Opinion

Storynomics: How corporate communication can benefit from the lessons of a film master

robet mckeeIn this opinion piece Julian Smith explores how the theories of one of the world’s foremost story experts Robert McKee can contribute to corporate storytelling.

For almost two decades Robert McKee, an imposing leonine sage, has presented his acclaimed Story and Genre seminars all around the world. His alumni numbers over 40,000 and hundreds have nominations for Oscar or Emmy awards, scores of them winners.

McKee focuses on film, but stresses that his teachings apply equally to any story form.

Now he’s decided that the corporate world needs his expertise, so he has developed Storynomics to apply his story principles to selling.

McKee asserts that the inductive logic of business is at odds with the pure art of story and that corporate leaders err in “strategising with numbers, not narrative”. Already he has a dazzling array of endorsements from an impressive bunch of clients.

When I did McKee’s 3 day Story and Genre seminars I found both, as creative experiences, to be an absolute revelation. So I can offer a brief but biased Storynomics primer, with five McKee story fundamentals:

The essence of story.

The foundation of McKee’s whole philosophy is that story is always about a character whose life has been thrown out of balance when confronted by an unexpected obstacle or challenge. A compelling story narrative is developed by arresting attention, then setting high stakes as this character overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to achieve her goal. What happens in story is not important, McKee says; what’s important is how the character reacts to what happens.

Show, don’t tell.

McKee is scornful of the use of a narrator (voice-over) in film to impart story information, considering it gratuitous. Clearly this challenges convention in the corporate and commercial context. He sees even dialogue as action, not information.

He terms it “an elevated form of language”, to be used sparingly to heighten conflict that drives the narrative. Film, McKee reminds us, is a visual medium so images should not only convey setting, but amplify the fundamentals of the story.

Respect your audience.

McKee points out that in many movies, the audience is ahead of the storyteller: too often, they can guess what happens next. This compromises audience engagement, so he stresses that a good storyteller must always be ahead of their audience. Movies play to captive audiences, so it’s easy to assume that McKee might regard creating story-based selling messages that surprise audiences as an even greater challenge than making good movies.

Archetypes, not stereotypes.

McKee declares that stereotypes suffer a poverty of both content and form. An archetypal story focuses on a universally human experience, but wraps it in a unique world (or “culture-specific expression”) so that the ordinary becomes extraordinary. To achieve this, he says you need 3 things: real insight into human nature and society; a strong idea; and talent. McKee laments the fact that the film industry has become so hungry for spectacle and the use of what he scornfully terms “decorative photography” that it has neglected the fundamentals of story.

It’s not easy.

Hollywood makes 500 films a year and most of them are “perfect shit”, according to McKee. Studios spend over $750 million on commissioning and developing stories and only one script in twenty makes it into production. The high price of excellence is not measured in dollars; rather it is measured in talent and application to the task of giving the viewer what they want, but not in the way they expect, through outstanding writing.

What might we learn from McKee’s philosophy, applied to persuasive communication?

For me, as a former creative director, it was his profound insights into the mechanics of story development and delivery. McKee’s eloquent elucidation expanded my creative horizons and simply inspired me to want to do better. Commercials, corporate videos, Youtube clips… all are stories in micro and the same principles apply. So there’s plenty of opportunity for improvement.

McKee is at heart an aesthete who rails against the compromises of an intellectually lazy world focused on deliverables, at the expense of a rigorous creative process. It’ll be interesting to see how his new Storynomics product sits with a corporate sector whose hard-nosed commercial imperatives drive the all-important bottom line.

Storynomics is well worth investigating further at www.mckeestory.com

  • Julian Smith is a Writer/Director at www.filmcommunication.com
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