Katie Flamman 00:00:00:

Hello and welcome to storytelling for Business, the podcast that helps you connect with your customers by telling stories they want to hear. I'm Katie Flamman. I'm a voiceover artist specialising in business storytelling. You know that by now, but you might not know that I grew up with the arts. Literature was my passion at school, where I did A level English, German and Latin in and at university I went to Cambridge, where I studied English Literature and threw myself into acting in plays from Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas. And nowadays, although I do loads of corporate voiceover work, my clients aren't just businessy. I often do arty projects like narrating museum guides and documentaries. So imagine my excitement when I came across a business storytelling coach who combines business with lessons from the arts.

In fact, he's based his whole methodology on classical literature.

Today's guest is known as the Story Doctor. He's a writer, screenwriter and poet. He studied language, literature and creative writing at University College Dublin and St. John's College, Oxford. But Dr. James McCabe is more than a creative literary mastermind, and he's more than a writer and academic. He's got 25 years of global business experience, too. James is convinced that classical literature holds lucrative lessons for the corporate world, and he's got happy clients who agree.

He's worked with businesses from tech startups to international enterprises, and I am fascinated to find out more. Dr. James McCabe, welcome to the podcast.

James McCabe 00:01:45:

Thank you Katie. I'd like to invite you to be my new sales manager.

Katie Flamman 00:01:51:

I think a lot of people are talking about business storytelling at the moment, but I think you're the only person talking about it in the context of Shakespeare and Virgil. And I really want to start by finding out what classical literature's got to do with modern business.

James McCabe 00:02:07:

You're the only person in the world that actually knows what I do, Katie, because there are hundreds and thousands of business storytellers, but they are, in fact, almost always deploying rhetorical persuasion as their toolkit. So basically what they're dealing with is persuasive, but it's not dramatic. So what I do is always take the techniques and the skills and the insights and the lessons from the arts. Why? Because in the arts, when you don't sell a book and you don't sell a ticket to a play or a film, and there's no bums on seats, you starve to death. There's no other intellectual property. So all of the novelists, the playwrights, the screenwriters, the poets are the professionals, and none of the management consultants and the strategists. And the developers are the professionals when it comes to human attention, earning human attention, retaining human attention, and rewarding human attention. The professionals are the storytellers, and that's why I always and only go to them for my lessons and bring them back into the business world.

Katie Flamman 00:03:24:

So rhetoric is what too many businesses are doing, giving information, giving out lists, or trying to persuade somebody to do something without having a dramatic or emotional connection. Is that what the mistake is that everybody's making?

James McCabe 00:03:42:

I wouldn't class it as a mistake. And I'm not suggesting for a moment that dramatic narrative or storytelling is superior to rhetoric. It's simply if you go back in time, certainly in the western world, rhetoric and drama grow up together, and they're parallel languages. So rhetoric is the language of the public forum of the Agora in ancient Greece, where you did business, and drama is the language of the theatre, what the Greeks called the theatron, which means the place of seeing. So these two different communication modes, or languages, have two different purposes. Now, rhetoric is excellent and has a brilliant history. And a classic example of a very successful rhetor or public speaker is Winston Churchill, who was an excellent public speaker, but he was not a storyteller, he was not a dramatist, he was a persuader. He was not an involver.

In fact, he couldn't involve people, which is why he lost the election in 1945. It's a big mystery why one of the world winning leaders was booted out as soon as the war was over. Everyone always asked that question, and that's because we agreed with Churchill, but we didn't particularly love him. So he was very good at rhetoric. And the reason that people should think about storytelling today instead of rhetoric is because for rhetoric to take effect, you need a captive audience. And ever since Apple released the iPhone in 2005, or whenever they did, there is no captive audience around the world for anything. So it's just very difficult to exercise and practice rhetoric. So I'm not suggesting for a moment that storytelling or drama is everything and rhetoric is nothing.

I'm just saying there are two situations. You have a captive audience or you don't, and when you don't, you should start with storytelling.

Katie Flamman 00:05:43:

I've read something that you've written about how in today's world, nobody is captive because we're all constantly distracted. We're all flicking through the channels or scrolling to the next thing or looking at the next meme, whatever it is, and you make the comparison between our personal lives, where we go home and flick through the channels and our business lives where we expect everybody to pay attention and sit up and listen to what we say. And there's a real disconnect there, isn't there?

