Before committing to a corporate-storytelling project, Jasper Claus poses three qualifying questions to clients and their colleagues. The questions diagnose whether the project is ready to produce kama muta or whether it will fall into the three pitfalls. The questions:1
Question 1. Are you aware that in a storytelling film you will not be able to include a lot of information?
Question 2. Are you okay with the relationship between story and your message being 90% / 10% in terms of screen time?
Question 3. Are you willing to include struggle and conflict into your story as long as it serves the feel-good ending?
Each question targets one of the three pitfalls. Question 1 surfaces information-overload risk. Question 2 surfaces message-versus-story-confusion risk and the 90/10 ratio commitment. Question 3 surfaces negaphobia risk.
If the client answers yes to all three with genuine understanding, the project is ready to rock and roll in Claus's framing. If the client cannot honestly say yes to any of the three, the project will fall into that pitfall and the affective outcome will not be produced.
The three questions form a compressed pre-project diagnostic.
Question 1 — information awareness. The client must understand that the film will not include comprehensive information about the brand, the product, the company history, the certifications, etc. The film will deliver one message via one story. If the client expects comprehensive information, the project will collapse into pitfall 1.
Question 2 — ratio acceptance. The client must accept that 90% of the runtime goes to story and 10% (or less) to message. If the client wants more message-screen-time, the kama-muta production will fail (per the 90/10 ratio's empirical guarantee). The acceptance must be genuine, not nominal.
Question 3 — darkness permission. The client must permit struggle and conflict in the story, with the understanding that the dark content serves the feel-good ending. If the client cannot tolerate dark content, the bathtub-shape cannot operate and kama muta cannot be produced.
The cognitive mechanism: each question targets a predictable client-resistance pattern that produces a specific pitfall. The three questions collectively cover the three pitfalls. Asking the questions upfront surfaces the resistances at the conception stage when they can still be negotiated.
The questions are binary — yes or no answers. The binary framing prevents soft acceptance (the client saying yes without genuine commitment). The storyteller can ask the questions, observe the client's reaction, and assess whether the yes-answer is genuine or performative.
If a no-answer comes back, the storyteller can either (a) educate the client about why the discipline is necessary and re-ask, or (b) decline the project. Both options are operationally available; both are sometimes the right choice.
The qualifying questions operationalize the three pitfalls as a pre-project diagnostic protocol. The three questions correspond one-to-one to the three pitfalls.
The questions support the True Storytelling Method by surfacing client-commitment to the method's discipline before project-commitment. Clients who pass the qualifying questions are ready to operate within the method; clients who fail are not.
They connect to research as cliche prevention indirectly — clients who accept the discipline of the qualifying questions are also more likely to accept the research-investment the cliche-prevention requires.
Before committing to a corporate-storytelling project, schedule a client-meeting to ask the three questions. Frame them as qualifying — I want to make sure we're aligned on what storytelling-craft requires before we commit to the project. Ask each question and observe the answer. Assess whether the yes-answers are genuine. If all three pass, proceed with the project. If any fail, either educate-and-re-ask or decline.
You committed to a project without asking the qualifying questions and the project fell into a pitfall. The fix is to add the qualifying questions to your standard client-engagement protocol going forward.
The client answered yes to the questions but later resisted the discipline. The yes-answer was nominal rather than genuine. The fix is to refine the question-asking process — probe the answers more deeply, ask follow-up questions that surface genuine understanding.
You declined a project based on the questions and later regretted it. Sometimes the right call is decline. Other times the right call is education-and-re-ask. The judgment varies by project. The fix is to develop calibration over many client-engagements.
The qualifying-questions practice is a specific case of upstream client-commitment-checking practices that have been formalized across professional-service fields where misaligned client-engagements produce predictable failure-modes.
Legal practice / engagement-letter due diligence: Lawyers conduct upstream due-diligence before accepting cases — assessing whether the client understands what the case will require (timeline, evidence-burden, deposition-discipline), whether they are committed to the process (willing to invest the resources required), whether they will accept the legal-strategy the lawyer recommends (rather than insisting on alternative strategies the lawyer considers less likely to succeed). The structural parallel to Claus's qualifying questions is direct — both fields recognize that taking on a client who is not committed to the discipline produces failed engagements regardless of the professional's technical skill. Pairing legal due-diligence with corporate-storyteller-craft: legal practice has formalized the engagement-letter as a written commitment document the client signs before the work begins, locking the client's acceptance of the conditions. Storytellers could productively develop a storytelling engagement letter that the client signs after passing the qualifying questions, making the client's commitment to the three disciplines explicit and harder to walk back during the project.
Therapy / treatment-commitment assessment: Clinical psychologists conduct upstream commitment-assessment before starting therapy — assessing whether the patient is ready to engage with the difficult material therapy will require, whether they are willing to do the inter-session homework, whether they will tolerate the discomfort of the therapeutic process. Patients who fail the assessment are sometimes referred to less-demanding intervention forms (medication-only, support-groups, lifestyle-coaching) rather than enrolled in therapy that the assessment predicts will fail. The parallel to corporate-storytelling: not every project is ready for the True Storytelling Method's discipline; declining-or-referring is sometimes the right call. Pairing therapeutic commitment-assessment with corporate-storyteller-craft: therapy has refined commitment-assessment methodologies (standardized intake-questionnaires, behavioral-prediction-criteria, multi-session evaluation periods) that supply more rigorous diagnostic instruments than Claus's three verbal questions provide. Storytellers can borrow the therapeutic-methodology depth to refine their own qualifying-questions practice over time.
Construction / scope-and-budget alignment meetings: Construction firms hold upstream alignment meetings to verify client understanding of scope (what specifically will be built), budget (what specifically will be spent), and timeline (when specifically will it be done) before breaking ground. Misaligned projects produce expensive failures downstream — buildings that exceed budget, take longer than planned, or do not match the client's actual desired-outcome. The construction-tradition has developed substantial protocols for the upstream alignment (the detailed-specification documents, the client-signoff procedures, the change-order processes for managing scope-shifts during construction). The pattern is the same as Claus's qualifying-questions practice — upstream alignment is dramatically cheaper than downstream remediation. Pairing construction with corporate-storyteller-craft: construction has formalized the change-order process — when the client requests changes during construction, the change-order document requires explicit acknowledgment of the scope-time-budget implications. Storytellers could productively develop story-change-orders for projects where clients request modifications mid-production, making the implications of the change explicit before the modification is accepted.
The Sharpest Implication The qualifying-questions practice implies that corporate-storytellers can substantially improve their hit-rate by declining projects that fail the questions, rather than accepting projects and hoping the discipline can be negotiated in later. The decline-rate may be uncomfortable in commercial terms (less revenue), but the success-rate on the accepted projects increases proportionally. Over years, the storyteller's reputation for producing kama-muta-films improves; the projects that come to the storyteller are increasingly the ones that pass the questions. The decline-discipline produces a virtuous cycle.
Generative Questions