The words story and narrative are often confused with each other.

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Here’s how you can make sense of them both. Let’s start with the trickier word: story

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‘Story‘ is a tough word to pin down:

– You heard stories from your grandmother

– A moviemaker tells stories on the big screen

– A newsreader will announce the day’s top ‘stories’

– A friend may tell you an hilarious story of how she almost failed her driving test

– And when you present a data-heavy slide, your boss may ask you – “So, what’s the story here?”

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Will the real ‘story’ stand up please?

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Ok, first things first – in this post, I’m definitely not going to attempt to parse through all these interpretations and make sense of them (topic for another post!).

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But one way to simplify things is to make a two way split between fiction and non-fiction. At the workplace, we are not dealing with fiction. We are telling fact-based stories.

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In this context, we can turn to one clear definition of a ‘business story’, articulated by Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk of the story-coaching firm, ‘Anecdote‘.

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As per the Anecdote’s ‘story spotting framework’, a business story has:

– A time and place marker

– A sequence of events

– Humans doing and/or saying something

– A surprising/unanticipated occurrence

– A business point

Alright, so we have one (admittedly narrow) definition of a story.​

What is a narrative then?​

A narrative is the entire sequence of messages that you craft to get your point across to the audience.

A narrative can have stories (and statements and analogies and numbers and quotes…) as a part of it. The narrative is the pizza; the stories are the mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes on top.

Great, you say. Can you give me an example that illustrates this, you ask.​

You are in luck.​

In my recent podcast episode with J Ramanand, we discussed an article he wrote – about how to cope with remote work (this was written when all of us were grappling with managing remote teams during the pandemic).​

This post is a lovely case-study of a simple, clear narrative studded with engaging real-life stories.​

The post is titled: ‘New to Managing A Remote Team? Three Lessons From Radar, Space, And A Blind Professor To Navigate These Times‘

​Read the post. It is short, clear and engaging.​

The narrative uses three stories:

– The story of the invention of radar in Britain

– The story of how NASA works with astronauts remotely

– The inspiring story of Prof Hull, and how he coped with his debilitating loss of sight in his 40s​

Each story has several nuanced lessons and finally, Ramanand distils three lessons from them:
I love how the stories were woven into the narrative.

A special mention for the ‘cold open’ – Ramanand starts with a war story to grab our attention from the get go!

Here are some of the storytelling techniques I spotted in Ramanand’s thought-provoking post:​

#SOTD 17