Hey Innovator, Rule Breaker, Market Maker!
I see you strutting your stuff.
Man oh man, it feels great to create something new, doesn’t it?
Ooh, the endorphins.
And then . . .
What the heck? Why doesn’t anyone understand what I’m trying to do here! This is new! This is different! THIS. CHANGES. EVERYTHING.
Houston, we have a problem. You see, they don’t know what you know. They don’t see what you see. Not yet anyway. They are stuck in the old mode. And you? You haven’t crossed the chasm.
And that’s why . . . storytelling. But not just any story, the VISION STORY.
OK, let’s break it down.
Introducing something new and innovative is hard. And all those potential early adopters are rightfully skeptical. Most new things don’t survive.
And, to make things even more challenging, there’s this little problem: the more you explain it, the less trustworthy you seem. Weird, huh? It’s the old “methinks you doth explaineth too much” problem. (Sorry for murdering the line, Shakespeare lovers.)
A vision story is a small but mighty tool in your arsenal when you’re looking to break into new territory. It should be one of the core narratives you use to paint a vivid “from/to” picture.
At the most basic level, a story has 3 stages:
- Context (what’s the situation)
- Conflict (what’s wrong with the situation)
- Resolution (what fixes the situation)
But, to get people to listen to something they’ve never heard before, don’t you dare mention your breakthrough product/service/thing until the third and final stage (the resolution). Why? Because if you want folks to listen, first you have to get their heads nodding. And to do that, you need to connect around the familiar first, not the “new”.
You start with the present state — the “from” part — and show how limited, unsatisfying, or outdated it is. Then you get mad as hell about the crazy state of the status quo – ideally in a simple, relatable and intuitively true statement. Finally, you transition to your vision of a brighter future — the “to” part, where you describe the world that people can enter when they adopt your products or services.
For example:
FROM: “Businesses have been doing headshots the same way since the camera was invented.”
SOMETHING’S GOTTA CHANGE: “You shouldn’t have to hire an overpriced photographer and cross your fingers for a good hair day to get a headshot worthy of a Forbes cover.”
TO: “It's time to take the hassle out of headshots by using the most advanced photography innovation available - the smartphone. At headshots.com, we walk you through a virtual photo shoot, then we hand retouch your photos for a headshot that says YOU’VE MADE IT.”
The vision story gives outsiders a glimpse of what’s to come, showing them the path from impossible to inevitable. 🙌
After years of working with folks in healthcare, tech, finance, pharma, and everything in between, I repeatedly saw brilliant people die on the hill because they were trying to sell their tech, or their R&D, or their progress on a milestone. . . . and end up getting buried in the rabbit hole of questions trying to explain the details.
It was a real problem for the projects we were advising. That’s when we started helping them craft story-driven narratives and pitches when seeking project approval, funding, or even formation of a skunkworks. It started really changing the trajectory of the projects, helping them get closer to crossing the chasm toward market acceptance. A virtual photo shoot was unheard of prior to covid. Now some of the biggest companies on the planet are leveraging them.
Sometimes all those innovators needed was a handful of micro-stories. That’s what led us to start doing free-standing storytelling workshop collabs, where we work with a team to build out a set of core stories over the course of a single day. (Imagine your conference room covered in stickies by over-caffeinated game-changers!) If you think you might be just a handful of stories away, you know what to do. Just hit reply!
Shoutout to my good friend and badass entrepreneur Jason, who launched Headshots.com in the thick of Covid when he wasn’t able to visit clients for photoshoots anymore! I got to be one of his early advisors, and I’m blown away by how he took massive action. It’s amazing - go check it out. They have clients like Uber, Boeing, Kaiser Permanente and more.
Thanks for reading to the end! Happy hump day!
Ginger