James McCabe 00:06:14:

Yeah, there is, because generally, in the world of free time and our private life, we just want to be entertained. And that's what we expect. And we suddenly switch off this button when we're in public life or in business. And we assume that it's everyone else's job to read our email or to remember what we said. And it's not everyone else's job to do that. It's our job to make sure that they want to read our email and want to remember what we say. And I suppose the original meaning of the latin word entertainment is simply to hold between. And I think that that's a fascinating meaning because it's the idea of sustaining attention between two moments of time or between two people.

And so entertainment is the business that we're all in, although some of us don't like the word because we regard it as being superficial.

Katie Flamman 00:07:14:

So how do businesses entertain their audiences when the audience isn't captive?

James McCabe 00:07:20:

Essentially, the way you do this is to understand the parallel sequence of a story, a dramatic narrative, and that in a rhetorical argument, we generally move from establishing credibility to presenting a logical argument, to finally delivering evidence or proof. And this sequence is in Greek, ethos, logos, pathos. And it's a kind of a sequence. Some people believe that you can just pick any one of those or it can be in any sequence. But that idea of having expertise, presenting a logical proposition and proving your point. So that's authority, logic, proof, and that sequences the way the business world does it. It's effective if the audience is there. If the audience is not there, or they've clicked on, or they scroll past you or they just switched off, then it's not going to work because you never get to the proof point, okay? They don't give you enough space, enough time in order to absorb everything.

So what you do is, in drama, you substitute expertise for empathy. You substitute logic with suspense, and you substitute proof with surprise. And so the new sequence in drama or story thinking is empathy, suspense, surprise. And those three words in that sequence are the questions you must ask yourself. Okay, so what is my audience feeling? That's the big question. It's not, what do I want them to know? The question is, what is this audience feeling now? Okay? That's the empathy. What is curious or interesting about this subject? That is the suspense. And then the surprise is, how can I reveal something that's generally unknown or hidden.

Okay, so how can I reward the attention of my audience? By revealing something that lingers in their memory. So we think that it's an attention economy, but actually it's not. Attention is just the necessary first step. It's really a memory economy. So whoever gets remembered gets patronised and purchased and bought. Okay. So we have to ensure that we win people's attention, sustain their attention, and reward their attention by lasting in their memory.

Katie Flamman 00:09:56:

I love that memory economy. That's absolutely brilliant. And I guess as well as they might get rewarded, you, the storyteller, might get rewarded by being remembered. Presumably you also want that audience to remember your story and tell it to somebody else.

James McCabe 00:10:15:

If we look at Homer and the Iliad, what a lot of people don't understand is that there were dozens of epics about the Trojan war, but we only remember Homer. And you have to ask, why? Why is that? Why was everyone else forgotten? And he was remembered, and it's actually because of how he designed his story. And if you look at the four key features of the Iliad, these are still the four key skills. Do you know what they are, Katie?

Katie Flamman 00:10:45:

No. Go on, help me out here. My Latin was a long time ago. MyEnglish degree was also a long time ago.

James McCabe 00:10:54:

Number one is limitation. Don't tell everything. Omit and select. So the Trojan war lasts ten years, and Homer concentrates on 51 days within a ten year period. So the first way in which he ensured that we would remember him is that he concentrated our mind, okay? He had three and a half thousand days to describe or dramatise, and he ignored almost everything. So he focused on 51 days. That's step number one, focus. Okay? Step number two is timing. Okay? They weren't any 51 days. It wasn't the 51 days at the beginning of the Trojan war or 51 days at the end of the Trojan war. He located the story of the Iliad just before the fall of Troy and the Trojan horse episode. There was no Trojan horse in the Iliad. So in other words, the moment before change, before any significant change, is the moment to focus on as a storyteller. Not the change, not the aftermath, not the preparation, but the exact moment or point of decision is where you should focus your dramatic attention. That's the second point. The third point is that it's called the Iliad because Troy was called Ilium.

Okay, so it's the story of Troy, but actually it's not. It's the story of one man called Achilles and how unhappy he is when his quote, unquote, boss Agamemnon steals his war booty, Brysius, and he goes into his tent to sulk. So the Iliad concentrates on one human being and their emotional temperature. Okay, so the third point is individual emotions, single people's feelings, is where stories happen. The fourth point is the one that made Homer timeless, because all stories revolve around choice under pressure. I have two personal definitions of story. The first one is that story is expectation followed by surprise. You must develop expectation in the audience, and you must always surprise the audience.

Katie Flamman 00:13:20:

So we got limitation. We've got focus, focusing on the one the moment before.

