Storytelling in business is an open field. In most facets of commerce, the field is crowded, established foes are entrenched behind high protective walls and as far as you can see it is all red ocean. Presenting however is all blue ocean because most business leaders hardly even get their toes wet. They dismiss being able to present in a professional manner as fluff, smoke and mirrors, all show and no substance, inconsequential. Their approach to speaking in public is that the audience are only there for the data, statistics, the latest information and the delivery is irrelevant. If possible, they prefer to avoid the whole affair because it is painful for them. Being persuasive however has never gone out of style in business and that is a universal and timeless truth.
Being persuasive has many aspects, such as understanding who is going to be in the audience and determining what is the purpose of your talk. Are you there to inform, inspire, convince or entertain? Research teams and underlings are good at digging out different data points and the temptation is to throw these logs on the fire to heat up the audience. Nothing wrong with that except all of this data struggles to remain in the memory and it makes the whole talk crusty and dry, like week old bread left outside.
When we can wrap the information in a story we start to really motor with our audience. This delivery technique is tremendously impactful because it makes the information easy to remember and makes the message clear and attractive. Many business leaders however are never exposed to how to tell a story, so they have little idea where to start. I cannot tell a joke to save my life, but I can tell a story because I know structures, which make this process easy for me.
There are a number of steps.
We are fed a constant diet of professional storytelling in the media and there are always a number of key characters involved. Who will these characters be in our story? They could be the founder, members of the senior leadership team, researchers, scientists, clients, etc. If the main characters are well known to the audience then even better. Our object is to have those listening picture the face of that person in their mind. If I make Elon Musk the main character, then I am guessing that everyone can see his face in their minds eye. Maybe the company CEO or CFO is also so recognisable that the entire firm can see their face when they hear the name.What is going on in the background of this story? Why are the key points we are going to cover relevant? What is the driving the circumstances of this story’s punchline? When we describe the context we need some guideposts. When was it? Is this last month or two years ago? What was the season? Was it a February snowy day or a brutal Tokyo summer August day? Where was it? Are we in a boardroom in the HQ, a Hotel restaurant, a convention, a research lab? Which of the main characters were there at that moment? Remember our task is to transport our listeners to that key point in the story, to get them seeing the same scene we are describing in their mind. That requires that we paint the location and people with a series of word pictures.
Conflict/Opportunity. Every drama we see on television or at the movies and every novel we read, has this construct. The good guys and the bad guys are both there to create the tension in the drama. In our business story there will be protagonists. That may be the market, the currency, the competition, the regulator, the bank, the suppliers, the client, the government. Think about the recent supply chain issues. There are plenty of protagonists involved to explain why this phenomenon is impacting businesses.
It could be Covid or the war in Ukraine. It might be a technological breakthrough that destroys established players as Nokia found with the launch of the iPhone. We need to place the conflict inside the context we have described and make it clear how high the stakes are here, because that degree of tension is gripping. There has been no shortage of drama for my industry, the training industry, since Covid started. Probably none of us will have any trouble finding conflicts or opportunities to describe to the audience and we intertwine the main characters to make it real for the listeners.
This may be positive or negative, but there will be an outcome in the story. Even if the conclusion is that this is where we are at this point and here is what we expect to be coming down the pike, should there be no ultimate resolution at this juncture. We need to put a ribbon on the story however and tie it off, so it not just left hanging. The audience needs a finale of some sort or they are left feeling unfulfilled.
After having explained the context, the main protagonists, the drama of the conflict or opportunity and how it ended, we now proffer some insights. There is no doubt we love to hear the lessons from the train wreck more than the swan story about silkily gliding across the surface of the business context. If my speech is titled “How I made $100 million”, for most people, it will not be as attractive as the title “How I lost $100 million”. We all love a juicy business meltdown and all the drama which went toward creating that disaster. We do this so we can learn what not to do ourselves.
Everyone of us has amazing business stories inside us already. If we don’t have enough, relax, the universe will just keep minting them going forward. If you don’t have enough of your own, just start reading the business news and there you have a cornucopia of content to work with.
