Matthew Dicks: recommendation

Transcript context

…I get that. "... we've added a boring feature to our boring platform and we need to make people understand what it does. Will you give us the metaphor we need?" They don't understand that I'm not really generating metaphors. I am just taking stories from my life, pulling myself out of the story. And if you take yourself out of a story, often what's left is a metaphor, a simile, an example. And then I just offer that to them. And I tell them, if you just use some of my storytelling generating techniques, you could do the same thing. But they're a bandaid company. They just want me to fix things. And I understand that. If you're trying to do it, the best way to tell a story about something that you want people to understand is to do what I call speaking with adjacency, which means we're not going to match content to content. Instead, we're going to match theme, meaning or message. So that scientist, for example, he wasn't talking about tubes. He was talking about how people deserve to get what they want in life. His family deserves to get the apples they want, and you as a business deserves to get the tubes that you want. But so often in business what people think is content to content, well, I got to find a way to talk about these tubes to make people understand how important they are. And I say, well, let's not talk about the tubes. Let's talk about something else instead, and then we're going to move what we were talking about over two tubes. We are going to snap it in place. That snap when someone realizes, you were telling me about apples, but really you were telling me about tubes. That snap is so powerful. I use it with students all the time. A student acts like a fool, gets in trouble sitting at my desk. I'm not talking about their behavior. I'm telling a story that they have no idea why I am telling them the story. They're like, "I'm in trouble. Why is he telling me about his dog? Why is he telling me a story about his dog when he was 12?" Because I'm going to snap it into place. Because I'm not talking about content, theme, meaning or message. So when they come to me and they say, "Here's what we've got." I'm not thinking about the thing. I'm thinking about, what is the theme they want to convey or the meaning that they want to convey or the message they want to convey. And what story do I have that will match that or what story can I get out of them? The scientist did not come to me with the apple story. The scientist came to me with the tubes and I said, "Well, it sounds like you're a company that wants to give people what they need. Let's find a story in your life about a time when you have to give people something that they need." And we brainstormed it. And when we landed on apples, I knew we had it. Because he was going to be able to talk about, I'm a father. I'm a husband. I'm the husband who takes apple orders from his family before going to the grocery store. anded on apples, I knew we had it. Because he was going to be able to talk about, I'm a father. I'm a husband. I'm the husband who takes apple orders from his family before going to the grocery store. I'm going to be able to be funny, because befuddled husbands in grocery stores are always funny. So it wasn't that he came to me with a story. I came to him with the idea of let's look at theme, meaning and message and then snap it over to the tubes. That's what we want to do when we're putting a band-aid on. We don't want to think about what we're talking about. We want to think about the feelings we want people to have about what we're talking about.…

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