7. The ABT dynamic is ubiquitous

First, we have the world of storytelling, in which we see that the ABT structure of And, But, Therefore is ubiquitous, as we’ll explore in Chapter 3.

Then there’s the business world. A few years ago I presented the ABT at a workshop for Deloitte executives. One of them asked, “Is this the same thing as how we structure our case studies in the business world as ‘situation, conflict, resolution’?” Yes, absolutely.

Then take a look at the basics of argumentation. My friend Gerald (“Jerry”) Graff, senior statesman of the humanities world, is the co-author, with his wife, Cathy Birkenstein, of one of the best-selling textbooks of all time. The book is about the use of templates for argumentation. It has sold over 2 million copies and is used in college classes on comparative literature, rhetoric, and English in general.

The title is They Say, I Say. Those are the first two elements of the triad. It’s the simplest, clearest, most effective way to present an argument. First you present what we can agree is the argument of your opponents, then you present how your argument contradicts it. And then you pull the two together with the synthesis, which is the “therefore.”

Now think about comedy. The standard joke consists of a setup (Man walks into a bar), the twist (the bartender is a duck), and punchline (insert funny thing duck says here). Comedians live and die by the ABT, whether they realize it or not (we’ll explore this in Chapter 3 and see that they adhere to the ABT dynamic better than anyone).

As for science: They discovered the triad structure long ago, as I talked about in detail in my Houston book. In the 1600’s, scientists initially tried to communicate with the AAA structure; they wrote papers that were just streams of information. But by the 1800’s their papers began to take on the ABT structure. Today almost all scientific journals follow some version of the IMRAD template which stands for Introduction (agreement), Methods, Results (contradiction), And Discussion (consequence). It’s a pure expression of the three narrative forces.