Story Square
The Story Square: Simplify your message and tell a better story
If you’ve ever struggled to tell your story or quickly explain what your company does in a way that anyone can understand, keep reading.
I wrote this for you.
For more than a decade I’ve worked with some of the largest companies in the world as well as startups you’ve never heard of to simplify their message and find creative ways to explain complicated ideas.
On the surface it looks like we’re just creating a video, or building a website, or designing a presentation, or producing an animation.
But behind all of that creative work is the real work: Simplifying the message.
Of all the things we could say, what are the things we should say?
Every company I’ve ever worked with has had this same struggle. Their story isn’t clear. Their message isn’t simple and repeatable. They have a hard time explaining what they do, why they matter, or how they are different in a way that everyone can understand.
As it turns out, I’m pretty good at helping people get the clarity and simplicity they’re looking for. Over time I noticed that I kept asking the same questions, searching for the same answers, and constructing things based on a similar pattern.
You’d think that something so formulaic would be met with yawns and eye-rolls, but time and again the response has been…different.
“How did you do that???”
“We’ve been wrestling with this for years, and have never gotten it so simple.”
“My family finally understands what I do for a living.”
Apparently, figuring out what to say is a lot easier than we think it is.
You just have to know what you’re looking for.
That’s why I created the Story Square Framework. It takes my years of experience across all sorts of industries and packages it in a way that you can use today to quickly explain anything to anyone.
The Story Square Framework
As you might guess from the name, this framework is inspired by some of the timeless principles that make stories work. And while the Story Square won’t turn you into Aaron Sorkin or Stephen King, it does follow the basic rules of narrative storytelling that scratch the human mind in all the right places.
The mind of the person you’re talking to is listening for 4 things. When the mind hears them it understands. If any one of them is missing, the mind is confused.
Desire - People are listening to hear you talk about something they want.
Obstacles - things standing in their way of getting the thing(s) they want.
Solution - the answer to those pesky obstacles that they couldn’t overcome on their own.
Resolution - how awesome life will be once they’ve taken action.
If any of this sounds familiar it’s because it’s the most basic structure of about every story you’ve ever heard. There’s someone who wants something. They encounter all sorts of obstacles. They discover a solution. They live happily ever after.
When you arrange those four things in a 2x2 and progress through them clockwise what you wind up with is the hero’s journey in its most irreducible form. And if you need to quickly explain something to someone it’s a roadmap to the human mind.
Here’s why…
This 2x2 reveals four core psychological drivers that correspond to the four sides of the square. These psychological drivers are the byproduct of the pairing up of the four cornerstones of Desire, Obstacle, Solution, and Resolution.
When articulated well:
Desire + Obstacle creates Tension.
Obstacle + Solution unlocks Symmetry.
Solution + Resolution reveals Novelty.
Resolution + Desire highlights Transformation.
Put it all together and you have a model I call the Story Square Framework. Remember earlier when I said, deciding what to say is a lot easier than we think it is. You just have to know what you’re looking for? This is what you’re looking for:
Desire
Obstacle
Solution
Resolution
Tension
Symmetry
Novelty
Transformation
If all of this is starting to sound too theoretical or academic, sit tight. I'm going to dive deeper into each of the core elements of the Story Square. But as I do I want to show you an example. See, while creating things like videos, websites, presentations, etc are about 50% of the work I do with my clients, the other half is messaging strategy.
What does that mean?
It means I work 1:1 with companies to go through the process of filling in the blanks in the Story Square to create a comprehensive messaging guide. This guide ensures that everyone is on the same page and putting a consistent message out into the world. Sales, marketing, product, support, C-Suite, everyone is saying the same thing over and over and over again. That's how you win.
What gets repeated gets rewarded.
Recently, I took one of my clients, Latchel, through the messaging strategy process and they’ve graciously agreed to share the work with the world so you can see what it looks like to simplify your story using the Story Square.
(Working mostly with Fortune 500 clients as I do is a mixed blessing. They tend to be a bit more reluctant to pull back the curtain. Special thanks to the Latchel team for being so open-handed).
