Three Questions for Narratologist Tobin (Toby) Trevarthen

Toby Trevarthen has a very cool job title: Founder and Chief Narrative Officer of Spatial Shift, LLC; in Napa, California. Although we did not know each other at the time, we were colleagues at USA TODAY/Gannett in the late 80s/early 90s. I connected with him last year when I added Narrative Generation: Why Narrative Will Become Your Most Valuable Asset in the Next 5 Years,  a book he co-authored with Ann Badillo and Tim Donovan, to “My Curated List of Books by Current/Former USA TODAY Writers: Revised and Updated.” I found the subtitle of the book particularly relevant, as the concept of what qualifies as an asset for both individuals and organizations, and how that asset changes in value, is increasingly important.

Toby is admirably building on his long and varied career, devising new ways to help both people and organizations tell their stories (and in the process, learn more about themselves). I’m grateful to him for answering my questions about his forward-thinking work, and especially about what in the world it means to be a narratologist in the first place!

For the non-specialist reader, how would you characterize your work and research and how that might have changed in the past decade or so?

The majority of my career was spent in consultative sales or business development for traditional and digital media companies. Those platforms allowed me to play on global stages, across a diverse range of industries and clients. Hence, I became a polymath on disruptive forces impacting business models. My work today is an amalgamation of that wisdom gained over decades of working with world-class companies and individuals.

About ten years ago, I had just exited a connected car start-up that was acquired by Harman. I decided I wanted to go back to running a portfolio life that would allow me to continue to play on the edges. I had two clients – one that was focused on facilitating innovation immersions with {Fortune} Global 500 companies and the other was a PR firm looking for someone to help them rethink “earned media” in a world being disrupted by social media.

The facilitation company utilized a “rapid product prototyping” discipline developed by Google X as the process used in our 48-hour sprints.  It was there that I was introduced to Singularity University’s exponential thinking. Both of these concepts were completely foreign to me. I immediately recognized that I had just crossed into the future and I didn’t think like this. My brain went into hyper-unlearn and relearn mode.

I took what I was learning in my immersions and applied it to my challenge of solving for earned media.  At the same time, I was also digging into John Hagel’s work on Narrative as a way to differentiate earned media.  A colleague and I mashed this all together into a creation we called “Agile Narrative.”

The idea of brands and communication has been around forever, but the approach to take everything to a deeper level and at the speed of business was the breakthrough.

I have to admit that I was not aware of the discipline of narratology before learning about you. Can you explain why you call yourself a narratologist and if/how this differs from how other people define that term?

Like you, I was not aware of the discipline of narratology either. The more I dug into languages, anthropology, neurolinguistics, neologisms, mnemonics, and the like, the more I became fascinated with this world that has been around since the beginning of man’s ability to communicate. I found a Narrative Society that existed in the academic world – over 50 colleges around the globe that teach some form of Narrative. The primary focus is on Literary Narrative and its various applications.

I admit, I do not have a formal degree in Literary Narrative, nor do I consider myself a literary expert by any means. If we are to take a literal classification of the term narratology, it would likely not define what I do today. I view what I do as more of an experimental practitioner.

I have taken the theory of narrative and applied it to the creation of breakthrough strategic narratives for companies and executives. My quest is to design new categories, new identities, and new languages that lead to transformational outcomes. 

“Narratologist” is the term I wanted to identify with as a way to stand apart from brand strategists, communication experts, and/or storytellers. I view those as a component of what a Narratologist does. 

You have extensive experience in various segments of traditional media. How does that inform your current work, and what you see for your future endeavors?

It continues to inform my current work.  A lot of the business models in print (subscribers + advertisers + licensing + community) are still bedrocks for how tech SaaS {Software as a service} models work.  Literally identical, but with new catch names and terminology invented to sound different.

The biggest thing I learned in my traditional media days is the power of a relationship. People buy from and trust people they know. I believe the art of the human relationship has been severely fractured by technology and we need to reimagine this aspect of how we function as human beings.

That said, I do believe generative AI is a Guttenberg moment. I felt this when I first got involved with the internet and the launch of Pathfinder at Time Inc., and later AOL in the portal era. I see the transformation that GAI will bring to every industry and every potential use case we can imagine. It will require us all to rethink how we think and how we will co-exist as a species and as a society at large.

I see a world in which human connection will vastly improve because we will have the tools to better understand and communicate with each other on a global scale. Eight billion people will be connected like never before and it is our opportunity to reimagine a strategic narrative for how we would like the world to operate going forward. 

This post originally appeared (June 28, 2023) on my Living in More Than One World blog: https://brucerosenstein.com/three-questions-for-narratologist-tobin-toby-trevarthen/