Unleashing the power of storytelling

Storytelling has become one of the most critical power skills in business today. Without effective storytelling, groundbreaking ideas can fail to secure the support of their sponsors, reorganisations struggle to gain momentum amid sceptical employees and high-value sales proposals that had taken weeks to prepare can fall short of closing a deal.

Storytelling is a powerful, analytical approach to frame and deliver a message. It enables you to convey complex ideas with simplicity, win the acceptance of others, speed up decision-making and demonstrate your contributions as a thought leader. It’s an instrumental skill both for the success of our businesses and our careers.

Seven steps to successful storytelling

Can anyone become a storytelling champion? Consider every story that you build to be a unique puzzle. The methodology outlined in this article is your solutions guide. The seven steps are easy to assimilate and suit the needs of business, scientific and other industry domains.

Step one – defining the vision: Start by asking yourself the question “what outcome should result from building and delivering this story?”. It may sound trivial but it’s where many stories go wrong. “To inform a client about the benefits of our new service offering,” would be a weak vision as it describes an action, not an outcome. “To secure our client’s interest in our new service offering and to agree on the next steps”, would be much more on-point. Two vision statements that would result in two different stories. Set the right scope and ambition level in your vision, as everything that you build into the story will point back to it.

Step two – understanding your audience: Achieving some degree of intimacy with your audience will be essential to capturing their attention. Do you know who they are? What’s important to them? Their environment? Their challenges? Whether dealing with internal or external audiences, a simple profiling exercise will do the trick. Then, weave these insights into the fabric of your story. It will have a fundamental impact on their reactions when your story is delivered.

Step three – framing the problem: Many of the issues that we build stories to address are vaguely specified from the outset. That makes it difficult to build a story that’s guaranteed to hit the target. If you’ve ever prepared material for your boss and she responded, “This is good, but it’s not exactly what I had in mind…” you have fallen into this trap. We need to frame the problem before we can address it with accuracy. Techniques such as the ‘logic tree’ can be used for this purpose.

Step four – constructing a story framework: This is an important analytical exercise that ensures that a story will be robust and defensible. Created using a combination of logical (deductive and inductive) arguments, the framework provides both a solid flow and the required supporting structures. You wouldn’t build a skyscraper without a solid architectural blueprint and storytelling works in much the same way. The framework can then be translated into any delivery format required; a document, presentation or verbal dialogue.

Step five – preparing an engaging delivery: The all-important narrative is where you bring your story to life, engage your audience and win their support. Accomplished storytellers use a rich selection of techniques, such as linguistic structures to accelerate comprehension and emotional triggers to influence feelings and audience reactions. Support material must be concise, not busy and hero the most important messages. In addition, the use of strong titles plays a fundamental role in documents and presentations.

Step six – visualising data: Data can play an important role in business communication, but it’s the author’s responsibility to decide the story that it should tell. Psychology plays an important role dictating the relationships between the iconic, working and long-term memories. The use of some simple best-practices will immediately elevate the role of data in a story.

Step seven – delivering the story: Whether in-person or over virtual media, your ability to lead your audience is an important delivery skill. A wide variety of techniques can be applied, from vocal modulation to the creation of on-stage presence. When dealing with a critical audience, the smooth handling of questions is essential to winning their respect and you must be ready to handle the unexpected. Priorities may have shifted at the last minute and people may be resistant to new ideas or bring political agendas. It’s good planning, plus your flexibility in dealing with these obstacles that will navigate you to a successful outcome.