Six step approach to storytelling

Most corporate stories are chronologies pretending to contain a cause. Customer had problem. Customer bought thing. Customer achieved glorious result. Nobody explains what changed between purchase and glory, presumably because the product sprinkled outcomes during the night. The clever word in this six-step formula is “because”.

That missing link is where most of the actual selling lives. Without it, the result is testimonial confetti drifting past an unexplained invoice. “Because of that” is rude to this nonsense. It demands consequence. The feature altered an action. That action removed a delay. Removing the delay changed what the customer could do next. Now the result has a traceable cause.

This makes the formula useful for case studies, product narratives and even incident reports. Six ugly sentences can expose a missing cause faster than six polished pages. If two events cannot be joined honestly, the gap requires investigation, not a more emotional adjective. Then throw away the labels. A reader should feel the chain without seeing the scaffolding. Keep “once upon a time” in a business case and everyone starts sounding like a management course held near a beanbag. Vary the rhythm, begin where tension begins, compress the obvious parts.

The six sentences reveal where the evidence linking the two sides is missing. Once those links survive, the formula can disappear. Any unexplained leap will still be sitting there, now with nowhere to hide.