FAQs

A Story-Model™ is a story that is created to be useful and inspire action.
The purpose of a story determines the approach to writing it. Many stories are just for entertainment and pleasure, which determines how they are written and when they are successful.
Other stories are told to inspire the audience to take an action. To do that, the story needs to communicate a model of the world that is useful to the audience.
A more specific and detailed definition of a Story-Model™ is a simulated scientific model of a complex system, represented with natural language.
“Story” is very general, and not very useful.
Writing a story to inspire action requires a very different process than writing a story to entertain. And when they “don’t work” they require a specific troubleshooting approach.
A different name isn’t important for the audience, but it’s very helpful for the storyteller.
Absolutely. We’ve always used useful stories to inspire action.
Because every founder, leader and spokesperson is expected to tell an inspiring Story About What We Do™.
Web 2.0 made storytelling a popular communication strategy, which gave rise to the Story About What We Do™. Today, professional communication skills for founders, leaders and spokespeople includes telling their story — which requires approaching the story as a Story-Model™.

There are 4 steps:
1. Assess your current story. What’s working? What’s not working? How do you know?
2. Narrative analysis. Deconstruct the story to identify the underlying narrative structure.
3. Story-Modeling™ to improve coherence and effectiveness.
4. Testing. Verify and validate the new story.
Allow 3-4 weeks.
Mostly founders, leaders and spokespeople, usually at startups, nonprofits or social enterprises.
If your story is working — you don’t need to change a thing.
If your story is not working — you’re not getting the reactions that you expect — Story-Modeling™ will diagnose the problem and create a version that works.
Story-Modeling™ combines what we already know about narrative cognition, narratology and scientific modeling with communications practice. The science is not new, but creating a method that combines knowledge from these disciplines is.
No.
Story-Models™ can produce persuasive stories, but a Story-Model™ is successful when it produces a useful story, not when the story persuades the audience.

Narrative is a cognitive process we use to organize information so that it’s useful; people often say narrative is how we “make sense” of the world.
The Story-Modeling™ method uses knowledge from narrative cognition and narratology to produce Story-Models™.