Story Arcs (sketchnote from InnoVAte Virginia 2017)

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At this year’s InnoVAte Virginia Jason Allen Ashlock (@jasonashlock on Twitter) gave the afternoon keynote on “The Storyteller’s Secret: How Narrative Intelligence Can Transform Your Organization.” A highly engaging speaker, he started with a hook, then told us he was going to talk about five types of story arcs that businesses use to tell a story that compels you to buy their product. His hook was not the concept of story arcs (see this YouTube video of Kurt Vonnegut talking about the shapes of stories), but that he used nearly universal references of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”, “The Brady Bunch”, and “Gilligan’s Island” to get the story arc concept firmly implanted in your head so that he could quickly focus on pivoting story arcs to business applications. A wonderfully effective speaking technique to use in facilitating meetings.