Storytelling: Taking You In To Familiar Experiences
Anjali Sharma
Director of Narrative
Published Date
November 8, 2017
There is senior management meeting coming up and a fairly strong presenter has been chosen to lead the presentation. A day before the presentation I am sitting with the entire team who is responsible for managing the upcoming presentation to the management
The presentation serves the purpose of making a case on why the organisation needs to curate a Change Story for a major change they are going through. This change is SMART FACTORY CHANGE
The team is prepared, they have relevant content but their delivery needs work.
Here are just a couple of practical tips that I gave the team and saw a remarkable change in their effectiveness.
Announcing Categories : The presenter has to give reasons on why their manufacturing output has increased drastically over the years. He starts by saying, " the market has changed, so we have to change ." This sounds like a set of words that can be easily ignored.
I asked the presenter to say something like this instead
" There are three key reasons for the increased output demand we are experiencing".
Why does putting things in categories work?
Because it informs the listener to look out for 3 reasons.
Because it shows how confident, clear and articulate you are about your content and delivery.
Because it instills faith in management and teams that we are in good hands i,e builds your credibility.
Because it avoids cognitive load ( a load on brain when we do information dump)
Because it gives details of what exactly has changed in the market that led to the change.
Take them in to Familiar Experiences : The presenter was brave enough to not use powerpoint crutches but at one stage of the presentation he says" The number of semi conductor chips in the car are a lot more than they used to be and that is one of the reason why the demand has increased. "
Once again a set of words that can be easily ignored.
How about we say something like this,
" Not that long ago, when we needed to reverse park our cars we had to be skilled enough to do it without bumping in to anything but now we have reverse park sensors that help us park our cars safely. As soon as we are close to something we hear beep beep beep.... Our semi conductor chips are the reason why these reverse car park sensors work. Over the years cars have a lot of added features, all supported by our semiconductor chips"
At this stage if you can show this visual on the screen it will help reinforce your point. The visual demonstrates all the features the car has now.
Most people have experienced reverse carpark and enhanced features of a car.
When you take your audiences in to a familiar experience via storytelling it sticks, it resonates and it makes sense. Not just to you but to your audiences too.
Please take note that this blog post will only make sense to you if you have attended our Signature Workshop - Strategic Storytelling Welcome back, workshop alumni! You've mastered the art of building a powerful storyboard, meticulously crafting each element of your narrative. Now, it's time to bring that vision to life with the help of Gen AI. This post will guide you through using AI to...
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