The Sunday before last, 12 intrepid people honoured me by giving up their afternoon to explore the topic of story in business presentations.
I’d been marinating in research about storytelling for a few weeks, so on Sunday morning I put on my at-home glasses, sat on the sofa next to the cat and started gathering my thoughts.
In ten minutes I had this:
Story telling in business turns out to be more complex than I thought…
Expect some posts from me as I explore why it is that story makes people interesting, and also why we, at times, resist it.
My aim is to come up with some solid advice that means you can use story and anecdote without sounding like a vicar, ‘Something interesting happened to me on the way here this morning…’ or coming up with stretched metaphors, ‘And the spokes on the wheels of the bus are…’
Please don’t expect textbook advice. I’m more excited about putting some stuff out there that makes you share your thoughts, and together we can discover how this works.
Sound good?
In the meantime, here are some related posts on story:
~ Resources on story in business presentations
~ The president of East Timor is a great speaker
~ Learning storytelling from movies
Andrew,
When you’re setting out an a trip and you’re depending on a map (not a GPS), you circle your starting point and your destination. Then you select places along the way. You try to pick a variety of stops-food, history, nature, or others. Your goal is to make the route engaging, not necessarily the shortest distance.
That’s what adding stories to your presentations is like. You know where you want to go, you know where you’re beginning, and you know the key points that will get you from start to finish. Then you look for opportunities to add stories in front of your key points. You could always use a story for the attention-getting opening.
When you build a speech in a systematic way you pull the whole thing together as well as find places where stories are clearly a great fit.
As you say, the speaker needs to use their own stories. What I have found is that many specific stories can be matched to different key points. It depends on how you craft the story.