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Narrative Is Everything: The ABT Framework and Narrative Evolution
By Randy Olson
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Randy Olson
"Narrative Is Everything" is the culmination of scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson's 40 year journey into Hollywood AND it may seem like just another "joy of storytelling" diatribe, BUT the book plays on two levels, THEREFORE you can take your pick — use it to improve your communication, or allow it to give you a new perspective on cultural evolution. On the practical side, it presents the ABT Framework (And, But, Therefore), showing its power and application in fields as diverse as business, politics, entertainment, science and religion. On the higher, more all-encompassing level, Olson combines his backgrounds in evolutionary biology and communication to propose a detailed mechanism of cultural evolution through what he terms, "narrative selection." He argues that the brain is the selective agent and the ABT is the factor determining what survives and doesn't survive over time in all cultures. From epic myths to nursery rhymes to news media to pop music hits, the ABT Framework is present everywhere, leading to the inescapable conclusion that "Narrative Is Everything."
Randy Olson earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University and achieved tenure at the University of New Hampshire before resigning and moving to Hollywood, obtaining an M.F.A. from the University of Southern California School of Cinema, and embarking on a second career as a filmmaker. Since film school he has written and directed the critically acclaimed films Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus (Tribeca, '06, Showtime) and Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy (Outfest, '08), and co-founded The Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project, a partnership between scientists and Hollywood to communicate the crisis facing our oceans.
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Public Speaking & Presentation
Narrative Is Everything - Randy Olson
Narrative Is Everything:
The ABT Framework and Narrative Evolution
Copyright © by Prairie Starfish Productions
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except it the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the author at randyolsonproductions@gmail.com
Cover and interior design by Dante Cervantes
Edited by Adina Yoffie
1 BUSINESS - Branding is ABT
2 POLITICS - Messaging is ABT
3 ENTERTAINMENT - Story is ABT
4 SCIENCE - Scientific Method is ABT
5 RELIGION - The Double-Edged Sword
6 NARRATIVE SELECTION - The Future
APPENDIX 1 - Defining Narrative Versus Story
APPENDIX 2 - Story Circles Narrative Training
APPENDIX 3 - Examples of Narrative Analysis
A Note About This eBook
This book is just the nuts and bolts. If you want the detailed academic version of the ABT Framework read my 2015 book Houston, We Have a Narrative. It's published by University of Chicago Press, which is … an academic press.
I wrote this book initially for our Story Circles Narrative Training program as kind of a manual, but then I decided to make it more widely available. It's still somewhat of a work in progress, so please don't hesitate to send me notes and thoughts—all input is appreciated.
- Randy Olson (rolson@usc.edu), May, 2019
ABT—it's all about ABT—or so my friend asserts,
Author, consultant to corporations, keynoters,
This his mantra—ABT: And, But, Therefore—
Just as ii—V—1 in jazz,
A squared plus B squared equals C squared,
The Trinity. E equals MC squared.
Triune truths. Essence precedes existence.
But back to ABT:
And, we look out upon our world,
And, know it was once fecund, diverse, intact:
But, icebergs are melting, coral reefs whitening,
But, arable land vanishing, water for sale.
Therefore, fellow inhabitants, what shall we do?
Therefore, my dears, what on earth shall we do?
- Paul Cummins, 2018
We have nothing to fear but boredom itself.
- Not F.D.R.
This book is about a new approach to communication. It's useful on two levels.
At the practical level it introduces you to the ABT Framework—the one-sentence template involving the three words And, But, Therefore. If you're interested only in improving your communication skills, it will provide plenty of help.
At this point the ABT Framework is more than just a neat trick. We've been running our Story Circles Narrative Training program (which is built around the ABT Framework) for five years, with a range of government agencies, including the National Park Service, the US Department of Agriculture, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Institutes of Health and a number of universities. We're approaching 500 graduates, and we recently posted over 100 of their stories of how they are using the training in the real world. Which means there is a very practical aspect to what is in this book.
But on the larger, grander scale, the book is about a whole new approach to understanding how human culture changes over time. At the core is what I have termed narrative selection. It combines the simplest elements of what neurophysiologists are learning about the brain with what Hollywood has learned over the past century about narrative structure.
For this pulling together of evolutionary theory and Hollywood knowledge, I ask you to keep in mind two things. First, I earned my PhD in evolutionary biology from Harvard University long ago, which gave me an evolutionary perspective on the world. Second, I left a tenured professorship of biology to spend 25 years in and around Hollywood, learning what I could about narrative.
My learning about evolutionary biology began in my late teens, before my brain had completed its development. The result is a view of life through the prism of evolution by means of natural selection, about which Charles Darwin famously said, There is grandeur.