James McCabe 00:13:25:

Exactly the point just prior to decision making. Okay, the third point is personal emotions, single people's feelings translated into hormones. And the fourth point is stories are always about choices under pressure. But in the Iliad, in fact, everything is preordained. And Homer removed the element of human choice because we all know when we start the book or the poem that Achilles has chosen to die young, gloriously. So, in other words, Homer completely removes the element of choice from the equation, which is fascinating. Why? Because we're able to focus on the actual nature of that choice. So when a doctor tells you you've got two months or two weeks to live, suddenly you understand what being alive is all about.

Katie Flamman 00:14:25:

So you mentioned hormones back then a minute ago. Can you just talk about that a little bit more?

James McCabe 00:14:31:

There are a lot of current experiments in the area of neuroscience, and they're basically all simply proving Aristotle's point. Aristotle wrote the poetics over 2000 years ago, and he talked about the core elements of poetic storytelling. And this is the kind of ground zero book, at least in the western world, the poetics of Aristotle and in modern neuroscience, and also in the you know, let's say, study of what happens biologically, we know that there is a sequence. So just as you have empathy, suspense, surprise, that's actually a biological sequence. It's not just a set of ideas or words. So oxytocin, cortisol, and dopamine are three classic hormones which are associated with being involved in dramatic narrative. Oxytocin is the bonding agent. So it's when you're glued to another person and you start identifying with people.

Oxytocin is what explodes on a football pitch when somebody scores a goal, and they all jump around each other like chimpanzees because their bodies are bursting with oxytocin. There's just an explosion of hormones inside. Cortisol, of course, is a kind of edge of your seat hormone. You're curious, but also in a slightly stressful or nervous way. Okay, you want to know what happens next? So there's a sort of a cortisol element there. And then, of course, dopamine is kind of like the payoff and the reward, which is not always happy, but it's associated with sorting things out and finding things in closure and a kind of a justice thing. So those hormones are, they're basically what is watching the television.

We're not watching the television. Our hormones are watching the television. We don't decide to zap the channel. Our hormones get pissed off and bored and fed up, and they zap the channel. So we're just a hormone platform. That's all we are. And it's arrogant to think that our brains are in control or we're making these decisions ourselves.

Katie Flamman 00:16:42:

I love that it's our hormones that are in control. So, I want to ask you about something I read that you were talking about. Stories don't have to be an epic poem. For instance, you talked about the six word story, and I'd never heard that before, and I thought it was so powerful. So what is the six word story? And how can a six word story possibly be powerful and trigger all those hormones that you just talked about?

James McCabe 00:16:18:

Well, that classic example is perhaps an apocryphal anecdote associated with Ernest Hemingway. Whether he did or didn't say it, in fact, we don't know. But Hemingway was a very succinct, spartan stylist, and the six word story was this so-called contest that he had with his drinking buddies as to who could come up with the shortest single story. And Ernest Hemingway's offering, according to this story or anecdote,was "for sale, baby shoes, never worn." So here we have a single scenario or moment in time. We have the empathy of baby shoes, and then we have the cortisol or the suspense or the poignancy of never worn, and we want to know why they were never worn. So the story doesn't deliver answers.

The story opens the door into multiple questions. And, in fact, the word story, in its origin, originally in Greek, means learning by asking questions. And that's exactly the experience that the audience wants to do. They want to ask the questions. They want to come up with the answers. They don't want to be taught by us as experts or teachers. So teaching by example is rhetoric. So the rhetor stands up and models the behaviour that they want the audience to fulfil.

Okay, so this is. We'll fight them on the beaches. This is Winston Churchill. Okay, so he's modelling the bulldog spirit that he wants everyone else to start exercising. So the dramatist or the poet is completely different. They don't model anything. So this is why we know nothing about Homer or Shakespeare. They don't have Persona.

They're more like chameleons. And what they do is they invent characters like Hamlet or Achilles that everyone starts identifying with. Okay? So the feeling is much more communal, and it's also much more interpretive. And the audience has the ability to create the meaning. And that's why audiences love that, because it's agency. They have more agency. They can grow old. They can see the play again, they can watch the film again and see different things each time in the story.

Katie Flamman 00:19:44:

Love that. So, okay, we've got the recipes, we've got the techniques. What happens now? How can businesses look to all of this in a world that is changing so rapidly? There's artificial intelligence. There's many, many platforms. There's so many ways that we can reach out to an audience. How can you take these techniques into the future?

James McCabe 00:20:15:

Well, if there's any pragmatic method, it's in the single law or rule or principle. Do not bore. Okay, so stop boring people and stop reciting or repeating the cliches. So if I were advising a company which was redesigning its future around artificial intelligence, I would start by helping them challenge the idea of artificial intelligence, which, as I'm trying to tell people, is one of the world's great misnomers, because, in fact, it's not intelligence. The correct name is artificial knowledge. There is a difference between knowledge and intelligence, and the real meaning of intelligence is to know what's missing in a body of knowledge. A machine can never know what's missing because you have to tell it what's missing. Only a human being can have the intelligence to read between the lines.

