I’ve been thinking about storytelling frameworks lately. Not because I’m a comms professor or a copywriting guru, but because I keep using a handful of them without realising it, and I got curious about what else was out there.
Back in 2016, after 1,000 days at Telstra, I wrote a post framing that chapter through the lens of the Hero’s Journey. A call to adventure, guardians, mentors, temptations, challenges, transformation. It mapped almost perfectly onto the API Strategy work I’d been leading. I knew that framework and it just fit perfectly.
The best frameworks don’t feel like templates. They feel like a torch you hold up to a story you already have, and suddenly you can see its shape.
So I did something slightly obsessive: I took one story and ran it through eight different frameworks to see what changed and what stayed the same.
The story is about building SmallBizAI.au. I’ll introduce it properly in a moment. But first, the frameworks.
The frameworks (and where they actually came from)
There are dozens of storytelling models floating around the internet, most of them misattributed. Here’s what the research actually shows:
The Hero’s Journey – Joseph Campbell mapped it in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Christopher Vogler adapted it for screenwriters in The Writer’s Journey (1992). Twelve stages from ordinary world to return with the elixir.
The Golden Circle (Why-How-What) – Simon Sinek’s TED Talk (2009), later the book Start With Why. Start with purpose, not product.
What, So What, Now What – Terry Borton, an educator, published it in Reach, Touch and Teach (1970). Originally a reflective learning model. Business people borrowed it.
The Story Spine – Kenn Adams, a playwright, created it in 1991. Pixar made it famous. It’s often called “Pixar’s framework.” It’s not; they popularised it.
Before-After-Bridge (BAB) – No single inventor. It’s a copywriting tradition, mid-20th century. Shows the gap, shows the destination, then introduces the bridge.
Problem-Agitate-Solution (PAS) – Dan Kennedy named it in The Ultimate Sales Letter (1991). More aggressive than BAB. It deliberately intensifies pain before offering relief.
ABT (And-But-Therefore) – Randy Olson, a marine biologist turned filmmaker, coined it in a 2013 TEDMED talk and formalised it in Houston, We Have a Narrative (2015). The most diagnostic of the lot: if you can’t compress your story into ABT form, it probably doesn’t have a real conflict.
StoryBrand / SB7 – Donald Miller, Building a StoryBrand (2017). Built on the Hero’s Journey but with one crucial inversion: your customer is the hero. Your brand is the guide. Never confuse the two.
There are others worth knowing: the Pyramid Principle (Barbara Minto, McKinsey, 1985) for answer-first business writing; STAR (Situation-Task-Action-Result) for professional storytelling; Freytag’s Pyramid (1863) for dramatic structure; Three-Act Structure (Aristotle, 335 BCE, yes, really). Eight frameworks is enough to make the point.
The raw story
Before applying any framework, here it is plain:
I graduated from Monash University in 1984 and spent six years at Aspect Computing doing consulting work. The clients were all over the place: engineering firms, manufacturers, petrochemical companies, the Bureau of Meteorology, banks, police and law enforcement agencies, and tech companies. The platforms were mainframes, minis, and PCs. I even built products to interface PCs to mainframes – early systems integration before anyone called it that. This was computing before the internet existed, before most people had heard the word “software” in conversation.
Then 22½ years at Microsoft. Four years at Telstra. Six years at AWS.
In 2024, I took a career break. I noticed that almost everything written about AI was aimed at enterprise buyers, US audiences, or people with a computer science degree. Australian small business owners – tradies, café owners, sole traders, allied health practitioners – were getting nothing useful.
I started building SmallBizAI.au. Not with a team, not with funding, not with a content agency. With an AI assistant I named Claw, a set of Python scripts, and a publishing cadence that has now produced over 1,470 posts. The site gets cited by ChatGPT, Copilot, and Siri when Australian small business owners ask AI questions. The gap I saw got filled, one post at a time.
Now watch what happens when you put that through different lenses.
1. The Hero’s Journey
Campbell / Vogler – 12 stages
Ordinary World: Forty years in tech. Aspect Computing in the 1980s – consulting across engineering firms, manufacturers, petrochemical companies, the Bureau of Meteorology, banks, police agencies, and tech companies. Building products to interface PCs to mainframes before that was a thing anyone had a name for. Then Microsoft through the PC and internet booms. Telstra navigating corporate Australia’s digital pivot. AWS through the cloud era. Senior roles, global teams, a life that looked, from the outside, like it had arrived.
Call to Adventure: The career break. The blank calendar. And a question: what’s actually useful in this AI moment?
Refusal of the Call: What would I even write about? Who am I to explain AI to small business owners? I’ve spent my whole career inside large organisations.
Meeting the Mentor: The AI itself. Building Claw – the assistant – wasn’t just a tool decision. It became the methodology.
