOTH entertainment and business storytelling derive. Then, within these categories, let’s look at how storytelling expertise typically evolves inside silos.
For example, the worlds of film and TV are very different, not just in how they manifest, but in how they are created.
Broadly speaking, the agents who represent film writers specialize in film deals. They do deals with film producers, film studios, and film distributors. The agents who work with TV writers specialize in packaging TV deals and selling projects to TV networks.
Then, there’s specificity within genre. With rare exception, the comedy screenwriters are different than the drama screenwriters. Comedy writers work with directors, producers, and actors who specialize in comedy. Same for drama, horror, action, romantic comedy, etc.
So, within Hollywood, the silos are a function of medium + genre, i.e., the people who write comedy for TV tend to know and work with the people who represent, direct, produce, and distribute comedy for TV.
The reason things are specialized is because people in entertainment want to work with experts, just like people in the business world.
In the business world, silos are a function of activity + context.
Let’s take selling as an example of an activity. The people who sell to individuals (Business to Customer, or B-C), are typically different than the people who sell to other businesses (Business to Business, or B-B), who are different than the people who sell massive projects to enterprise or to governments.
Of course, there are many more activities and contexts, a few more mediums, and a ton of genres and subgenres. The point is that most people develop expertise ONLY in their niche.
Instead:
- Improve your storytelling skills at a foundational level.
- Develop abilities in storytelling for business or entertainment.
- AND focus on your niche: activity + context, or genre + medium.
To improve storytelling at the foundational level, we need a definition of story to understand when we are telling a story, and when we are not.