The ABT Narrative Template is this:

___ AND ___ BUT ___ THEREFORE ___

Randy Olson began formulating it in 2011, derived initially from the co-creators of the animated series South Park, but eventually tracking it back to screenwriting legend Frank Daniel who first identified the ABT elements in a speech in 1986.

The foundational establishment of the ABT as a model for communication was laid out in Dr. Olson’s 2015 book, “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”  

The world brings you experiences that are mostly noise with some signal mixed in.  This is the non-narrative AAA (And, And, And) form.  The biggest challenge for effective communication is to weed out the noise, thus purifying the signal.

The tool for this is the ABT (And, But, Therefore) Narrative Template.  This is what we do in our training — teach you how to use the ABT, show you the importance of social interaction in working with it (you can’t do effective communication alone at your desk), and help you begin to achieve the ultimate goal of Narrative Intution.

Our Narrative Training model has been evolving for 15 years, since the publication of Dr. Olson’s first book, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist” in 2009.  It has gone from 1) Connection Storymaker Workshop to 2) Story Circles Narrative Training to 3) The ABT Course to finally 4) The ABT Mini-course.

The mini-course goes from a Monday to a Friday where we lead you through 5 drafts of your one sentence ABT.  Your first draft tends to be mostly noise.  Your final draft is ideally mostly your purified signal.

With the advent of ChatGPT, it is tempting to think that you can simply use it to create the needed narrative structure, BUT what ChatGPT is missing is “narrative intuition.”

Think of ChatGPT being like a fancy racecar. It can do impressive things, but narrative intuition is the steering wheel. If you don’t have narrative intuition, you ultimately cannot steer this impressive racecar, and you’ll eventually end up crashing and burning.