So, meet Ethan. He’s the handsome CEO of Latchel. I’ll briefly explain each of the core elements of the Story Square. Then, if you want to see how it translates into the real world, check out the corresponding video where Ethan and I discuss the Latchel example.
Let’s dive in.
Cornerstone #1 - Desire
Stories begin with someone who wants something. And there’s a reason for that. Our desires order our life. They orient us to our surroundings. They tell us what we’ll do, how we’ll spend our time, and what separates good decisions from bad.
Desire is the beginning. Without it we’re stuck at the starting block with nowhere to go. And if you want to capture someone’s attention you have to resist the temptation to talk about what you want. Talk about what they want.
Why?
Because there’s a timer in everyone’s head counting down the moment until you answer the question, “When are you going to start talking about something I care about? Enough about you, let’s talk about me.” And if you haven’t gotten to it by the time the clock runs out it’s game over.
There’s nothing more interesting than self-interest.
Ask Yourself: Who am I talking to and what do they want?
Cornerstone #2 - Obstacle
Getting what you want feels good. But right now, we’re not trying to make people feel good. We’re trying to make people uncomfortable.
We’ve established a desire - something they want. And that will hook them at the beginning, but not for very long. We need to introduce conflict. We need to show them that the thing they want is threatened by obstacles that are standing in their way.
Ask Yourself: Why can’t the person I’m talking to get what they want? What stands in their way?
Psychological Driver #1 - Tension
If you want to keep people’s attention you have to make them slightly uncomfortable.
In other words, if you want someone’s attention, create tension.
How?
Establish a desire, and then block it.
This combination of Desire and Obstacle triggers tension and invites the audience to take the next step so they can experience the catharsis of resolving the tension.
Ask Yourself: What’s the unfortunate reality of their life if they never overcome these obstacles?
Cornerstone #3 - Solution
Your audience needs help. Without a solution, they’re stuck. This is where you come in. You’ve got the product, service, or idea that can get them over the hump. What is it? How does it work?
Don’t overcomplicate or get into the weeds. A common mistake people make is wanting to jump into the features and benefits before clearly defining what it is. Label it. Name it. Until you do, your audience is incapable of understanding
Fill in the Blanks: [My thing] is a [what?] that [does what?] for [who?] by [these functions].
If you’re struggling to know what to put in those blanks, skip ahead to Symmetry and Novelty.
Psychological Driver #2 - Symmetry
The human mind is hard wired for symmetry. It craves the balance of tit-for-tat. Ying-for-yang. Peanut butter-for-jelly. When symmetry is missing it creates a mental outage and results in confusion. But when it’s present, symmetry makes your message very intuitive.
Nowhere is this more true than the connection between Obstacle and Solution. For every Obstacle there must be an equal and opposite Solution.
One for one.
Matched pairs.
Otherwise you run the risk of breaking the cardinal rule:
Never set up a problem you're not going to solve, and never solve a problem you haven’t already set up.
This comes in handy both when defining obstacles and your solution. For example, if there are problems that your audience faces, but your solution isn’t perfectly suited to knock those obstacles out of the way, those are obstacles you don’t want to mention. (Or you’ll want to consider upgrading and improving your solution so it does).
Likewise, when you think about the core functionality of your solution, try reverse engineering the obstacles from those aspects of your solution. This can be such a powerful way of building out the story that sometimes I’ll just start here. I’ll get my clients to start talking about their solution (which they’re all too eager to do) and then based on that description I can start to reverse engineer the Obstacles and even the Desire.
Ask Yourself: What’s the direct line between each of the obstacles and the aspects of my solution? If there’s something on one side that doesn’t have a counterpart on the other side what could I add (or take away) to resolve the imbalance?
Cornerstone #4 - Resolution
How does the story end? Unless you're going for a Tragedy, the story needs to resolve with the protagonist (your audience) living happily ever after.
Remember the tension we created earlier in the story? This is where we provide release. Fast forward to life-after-solution
Ask Yourself: What will their life be like? What do they have now that they didn’t have before?
Psychological Driver #3 - Novelty
Human beings are drawn to “new.” We crave novel experiences and ideas. Newness implies growth and we crave growth.
