Storytelling · Communication
Why business stories should start with the problem
Graham Brown says a business story earns attention when it begins with the tension people recognise, then shows how the past shaped it and what a better future could look like.
432: Brand Storytelling with B2B Podcasts | Graham Brown
Video from Nicole Jansen, published 24 October 2022.
Guests on Air checked quotes against the official English auto-caption transcript and recording, then added editorial synthesis and supporting research.
How should a business story begin when people need to change?
Begin with the present problem your audience can already feel. Graham Brown suggests using the past to explain how it developed, then the future to show what could change. Starting with tension gives people a reason to listen before you offer history, features or a polished description of the organisation.
Business stories often begin in the wrong place. A speaker starts with the company founding, the product catalogue or their own career history. None of that is necessarily untrue, but it asks an audience to wait for the reason they should care.
In a Leaders of Transformation interview, Graham Brown offers a sharper structure. He calls it the three-box technique: past, present and future. The sequence is useful, but he does not advise telling it in calendar order. Start with the present, where the problem is visible. Then return to the past for the conditions that created it. Finish by showing where a different choice might lead.
That approach makes storytelling practical for leaders. It is not a plea to become more theatrical. It is a way to give people a clear reason for a change, a route through the confusion and a part in the work ahead. The story has to earn its place by helping somebody understand what is at stake.
Key takeaways
- Open with a real problem, not a biography or a list of company credentials.
- Use the past to explain how the situation developed after people understand why it matters now.
- Make the future concrete enough that people can see what they are being asked to help create.
1. Start where the audience feels the pressure
Brown uses a film director to make the point. A compelling film may open with a startling scene, then rewind to show how the characters arrived there. The opening does not explain everything. It gives the viewer a question they want answered. A business story can do the same work without copying Hollywood. Name the customer frustration, stalled decision or internal contradiction that is already making the current approach hard to sustain.
This is different from manufacturing urgency. If the problem is vague or invented, people will recognise the trick. The useful opening identifies something concrete: customers abandon a process because it is confusing, teams repeat the same handover because nobody owns it, or a new market demands a capability the business does not yet have. The point is not to dramatise ordinary work. It is to describe the part that needs a decision.
Brown says the present scene is the problem statement. That matters for leaders who default to explaining their solution first. A solution without a shared problem sounds like another initiative arriving from above. When people can name the pressure together, they can test whether the proposed response fits it.
2. Use the past to explain, not to delay
Once the problem has the audience’s attention, the past becomes useful. Brown does not mean a full company timeline. He means the decisions, assumptions and constraints that brought a team to this point. That context can stop people treating a current failure as somebody else’s carelessness. It may show why an old process made sense when the organisation was smaller, or why a customer promise became difficult after the work changed.
The distinction is important because history can become an escape route. A leader can spend ten minutes describing everything that happened before asking anybody to act. Brown’s structure keeps the history subordinate to the present problem. Include only what helps people see a pattern or make a better choice. Leave out the facts that merely prove how long the leader has been in the room.
That restraint also makes room for honesty. The past may include a choice that did not work, an assumption that outlived its usefulness or a warning the organisation ignored. Naming it does not require a public confession. It gives people a fuller account of what changed and why the next step cannot be a repeat of the last one.
3. Make the future a shared piece of work
The final box is the future. Brown frames it as closure, the place where a story shows what happens after the problem. In business, that future should not be a glossy prediction. It should tell people what will be different, what remains uncertain and what they can do next. A service team may need to change how it hears customer feedback. A product group may need to stop treating another department as an afterthought. The story should make that request visible.
This is where podcasting can do more than distribute announcements. Brown describes an internal podcast as a better version of a newsletter because it can capture conversations already happening across an organisation. A team can hear not only that colleagues built something, but why they chose it and what they learned. Those details help work travel across departmental boundaries, especially when a written update would flatten the human part of the decision.
The format is not magic. A recorded conversation will not repair poor management or replace a difficult decision. It can, however, give people access to the reasoning and examples that usually stay inside one meeting. That is valuable when leaders want a change to be understood rather than merely acknowledged. The test is simple: would this story help somebody make a better decision or have a more useful conversation tomorrow?
Brown’s book Brand Love: How to Build a Brand Worth Talking About belongs here because a brand story has to be clear enough for people to repeat in their own words. The book does not turn every internal update into marketing. It supports the same discipline: identify the tension, explain what shaped it and make the next chapter worth joining. People carry a story further when it gives them something real to say.