Crossing the First Threshold: Publishing the first post. Committing to a cadence. The site is real now.
Tests, Allies, Enemies: The content gap is real but also crowded with noise. Every day there are reasons not to write – the story’s been done, the angle’s weak, the slot’s full. Keep going anyway.
Approach to the Inmost Cave: Does any of this matter? Is the site actually reaching people?
Ordeal: The first time ChatGPT cited SmallBizAI.au in response to an Australian small business owner’s question. It either worked or it didn’t.
Reward: It worked. 1,470 posts. Citations from Copilot, Siri, ChatGPT. A real audience.
Road Back: The work never ends. The next post is always due.
Resurrection: The career break wasn’t a pause. It was the real chapter.
Return with the Elixir: Proof that one person, with the right tools and a clear audience, can build something that gets cited by the world’s largest AI systems.
The Hero’s Journey is the most generous framework. It turns almost any experience into myth – which is useful when the experience is genuinely mythic, and worth watching when it isn’t.
2. The Golden Circle (Why-How-What)
Sinek – start with why
Why: Australian small business owners deserve AI content written for them, not adapted from US enterprise playbooks.
How: Publish daily. Cover every industry. Use AI as a tool, not a gimmick. Source everything. Write like a human.
What: SmallBizAI.au – 1,470+ posts, 41 industries, cited by ChatGPT, Copilot, and Siri.
I hosted Sinek at an event years ago and watched him run the workshop in person. The Golden Circle lands differently in a room than it does on a page – he builds it live, and you can feel the moment the audience clicks over from product-first to purpose-first thinking. Starting with the What is almost always the wrong move. You could describe SmallBizAI.au to someone and they’d think “nice blog.” Start with the Why and the whole thing makes sense immediately.
3. What, So What, Now What
Borton – observe, interpret, act
What: I spent 40 years in tech – consulting across industries as varied as petrochemicals, policing, and banking before long stints at Microsoft, Telstra, and AWS – then used a career break to build a 1,470-post AI resource for Australian small businesses, with an AI assistant as my primary collaborator.
So What: Most AI content is written for enterprise buyers or US audiences. Australian SMBs – 2.5 million of them – were being ignored. The gap was real and no one was filling it systematically. The site now gets cited by major AI systems when Australians ask AI questions.
Now What: If you’re creating content for a niche that mainstream media ignores, you don’t need a team. You need clarity on the audience, a publishing system, and the willingness to keep going when it feels like no one’s reading.
This is the sharpest version of the story for a business audience. No narrative arc, no drama. Here’s what happened, here’s why it matters, here’s what you can do with it.
4. The Story Spine
Kenn Adams – causal chain
Once upon a time there was a tech consultant who spent his first six years solving problems for engineering firms, manufacturers, petrochemical companies, the Bureau of Meteorology, police agencies, and banks – building interfaces between PCs and mainframes on whatever hardware existed at the time.
Every day for the next 33 years, he went to work inside large organisations: Microsoft, Telstra, AWS.
Until one day he took a career break and realised he didn’t know what to do next – but he could see that Australian small business owners were drowning in AI hype with nothing useful to grab onto.
Because of that he started writing. One post, then another, then a cadence.
Because of that he built tooling – an AI assistant, scripts, a publishing pipeline – to scale what one person could produce.
Because of that the site started getting cited by ChatGPT, Copilot, and Siri in response to real questions from real Australians.
Until finally the career break turned out not to be a pause between jobs, but the thing itself.
And ever since then the posts keep coming, the gap keeps shrinking, and the question has shifted from “will this work?” to “how far can it go?”
The causal chain is what makes this structure work. Every beat has to earn the next. It forces you to find the through-line – the thing that actually caused the next thing, not just preceded it.
5. Before-After-Bridge
Copywriting tradition
Before: Australian small business owners ask AI assistants about their industry – how to automate their invoicing, whether there’s an AI tool for their trade, what other cafés are doing – and they get answers written for Silicon Valley, not Surry Hills. Generic. US-centric. Useless.
After: The same owner asks the same question and gets cited content from a site that actually knows what it’s like to run a small business in Australia. Specific tools, local examples, industry-relevant context.
Bridge: SmallBizAI.au – built specifically to fill that gap, at the scale and cadence that makes it show up.
BAB is audience-focused in a way the other frameworks aren’t. The story becomes almost entirely about the reader’s problem. The founder barely exists here. That’s a feature for certain contexts, a bug for others.
6. Problem-Agitate-Solution (PAS)
Dan Kennedy
Problem: Australian small businesses are trying to figure out AI. The content that exists is written for enterprise buyers with six-figure budgets and IT departments. A sole trader trying to decide whether to use AI for their quotes isn’t going to find the answer in a Gartner report.
