The grab bag returns with a trio of takes.
Dénouement in Business Storytelling
Our workshop on storytelling techniques discusses dénouement, the French word that means to undo or untie the knot.
For business storytelling, it’s the time to bring clarity and resolution to the communications at hand.
Even though a business story doesn’t always technically end, you still need to find some way to shape the happy ending.
The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives
Not exactly the most catchy title, but I’m always interested in the science behind storytelling so I forked out the $11.95 to access the paper at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
I so wanted to mine fodder for my why-storytelling-works file, a handy resource in helping clients who often come from an engineering orientation to buy into the concept.
No such a luck.
Maybe the compelling science is there. I just couldn’t work my way through a narrative denser than stale cheesecake.
To net it out, persuasive storytelling works when the reader:
- Pictures the events
- Feels some type of involvement or connection with the events
- Identifies with one of the characters
- Considers how the narrative could have turned out differently
- Etc.
Which we already knew.
Irony in Irony
The Economist penned a story earlier in the month, “The Boredom of Boozeless Business” lamenting the end of the three-martini lunch and calling out Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a proof point:
Even famously booze-fuelled occupations such as journalism have felt the puritanical wind: hacks at Bloomberg Businessweek can be disciplined for so much as sipping a spritzer.
Apparently, the “offended” party contacted The Economist because the following correction appears in the August 18 issue.
I did get a kick out of The Economist going with fourth-trade syntax in the apology.
This is not true. Sorry. We must have been drunk on the job.
If one can apologize and mock at the same time, this is how it’s done.