To celebrate National Storytelling Week, we caught up with Kent Business School alum Matthew Woodget, Founder and CEO of GoNarrative. and expert in storytelling for business.
Storytelling is the structure the human brain uses to retain, recall and share information and we’ve used it since the Stone Age. Sharing stories is part of everyday life – not least of all in business. It’s the way we present the ethics and goals and build a brand, using a narrative. In the era of social media, a businesses’ story has never been more accessible or important.
Matthew Woodget is a Kent Business School alum who developed a passion and insight into the art of storytelling. Ten years ago, he established a business, Go Narrative.
“I studied Business Administration at Kent and ended up working in Marketing at tech companies. I’ve always loved telling and writing stories – I am Dyslexic and have ADHD, so it hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve written sci-fi novels and am obsessed with movies and the stories within them.”
It was when Matthew was appointed Chief Storyteller for Microsoft Dynamics that he started to delve into it as an art form and realised businesses were mostly doing it wrong.
‘Hero’s story’
“Research led me to Hollywood – the classic hero’s story for instance – so many attempted to use this structure to promote a narrative and failed. Why? Most businesspeople don’t have the time to become an expert in crafting entertainment stories. Storytelling in business is different, you’re trying to change people’s minds. Businesspeople need a different set of tools.”
That’s why Matthew created Storytelling for Action™ – a set of frameworks to enable businesses to easily build a narrative to impact their current and future customers. His 3D Story™ Frameworks sets out three simple areas to formulate an interesting and engaging story for potential customers – desire, difficulty, and denouement, the Story MeET™ Method pads that concept out with suitable morals, essential emotions wrapped up in the business and the truths held by a business.
“You use these frameworks to extract ideas, do the research and due diligence and layer it in,” he explains. “Your stories get nuanced and detailed – and unique.”
More recently, he developed a new framework for big ideas – brands and narratives that shape a business or organisation as a whole. It is called TRIPS Storytelling™ Methodology – which stands for Transformation, Reasons to believe, Innovation, Problems and Stories.
“This is the story for business ‘why are we doing this?’, the framework builds strategic narratives for an entire brand’s meaning. What is their big story, why did they get into this in the first place?” he explains.
Matthew is now on a mission to help every businessperson on the planet to become a good storyteller.
“If you get good at telling small stories, the rest will fall into place,” he says. “You’ll use them everywhere – the start of a presentation or on a meeting with a boss. The big stories, the narratives will follow suit.”
Matthew’s Top Tips for Successful Storytelling in Business
- Don’t look to Hollywood and the hero’s journey, it doesn’t work for business!
- Make sure every story is about change and transformation, no matter how big or small
- Stories must involve an element of conflict and how you as a business help navigate it and resolve it
- You have to do the work – think of a story early on and apply it to even a small presentation or blog post
- There is never just one story. Think of a movie, it is three or four stories, often more, woven into one. It’s the same in business. That’s your strategic narrative.
National Storytelling Week runs from 29th January to 5 February 2022. Find out more here.