Here's one simple example of what I mean about my view of the world: In our first semester of film school we had to take a wonderful class on the history of silent cinema. I was 38 years old, having just departed my science career. For my term paper I wrote an essay comparing the early oddball, one-and-done forms of silent movies to the early oddball, one-and-done forms of life seen in Cambrian fossils from over a half billion years ago.
I compared the bizarre silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc, which had more close-ups of faces than any movie since, to the bizarre Cambrian fossil Hallucigenia, which had a form never seen since. (It looks like a cross between a hair braid and a picket fence; thus its name.)
TWO FORMS NEVER SEEN AGAIN. The excessive close-ups of faces in The Passion of Joan of Arc and the spiny Hallucigenia from the Cambrian period.
That was 25 years ago. The film professor loved it and gave me an A ; he had never had his beloved silent films compared to ancient life forms. That's how I view the world: through the prism of evolution.
And so that's what I ask you to keep in mind as you read this book: It's a different approach to communication. I'm showing how the process of narrative selection has repeatedly produced the ABT narrative structure throughout our culture—from business to politics to entertainment to science to religion.
You can think of it this way: DNA is the universal element that natural selection has produced in living creatures. The ABT is the universal element that narrative selection has produced in human culture.
THEREFORE … THE ABT IS THE NUCLEUS OF NARRATIVE
Let me tell you how the ABT works. In 2001, my longtime marine-biologist colleague and hero Dr. Jeremy Jackson contacted me about the challenges he faced with communication. He had just published a powerful scientific paper that had made the cover of the most important scientific publication in the US, Science magazine. He wanted help with communicating his findings to a broader, non-science audience.
His paper was about the collapse of ocean ecosystems. In it he explained how we are destroying the oceans through pollution and over-fishing. He said to me, We have all the research we need and we know how to save the oceans, but what we don't have is action.
What this meant is that he had figured out his setup (the oceans), had figured out the problem (we're killing them) and now wanted to focus on implementing the solution (motivating people to stop bad practices). In the language I would eventually formulate, he knew his AND, he knew his BUT, he was now looking to implement his THEREFORE.
This is the ABT. It's the nucleus of narrative, and narrative is the heart of humanity.
The THEREFORE is what everybody wants these days. We know our world, we know the problems, what's needed is the THEREFORE—the actions that are actually going to fix the problems.
We want this in all facets of life. In business, we want the THEREFORE of how your product will solve the problems of our daily lives. In politics we want the THEREFORE of how your agenda is going to solve the problems in our society. In entertainment we want the THEREFORE of how your media is going to solve the problem of keeping us entertained. In science we want the THEREFORE of how your research is going to make our lives better. And in religion … we want the THEREFORE of what it all means.
THEREFORE … the title of this book—narrative is indeed everything. And, yes, I know this starts to sound like I think the ABT is a hammer and everything is a nail. All I can say to that is, could be ; I'll let you decide at the end of our journey through the ABT Framework.
FROM NATURAL SELECTION TO NARRATIVE SELECTION
What I am presenting is the synthesis of my 40-year journey from scientist to filmmaker to communicationeer (can't quite find the right term for what I do now). In 1993, I left a tenured professorship of marine biology and moved to Hollywood in search of a possible golden chalice for broad communication. I found it with the ABT.
Which means it's time for an introduction. Ladies and gentlemen …
INTRODUCING THE ABT NARRATIVE TEMPLATE
I call it the ABT Universal Narrative Template. I've been presenting it since 2012. I gave a TEDMED Talk about it in 2013 AND introduced it formally to the science world with my 2015 book Houston, We Have a Narrative (University of Chicago Press). BUT what was clear from the outset is that the ABT is present in all forms of communication. THEREFORE it's time to show it's pretty much everywhere.
The ABT is this:
_______ AND ________ BUT ________ THEREFORE _______ .
You can use it to boil down the narrative structure of just about anything to a single sentence.
You may feel it's very familiar, AND that you even learned it in grade school, BUT in 2012, when I searched everything to do with the ABT Template on the internet, I found nothing, THEREFORE please consider the possibility that something so simple could have gone somewhat unnoticed, unexplored and undocumented.
Actually, the sad truth is that the philosophers of the 1800's did identify it. They were smart. But today's world has gotten cluttered with too much information, resulting in simple, structural devices being obscured and even seen as trivial because they are not cluttered and obscured themselves.
So why is the ABT important? Let's start with leadership.
NARRATIVE IS LEADERSHIP: WHY THE ABT MATTERS
In 2018, Forbes magazine reported on Five Reasons Why Global Leadership Is in Crisis. They cited the 2015 Survey of the Global Agenda from the World Economic Forum that reported that 86% of respondents felt there is a leadership crisis in the world today.
The five causes they presented were: obsession with outcomes, linear thinking, arrogance, lack of self-awareness and lack of meaning. Nowhere in their mix is the simple problem of leaders who bore and confuse.
