Building Community and Connection in Business with Gavin McMahon

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show, everyone, where we explore how empathy, connection, purpose, shape the way we work and lead. I'm Stephen, joined by my co-host Mike today, and our special guest. So in a world overflowing with data, many organizations forget a simple truth. People do not move without a story. Ideas need narrative to gain traction. And we talk a lot about building emotional connection and how important that is in our marketing and internally with your team. And today we're exploring how storytelling and community building intersect in business with our guest. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (0:57)
Yeah, to do just that, Stephen, our guest today is Gavin McMahon. He's an engineer turned storyteller, author, CEO, and co-founder of Fassforward. And that's F-A-S-S, forward and story business. Now, interesting as well, like Gavin began his career building submarines, sports cars, and steel plants.
But over time, he realized that business success is not just about really execution, it's about persuasion and narrative, really the human connection that's created. With an MBA in innovation strategy and information technology, Gavin as well now helps companies shape their strategy, their leadership and the culture through this key of storytelling. He believes that even the best ideas go nowhere unless they're told well. Gavin, we are so delighted to have you on the show today. Welcome to our show.

**Gavin McMahon** (2:02)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:05)
Gavin, your work shows that stories are not just nice to have, accessories, but are foundational, right? Why do you believe storytelling is essential to building connection in business?

**Gavin McMahon** (2:19)
I think, so when I was researching the book, I watched a conference that Shonda Rhimes, who did Grey's Anatomy and all those TV shows, she was speaking at a A16Z conference, so speaking to Silicon Valley, and she was talking about the power of storytelling. And in one moment, she turned around and said, the best television show that I've ever seen is this show called Dark. It's a German TV show. It's on Netflix, if anyone's interested. There's a line in that show, so I obviously went down this bunny trail because I was watching this, and there's a line in the show where one character says to the other, the truth is the story we tell ourselves.
That's just stuck with me ever since because I do think it's true. It explains a lot of the politics in any country. It explains the politics in an organization. It explains why people make decisions a certain way because we're all telling ourselves stories. As I went down that bunny trail, I came across a neuroscientist called Friedrika Fabricius, and she talks about the systems in our heads and how they work. I am full disclosure, not a psychologist or a neuroscientist, but she talks about this idea that we all have a narrative network. That's the parts of our brain that light up when we're just on idle, when we're not really doing anything. The narrative network basically puts us at the center of the universe. We are always the hero of our own story, and all we're doing, and the people listening to this podcast now will be doing the same thing, they'll be thinking, what has this got to do with me? And so we live in this world surrounded by stories, and I was trained exactly the opposite way, where it's not that the universe is made up of atoms, but as the poet Muriel Rukhiza said, the universe is made up of stories. So I think that's the fundamental thing. When you talk about connection, we're really trying to connect a lot of different people who are all the center, the hero of their own stories. And I think that's foundational.

**Mike Liwski** (4:37)
It's interesting. Yeah, maybe let's talk a little bit more about the people part, because that seems key to the story. As we mentioned in the intro, you used to build pretty complex things like submarines and steel plants. But once the people kind of entered into the equation, I'm curious, like, how did that exactly shift, or maybe perhaps inform your philosophy around storytelling?

**Gavin McMahon** (5:04)
Well, it takes, it took a long time, honestly, for me.
I was, for a long time, I believed the world was a meritocracy. If you just work hard, if you just do the right thing, it will work out. And I think, in some ways, I say this jokingly, my parents lied to me because they basically told me that. And I believed it. And I believed it probably well into my, at least my early 30s. And I became an engineer. I studied engineering at university, became an engineer. I worked in the defense industry. And you were just working with things. My first real experience of working with things and people was, I was working in Africa and we were building a steel plant. I built the steel plant. I'd left. And then I was asked to come back and run the company. And when you're an engineer, you think about, I have a plan. We're going to do it this way. And then everything should go according to plan because that's how I thought about it. And you're always just breaking down problems and fixing things and rebuilding things. That's just how engineers think. And so they get, as an engineer, I'm going to speak for all engineers and massively stereotype, which I shouldn't do.