Agitate: Meanwhile, their competitors are experimenting. The tools are cheap and accessible. Every week they wait is a week behind. And the AI systems that millions of Australians are now using to make decisions – ChatGPT, Siri, Copilot – are drawing on a content pool that barely acknowledges Australian small businesses exist. You’re invisible to the systems your customers are starting to trust.
Solution: SmallBizAI.au was built to fix this. 1,470 posts, 41 industries, written specifically for Australian small business owners. It’s already being cited by the AI systems your customers use. The gap is being filled – the question is whether your industry has been covered yet.
PAS is uncomfortable to write. The agitation section requires you to make the reader feel the problem before you solve it. That’s why it works in sales contexts. It’s also why it can feel manipulative. Use it honestly or don’t use it.
7. ABT (And-But-Therefore)
Randy Olson
And: I spent 40 years in tech – Aspect Computing, Microsoft, Telstra, AWS – and became deeply familiar with how organisations adopt new technology across every major computing era.
But: When I took a career break and looked at how Australian small business owners were being served by AI content, I found almost nothing written for them specifically.
Therefore: I built SmallBizAI.au – a daily-publishing AI resource for Australian SMBs – which is now cited by ChatGPT, Copilot, and Siri when Australians ask AI questions.
ABT is the most useful compression test. One sentence of setup, one sentence of conflict, one sentence of consequence. If your story survives it, the conflict is real. If the “But” keeps coming out as an “And,” you don’t have a story yet – you have a list of things that happened.
8. StoryBrand / SB7
Donald Miller – your customer is the hero
Character (the customer): An Australian small business owner trying to figure out whether AI is relevant to them – and if so, which tools, how to start, and whether anyone has done this in their industry already.
Problem: External: there’s almost no AI content written specifically for Australian SMBs. Internal: the feeling that everyone else has figured this out and you’re falling behind. Philosophical: small businesses deserve the same quality of information as enterprise buyers.
Guide (SmallBizAI.au): A site I built, with 40 years in tech behind it – from mainframes to cloud – choosing to spend the career break writing for small businesses instead of consulting for large ones. Empathy (I know this gap is real) plus authority (I know how to fill it).
Plan: Find your industry section. Read the posts relevant to your situation. Try one tool.
Call to Action: Subscribe to the weekly newsletter. Or just start reading.
Success: You make a better decision about AI for your business than you would have otherwise. You’re not behind – you’re informed.
Failure avoided: Getting sold an expensive AI tool by a vendor who doesn’t understand your industry, or dismissing AI entirely because the content you found wasn’t written for you.
SB7 forces the most uncomfortable reframe for founders. You are not the hero of your own story. The moment you make your customer the hero, the whole pitch changes. My journey – 40 years in tech, the career break, the 1,470 posts – is only relevant as credibility for the guide role. It’s context, not the story.
What stays the same across all eight
Every framework contains the same three elements:
- A gap – something missing, broken, or ignored
- Movement – someone or something crosses from one state to another
- Stakes – a reason it matters
The frameworks differ in who they centre (founder, customer, or the problem itself), how much they dwell on the before-state, and whether they resolve with action, insight, or transformation.
The ABT is the most diagnostic. The Hero’s Journey is the most generous. StoryBrand is the most counterintuitive – it asks you to step out of your own story entirely.
Which one should you use?
Depends what you’re trying to do:
- Explaining your purpose to a new audience: Golden Circle
- Making someone feel a problem before you solve it: PAS
- A pitch where the reader needs to see themselves winning: StoryBrand
- A conference talk or long-form piece: Hero’s Journey or Three-Act Structure
- A LinkedIn post or newsletter intro: Story Spine or ABT
- A debrief, retrospective, or lessons-learned: What, So What, Now What
- A sales page or email: BAB or PAS
- Testing whether your story has a real conflict: ABT. Always ABT first.
The same story reads completely differently depending on which lens you pick up. The facts don’t change. The meaning does.
SmallBizAI.au is the site referenced throughout this post. If you run an Australian small business and want to know how AI applies to your industry, it’s worth a look.
Sources
- Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon, 1949.
- Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey. Michael Wiese Productions, 1992.
- Sinek, Simon. Start With Why. Portfolio/Penguin, 2009.
- Borton, Terry. Reach, Touch and Teach. McGraw-Hill, 1970.
- Adams, Kenn. How to Improvise a Full-Length Play. Allworth Press, 1991.
- Kennedy, Dan. The Ultimate Sales Letter. Adams Media, 1991.
- Olson, Randy. Houston, We Have a Narrative. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
- Miller, Donald. Building a StoryBrand. HarperCollins Leadership, 2017.
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