Notice I said simple. And notice their elements are all fairly complicated. I'm a fan of simplicity, as you'll see throughout this book.
So the simple truth is that people follow leaders who can hold their attention. They don't follow leaders who are boring or confusing.
We're in the Information Era, and the world is awash in excess information. People are desperate for leaders who can make sense of the world. It's only logical that they would follow those who can hold their interest and not leave them lost.
And that's where the ABT enters. It's the central tool for narrative structure. Narrative structure is the central element of communication. And communication is the central element of leadership.
Ergo, ABT is leadership. That's perhaps the most important reason why the ABT is important.
HOW THE ABT BEGAN WITH CAVE PEOPLE (PROBABLY/MAYBE)
So where did the ABT start? Let's dig deep into your DNA and see if you can think back millennia. What was the first thing two cave people did as they approached each other on the plains of Africa? They communicated. Visually at first, by waving from a distance, then vocally when they got close.
What were the first significant things they said? We can never know, but my good friend and fellow ABT explorer Park Howell, host of The Business of Story podcast, has a wild guess.
He says they began with agreement. One cave man, let's call him Creb (drawing on the old Clan of the Cave Bear series), began signaling to the cave woman, Ayla. As Creb pointed to the distant hills and made the sign of a wildebeest, Ayla conveyed her understanding by saying, Unh-hunh, unh-hunh, unh hunh. They agreed he had been hunting.
Creb conveyed a few more details until Ayla was starting to get bored. But then Creb put his fingers in front of his mouth, imitating a saber-toothed cat. Ayla responded with, Uh oh.
Creb started to walk away, but Ayla grabbed him. She needed to know what happened with the saber-toothed cat. He was leaving her aroused, in suspense. Creb pantomimed picking up a big rock and konking the cat on the head.
Ayla smiled broadly and replied, Ah ha!
And there you have it—the first ABT sequence for the human race. Unh-hunh, unh-hunh (the AND setup), uh oh (BUT, the problem), ah ha (THEREFORE, the solution)! That's how communication began. At least according to my buddy Park Howell, expert brand storyteller BUT … amateur anthropologist.
Maybe. Who knows? But what's certain is that communication is definitely that old. It's what all creatures do. Humans have just taken it to the highest heights (and deepest depths).
Cut to several thousand years later, and there's Carly Rae Jepson up on stage singing to thousands of screaming teen fans. Guess what structure you can see in her most popular song?
She sings, Hey, I just met you, AND this is crazy, BUT here's my number, SO (= THEREFORE) call me maybe. Her music video of that song, Call Me Maybe, has over a billion views.
Yes, the ABT structure is how we communicate, at the broadest and most fundamental of levels. But …
HERE'S THE PROBLEM: MORE INFORMATION, WORSE COMMUNICATION
The human race is vast, and today it has major problems with communication. I can show you specific examples from the world of science to support this notion. It's a sad fact that as we've gathered more information, we've gotten worse at communication.
Here's a specific and very important example: There's this gigantic global organization for the study of how the earth's climate is changing called the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). It's the best humanity knows how to do right now to deal with its biggest environmental crisis ever. But … more than one study has shown that communication by the IPCC has gone from bad to worse.
A study published in Science in 2008 showed that the supposedly simple summaries of the IPCC reports could not even be understood by most science graduate students at M.I.T. Then another study in Nature in 2015 showed that the ease of reading score for the reports has gone straight downhill over the past two decades.
This worsening of communication happens everywhere. In the second chapter I will show you how the World Bank has gone from interesting to boring in its reports.
Unfortunately this is a natural human progression—to go from interesting to boring. It even happens in lots of marriages, right? Oh, wait, that might be something different.
Anyhow …
OBFUSCATION NATION
In 1975, before leaving his medical career, legendary techno-thriller writer Dr. Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park) documented this problem for the medical world. He analyzed a few medical research papers and showed that they suffer from one common trait: obfuscation.
This word refers to the action of making something obscure, unclear or unintelligible. He showed it has been the case for medicine over the course of the past century. Doctors used to communicate with simple, plain, easily understood language. Today they obfuscate.
Same for scientists, same for lawyers, same for accountants, same for sports buffs, same for construction experts, same for forensic pathologists … pretty much, same for everyone with knowledge.
SO, DO YOU HAVE A COMMUNICATION PROBLEM?
Let me get personal about this now. This book is about improving communication, which has to start with you. But that has to start with a few simple questions.
Do you, personally, feel you have a problem when it comes to communication? Do you think you could communicate more effectively? Do you think you could get better at telling stories?
If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then this book is for you. But if it's no to all of them, then please go no further.
It's a lot like Alcoholics Anonymous, where they say you have to begin by admitting you have a drinking problem. Same thing here. You have to begin by admitting you're a less-than-perfect communicator and be ready to invest the time and energy for it to work. You'd be amazed how many people I encounter (especially academics) who consider themselves natural communicators.
