Habits for Success: Narrative Driven Communication

Taking the time to formulate a narrative when communicating is a Habit that forms the foundation for communication.

Try not to close the page in frustration when reading the below:

Star War: A New Hope was a cool movie. The surrogate father figure had a fight with the baddie. There is a lovable rogue. Hero dude picked up some friends. They ultimately got away, but baddie dude is like the hero’s real father. Oh, and the comic relief is annoying but plays a role to create plot moving serendipity. Dude kissed his sister though, not cool. Oh, and there’s magic, but they don’t call it that. It’s like the Mass Effect plot combined with Lawrence of Arabia.

That made no sense, what so ever.

Assertion: Communication is not just an unordered list of things, it’s the transmission of an idea, but ideas are complex. When we communicate, we want to start from a place where the suspension of disbelief is small and layer a sequence of events that could plausibly follow. This is the narrative structure. Piecing together a coherent thesis from an anthology may be entertaining (like in Momento), but not if you want to crisply communicate a thesis. Unfortunately, in the “bidness” world, that’s exactly what we do with random statements and reports; we leave the exercise of stitching the narrative to the audience.

Thus: Get into the habit of forming a narrative structure even for the smallest pieces of information. Give the audience a framework to put what you just exposed into a narrative. Bonus points for front-loading the conclusion.