Kyle Nel is CEO and co-founder of Uncommon Partners, served as executive director for Lowe’s Innovation Labs, co-creator of Neurons, Inc., sits on the boards of various emerging tech companies, and a faculty member at Singularity University. His newest book is “Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company’s Future.” Everything starts with a narrative. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what religion you practice or what part of the world you live in – people live off stories. We take all stories, fiction and non-fiction, and relate them back to our lives. Stories are how humans interpret and accept new information. Kyle went back in time, looked at the data and saw that every big movement was backed by motivation, cognition and a story. He would give presentation after presentation and see no change in behavior by his audience, until he started putting narratives behind what he was speaking on. His audience was suddenly able to make it relatable to them, and therefore believable and actionable. Kyle focuses on helping companies break down the steps to building a strategic narrative, breaking bottlenecks and figuring out who and where the influencers are in their business niche. After laying out the steps for his clients he writes their archetype. Kyle knows that we live in an exponential world, and need to look at the market opportunistically. Good companies that incrementally improve year to year are looking at almost certain failure. He helps guide his clients to make those exponential leaps. In this episode of Trend Following Radio: Strategic thinking Creating narratives in business Incremental thinking Breaking bottlenecks Linear paths Exponential paths Neuroscience Behavioral science