One of the greatest advantages you can give your messaging is to highlight the novelty. This shows up in two key areas, Solution and Resolution.
When it comes to your solution there tends to be a few different ways this novelty is manifest:
A new way of thinking - often described as the aha! moment
A new way of doing - often described as your differentiator
A new way of existing - often described as category creation
Novelty doesn’t stop at the solution you’re providing. In the end it must deliver a new capability, power, or resource to the user so they finally overcome the obstacles they couldn’t previously. Think of it like this, if your solution IS something new, the user DOES something new by using it.
Ask Yourself:
What’s the part of your solution that makes people say…
“Oh wow, I’ve never thought about it like that before!”
“That’s an ingenious way of solving the problem!”
“Actually, I don’t know of anyone/anything else that does what you do.”
What new outcomes do your audience have with your solution they didn’t have before?
Psychological Driver #4 - Transformation
Good stories are so satisfying because they show us the thing we crave the most transformation. There’s an irony to your life and mine:
On the one hand we want to be fully accepted and loved as we are. At the same time we don’t want to stay the way we are. We want to be transformed.
And nowhere should this transformation be more apparent than the side by side comparison of where the story starts and where the story ends. How is the hero different at the end of the story as compared to where they started?
I like to think about this as the, “but wait, there’s more…” section of the Story Square. It’s not enough for the character to simply get what they wanted at the beginning. They need to get more than they bargained for. They need to go above and beyond to an even greater level of thriving.
Ask Yourself: What’s the bigger, better, higher-order-of-human-thriving benefit that your audience will get once they’ve worked with you?
Putting It All Together
Now that we have all the pieces it’s time to put it all together to make sure we haven’t created some sort of clunky, incoherent story. If done right, you should be able to stitch all of the elements of the Story Square together into a short summary.
Here’s how I think about it:
If we can’t sum this up in 2 minutes or less, we haven’t made it simple enough.
(Fun fact, this 2 minute summary approach predates the Story Square Framework. For many years I was tasked with crafting short summaries like this without the benefit of a full-blown framework. The reps of doing this hundreds of times in rapid fire and short order helped accelerate the emergence of what eventually became the Story Square Framework).
The good news is that because the Story Square is based on story structures the translation from pieces to whole should be pretty easy. Here’s a beat-by-beat primer to get you started:
This is who you are: Audience
This is what you want: Desire
Here’s why you can’t have what you want: Obstacles
Here’s why that stinks: Tension
But don’t worry, here’s a solution and how it works: Solution
It’s unique: Novelty
If you use it you can get that thing you wanted: Resolution
And you can get a whole lot more: Transformation
Check out the video below to see how the 2 Minute Story turned out for Latchel
One Last Squeeze
So far we’ve gone from the 8 core components of the Story Square down to a 2 minute summary story. Let’s take it one step further.
2 Sentences.
In Hollywood there’s something called a Logline. It’s a one or two sentence summary of the main anchors of the story so you can get the gist in an instant.
If you want to craft your own Logline so you don’t have to stutter and stammer at the next cocktail party when someone asks you the dreaded question, “So, what do you do?” then here’s a simple template you can use: Obstacle. Solution. Resolution.
Sound familiar?
Here’s an example of how to craft a Logline:
Say More By Saying Less
One of the reasons we struggle to tell our story and simplify our message is we insist on saying too much. The Story Square can be a powerful tool you can use anytime you need to simplify anything.
I say that from personal experience. Over the years I’ve had to simplify a lot of stuff - everything from cyber security to commercial real estate, healthcare to HR, totalitarianism to toilet paper. (Yes, TP can be surprisingly complicated).
It seems like no matter the subject or project I can’t escape the principles found in the Story Square. It’s certainly not the only way to frame up your message. But it’s worked for me and my clients. I’m confident it can work for you too.
The Power of A Messaging Guide
Creating a messaging guide of your own can be a game changer. As you can see by the Latchel example below, it’s the dozen or so slides that can get everyone on the same page. Remember, the goal isn’t to find more things to say. It’s to find the right things to say. Then get everyone in the company to say them over and over again in a thousand different ways.