You know, at the moment, they're trying to make chat GTP more, what's the word? Relational. So it understands the question, or more, the prompt, or more. But in this situation, each time ChatGTP has to ask how you would like to be related to, because it doesn't actually have intelligence. It has knowledge, but it doesn't have intelligence, so it can't intuit anything. So what I would try and say to a company which is developing a strategy based around artificial intelligence is, number one, be original. Number two, challenge cliches and misnomers. And number three is develop a treatment or a way of handling that megatrend, which is utterly unique, totally unique, which is not like anyone else. So your own wordings, your own ideas dramatised and emotionalised in your own way.

And the best example of a company that has really exercised dramatic storytelling in the past like this is Apple. Because Apple was almost bankrupt in the mid 1990s, and they're in a terrible business, which is grey boxes selling grey boxes. There's no differentiation in these, just grey boxes. So Apple were able to invent a new emotion and call it Apple dumb. Okay, so there's kind of an Appley feeling, and you love paying over the odds for their basically similar material. Why? Because it makes you feel special and individual. And they heroized the customer, and the customers responded. So Apple deployed, ever since they had the Think Different campaign in the late 90s, they deployed heroic storytelling with tremendous impact and effect, and they're still benefiting from it. Although that's not to say that they're perfect as storytellers today, making the audience.

Katie Flamman 00:23:25:

Feel special and feel a part of it, that's the trick, isn't it? Okay, James, one more question for you. I usually ask my guests this at the end of the episode. We've talked about the future for storytelling, and we've talked about the future for business. What about the future for you? What does your story look like for the next five years?

James McCabe 00:23:44:

Let's say there must be something lucky about your podcast, Katie, because every time I talk to you, there's a rainbow outside the window, and there's another rainbow just after appearing. So your podcast must be a very lucky series. I never think about my future and have never had a strategy, and I suppose or hope that I will be blessed with inspirations and whatever the muse permits. So I'm a great believer in the nine muses, and I try to court as many of them as I can at the same time and to get as many fresh ideas. And I'm fascinated by different industries and different media and different art forms. So hopefully I'll have a life where I'm rocking into my 90s, never retiring and being creative.

Katie Flamman 00:24:33:

What an answer. That's brilliant. I'd just like to say you are not 85 at the moment, so you're not quite going into your 90s just yet.

James McCabe 00:24:43:

I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it, Katie. I'm feeling it.

Katie Flamman 00:24:46:

I think I've taken up quite enough of your time, so I'm going to say thank you so much for sharing so much fascinating stuff with us. Dr. James McCabe, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Well, what did you think of that? Shakespeare, Churchill, Homer, Hemingway, ChatGPT, oxytocin, cortisol, dopamine and Apple. That was a lot, but wasn't it good? Brace yourself. Here are my storytelling takeaways. One, everyone's attention span is so short nowadays that we all need to be entertainers to get our message across. Two, and we can learn techniques from classical storytellers like Homer and Shakespeare, which are still incredibly useful today. Three, most businesses communicate using rhetoric, the art of persuasion. But rhetoric only works when there's no other noise or no one else is speaking.

When you have a captive audience. We all know nowadays that keeping your audience's attention is really difficult. James's answer is to use dramatic techniques instead of rhetorical ones. Four, so what does that mean? Tell a memorable story. You can win their attention using empathy, sustain it using suspense, and reward their attention with a surprise they'll remember. Five, Homer's Iliad is the model of a great story because of four things that you can easily copy. Focus on one event, not everything.

Start just before something changes. Make it about one person and have them make a choice under pressure. So there you go. Be more Iliad.

You heard it here first.

If you want to reach out to the Story Doctor James McCabe his contact details are in the show notes.

Next time, the story's hidden in your numbers.

Michael Humphrey 00:26:58:

Sometimes I sit in front of people and they're like, this is eye opening. Why haven't you ever done this? I think, how have you not done this?

Katie Flamman 00:27:06:

From digital marketing to e-commerce, digital expert Michael Humphrey digs deep into data stories. So to find out how your ones and zeros can equal digital storytelling success, head over to episode 18. Now. Do me a favour. If you're enjoying the series, please leave a review and tell all your friends. I'm Katie Flamman and this is storytelling for business. Until next time, goodbye.