Once upon a time, there was a person who had to do some things. They either succeeded or failed. The end. 

Name me a story that doesn’t essentially boil down to that. I’ll wait. 

I’m only being a little glib here! In 1959, William Foster-Harris claimed there were three basic plots: happy, unhappy, and ~*literary*~. Academic Christopher Booker researched for 34 years (bless!!!) and wrote a 736-page book about how there are only seven stories in the history of the world. Kurt Vonnegut famously contended that there are in fact eight (though two are basically the same). A computer at the University of Vermont threw its hat in the ring and analyzed 1,700 fiction stories and decided there are only six. Ronald Tobias says twenty. And if you’re familiar with Joseph Campell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, he calls his structure the monomyth—implying one story to rule them all. 

Regardless of the exact number, all stories are variations on a theme. We might argue that The Lord of the Rings is nothing like Hot Tub Time Machine which is nothing like the Bible which is quite a far cry from Beowulf, but I promise you that they’re all the same recognizable elements just mixed-and-matched to achieve wildly different outcomes. 

And the elements that all stories have are:

• Time

• Fortune

That’s it. I promise. Now, the fortune can be good or bad, but it’s fortune all the same!

With those two elements, all stories can be plotted on a graph that looks like this: 

When we think about telling stories at work—whether we’re telling a story to customers about our company or we’re telling a story to our colleagues or managers about our work—we tend to think there’s only one type of story to tell: Problem → Solution → Resolution. They all look like this: 

There’s nothing wrong with this three-part story. It’s the story that’s in basically every investor pitch deck for every startup under the sun. This story establishes the context, describes the problem, presents the solution (your product or service, of course!), then shows how everything is even better than it was before the problem so you can ride off happily ever after into the sunset. 

Generally speaking, this structure is also known as fall-rise or “Person in Hole.” You fall into a hole; you crawl out of the hole; you’re better off for having experienced crawling out of the hole.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s a good story! Every human wants to know how another human crawled out of a hole in case we ever fall in a hole ourselves. But fall-rise or problem-solution is not the only story structure you can use to tell an effective story at work, whether it’s to your customers or to your executive team. 

So let’s explore three other story structures you can try on the next time you need to tell a story. You might be surprised how just having a new structure to fill sparks your imagination and creativity! 

1. Cinderella

As the title suggests, Cinderella is the quintessential example of this story: Things start off bad. But then you’re working toward a goal, things are chugging along, and it’s all looking up! Suddenly, something unforeseen happens that puts you in an even worse position than you started in, and all seems lost…until you find the ultimate solution and end on a high note. 

The big hill in the middle adds drama that good old “Person in Hole” just can’t deliver, and you get the satisfaction of swooping in with a happy ending just in the nick of time. 

This is a great structure to use whenever your story has a big curve ball in it that forces you to go back to square one! Maybe a good one to try out with something like a customer case study.

2. Voyage & return

Think of a more positive Lord of the Rings, but the movie version where they don’t raze the shire at the end. (Spoiler?) Setting off into an unfamiliar place or experience and then bringing those travelogs back to the ones left at home. 

This is a great way to pack in a lot of exciting individual anecdotes while still “bringing it home” at the end. You can consider this structure for things like a performance review with your manager, a job interview where you have to relay your “journey,” or something like a quarterly or annual summary of your work or a whole team’s performance.  

3. Redemption

Call it redemption, fall from grace, rebirth…this one goes by a lot of names! The main difference here is that we’re starting off in a good place, and then something causes a precipitous fall into bad fortune. After that, it’s a long slog back to normalcy! 

This one is great for a story about overcoming a major, unexpected obstacle. Think: during a retro when something went wrong, crafting a speech for a conference, or reporting back after implementing a new solution or hiring someone to fill a gap. 

Over to you

What story structures are in your arsenal? Which are you excited to try next? 

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Kumbaya,Shannon & Kevan