Nope. Sorry. Nobody is that great. Especially me. I've been at it for a long, long time, yet I still write first drafts that are exercises in the dull And, And, And, structure we're going to explore in detail.
We all need to work on communication. Especially in a world of growing complexity. If you agree with this, then read on.
AND HERE'S THE SOLUTION: THE ABT FRAMEWORK
THANK YOU, ABT : THE TEMPLATE IN ACTION
So how do we get back to the simple old days when everyone could understand each other better? The answer is the ABT Narrative Template.
Here's how the simple ABT template works at a birthday party:
I was at a birthday party for an old friend in a private room of an Italian restaurant in New York City. Someone clinked a fork against a glass, the room went silent, the speeches began.
We were all old buddies of the guest of honor. We took turns telling raucous tales that stretched back decades, but among the old timers there was one relative youngster: my 32-year-old business partner Jayde, seated beside me. She had known the birthday gentleman for only a few months. Worse, she'd had a couple glasses of wine.
She whispered to me, I'm gonna say something! I glared at her, then as she stood up, I looked at the floor, bracing for the worst.
She said, This is such an amazing group of old friends, AND you're sharing the most incredible stories, BUT I have a tale to tell that shows how quickly this man has the ability to change a person's life, THEREFORE … let me tell you how he helped me out …
Everyone was hooked and listened intently.
She told the brief and dramatic story of a health issue three months earlier. She had been in a panic, BUT … upon hearing of her problems he had connected her to a series of excellent doctors. More importantly, given my trained ear, I could hear her entire tale had tight ABT structure (i.e. … AND I told him I was fine, BUT he insisted he call his doctor for me, THEREFORE I ended up going to see the doctor … )
Her story was funny and heartwarming as she told it in a concise and compelling way, prompting a solid round of applause at the end. As she sat back down, she said to me with a broad smile, Thank you, ABT!
The stakes had been high. Had she bored or confused the group at the start, someone would have interrupted her with something funny, and she would have had the floor taken away from her.
But she didn't.
IT'S LIKE THE ARROW IN THE FEDEX LOGO
The ABT Narrative Template is the simplest, most powerful tool to help you combat these communications problems. From the Carly Rae Jepson song to the front page of The New York Times every day (as I'll show in Chapter 3), the ABT is all around us.
Communications veteran and buddy of mine Aaron Huertas notes that, The ABT is like the arrow in the FedEx logo—once you see it, you can never not see it when you look at the logo. When he first made that comparison to the ABT I had never seen the arrow in the FedEx logo. Now I can't pass a FedEx truck without thinking to myself, Yep, there it is, the arrow right there in the logo, plain as day.
Same for the ABT once you work with it. We hear this all the time from graduates of our Story Circles Narrative Training program, which is built around the ABT. It changes how you view the world, quite possibly just as much as the idea of natural selection changes how scientists view the world (as I will suggest in the final chapter).
So let's start with a few basic ABT details.
IT'S THE ABT (NOT THE ABS)
A number of people have pointed out that therefore is a clunky word that's rarely used in conversation. This is true. The more conversational word is so.
You can see it in the second paragraph of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s landmark I Have a Dream speech, which we'll examine in Chapter 2. The paragraph has perfect ABT structure, yet he begins the last sentence with, So we are gathered here today … —using so instead of therefore.
This has prompted folks to suggest calling the template the ABS. Well, I hate to dismiss suggestions, but … for starters, that kinda sounds like IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
It's not a trivial point. The entire strength of the template is the simple, memorable acronym that sticks with you. People have a very, very easy time remembering ABT.
ABT sticks, ABS doesn't. Why is that? A linguistics friend pointed out that words ending with a t have a hard edge to them.
If you ever saw Rocky Horror Picture Show (and memorized it as I did), you might remember when Dr. Frank N. Furter invites Brad and Janet to stay for the nighT. He hits the t at the end of night hard, and then Riff Raff echoes the word and pronunciation. He does the same thing for the next line, saying, Or maybe a biTe, with Columbia echoing biTe with the hard t.
Also, when it comes to constructing content, therefore is a powerful word of consequence. It begs the next word when you say, Thereforrrrre … ?
So sounds more dismissive. Bottom line, ABT has stuck.
WHY FRAMEWORK ?
As you will see, I have chosen the term, ABT Framework to convey pretty much everything to do with the ABT. You may wonder, Why this term? The answer is … because it sounds cool.
Seriously. That's about it. I use it to kind of mean everything to do with the ABT. I got it from my niece who is a superstar information architect in New York City. When I told her about the ABT a few years ago, she said, You need a cool term for the entire concept, then offered that up. I said okay.
That was the depth of that thought process. As I've said, I have
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