"Our head of sales, Natalie is excellent.. and I wish everyone was like her." "Mariam is top of class in her grades, hope all students can become like her." "Sandy is a great writer, she always comes up with best articles." We have all heard such statements and perhaps rolled our eyes when listening to them too! Often the teller of these statements, boss, teacher, parent is of an opinion that, I...

Keeping a story dry simply means removing details from it. There are occasions in a corporate setting that demand a dry story. Last month I was working with a multinational food-products corporation in China. Along with my client Maria ( not her real name ) I was working on a story that could convey the following key message, Consumers prefer small brands when it comes to making food choices. Big...

For many, making a case and storytelling sit at two ends of the credibility spectrum. A common belief is that one is fact based and the other is made-up. This perception, reinforced by corporate communication experts couldn't be further from the truth. In case making, credibility plays a vital role. Credibility in a court is the degree to which the Judge or jurors believe a witness. For a...

France winning the Football World Cup after 20 years was the big news this week. As we watched the media tell the World Cup story of 11 triumphant French players, I am sure some of us noted that the rescue story of the 12 Thai boys and their coach from the Wild Boars Soccer team was disappearing from our screens. One big story replaced by another which in turn will be replaced by others, most not...

No matter how well known you are, if you are in going to a new country to work, creating a connection with people is an effort worth making. Of course it is easier said than done. A lot of us are unaware of effective strategies to create this connection. Many believe that the best way to create a connection is by telling a story about yourself. A story that reveals a character trait of yours...

I live in Singapore and one of the best things about living in Singapore is the cultural diversity you experience. As a resident, I enjoy this but as a working professional I have fallen on my face a few times because of this cultural diversity I am surrounded with. It is great to consume facets of cultural diversity but it is hard to cater to it. A few years ago I found myself in a workshop...

Story-eliciting is equally, if not more important than Storytelling. It gives you valuable insights. You agree that you have to talk less and ask a few more questions to elicit the right stories. But in your heart you are pretty sure you know the answer to the problem you are eliciting the stories for. You are experienced enough to know what could have gone wrong. So, you decide to hurry the...

A senior business leader who is known to be a tough taskmaster and results driven, is taking over a new team. This leader has a clear idea of how to transform the new team into a high performing team. She writes a set of clear key messages and is keen to tell the vision story to the team but no matter how smart this leader is and how strategic these key messages are, the team will not perform...

The Turkish Getup is an exercise, most commonly done with kettlebells, where you are required to lift the weight overhead whilst getting up from the ground. Unlike most weight lifting exercises, Turkish Get-Ups require you to remember a sequence. I think there are around 14 steps involved in doing one Get-Up. So, the real frustration in learning to effectively do Turkish Get-Ups is not the...

*We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that the $200 silver ring when put in a blue Tiffany box is worth $500. *We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is cooler than a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. *We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better than $20 unbranded... and believing it, makes it true. The list goes on and...

I am conducting a Data Storytelling Workshop for finance professionals who works at a MNC. Their slides are filled with information, so much information that it feels to me like a Slideument (Slide + Document). When asked, "Why do you have so much information on a slide that you are presenting?", their response was, "It's a template that I have to follow." Clearly, this person has fallen victim...

"We are a B Corp Organisation Anjali." This is what I heard from a client last week. Confused, I started to research on B Corp Organisations. After several hours of searching online, I found this 1min 57sec video which does a great job in explaining what a B Corp Organisation is. After watching this video, I was immediately reminded of a comment that PepsiCo Chairman and CEO, Indra Nooyi, made...

Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and most of the world's most inspiring speakers, do not use bullet points. Why don't they use bullet points? If you have bullet points, you are making the audience listen to you and read the bullet points. That creates cognitive load. *University of Washington biologist, John Medina, has done extensive research into persuasion and how the...

Sam and his team, having worked hard to find an insight from data that they have received from their ecommerce team, finally find a meaningful insight after weeks of slicing and dicing the data. Excited, they walk in to a presentation to share the insight. Their presentation is structured like this: - We are here to make the following suggestions for an ecommerce strategy - The reasons we are...

In B2B, the biggest story one aspires to create is, my boss is happy and shareholders are happy. It's the need to create this same story that sometimes leads the CFOs to emphasise on cost cutting, because they need to make sure that the boss and shareholders are happy. Cost cutting can improve short-term profits and boost the current share price, but are they long-term gains too? Let's talk about...

Words have always been the most natural way to tell stories. However, the rising importance of data has created a new need for us, which is to tell a story with numbers. Something that doesn't come naturally to us. We have always presented an analysis of numbers. Hence, we are great at analysing the data but not so great at being able to use the insights from our data analysis to influence people...

When Little MissMatched came with the idea of selling 3 socks that did not match, nobody knew that they would succeed the way they did. When a Fortune 500 company decided to launch Diversity and Inclusion Campaign video with a script that said, ‘Don't engage'. Don't get involved with diversity. It doesn't generate business, it complicates things, it forces you to confront different perspectives…...

Karen is responsible for Change Management in her organisation. Every time she announces a change initiative, there is group of people who would hijack her presentations. They question everything and anything which usually dampens the little enthusiasm that exists for change. This group of people are super smart people. Karen's biggest worry, for a long time before any change announcement, was...

"Please turn on TunnelBear (a secure VPN service) when you travel overseas and use hotel WiFi." This is what a well-wisher has been telling me for years and I have had a standard response to this advice, "Yes" but the truth is, I never turned TunnelBear on because it was an effort which I was being asked to make for something I didn't think was required. My assumption and belief was, the whole...

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft tells the story about his first round of interviews at Microsoft about 25 years ago. An up-and-coming Microsoft manager named Richard Tait asked Nadella a question. The question had nothing to do with coding or solving an engineering problem. Instead, Tait asked: "Imagine you see a baby laying on the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?" Nadella quickly...

Storytelling, the way its taught, coached, consulted and as a result practiced, is so focussed on telling the story (may be because its called story telling) that it lacks attention in an area that matters the most. Who is it for and what is their worldview? Currently this is how we think, What is the key message I need to communicate? And what is the story I can tell to communicate the key...

Here is great talk by Doug Lipman on three connection-building strategies that are hidden in Storytelling and the simple ways to unlock each of them. [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://narrative.com.sg/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/What-Can-Storytelling-Teach-Us-About-Creating-Connection-Doug-Lipman-TEDxWilmingtonSalon.mp4"][/video]...

When you sell, it's most likely that your preparation before communication with your customers starts with answering questions like these, So, what are we going to say? What are our unique selling propositions? How are we different from our competitors? These questions come naturally to our minds because of how we have been trained over the years. However, we are rarely taught about stories and...

What is Agile? What is fundamental to Agile? Does Storytelling play a role in making an organisation Agile? If these are the questions you are asking yourself, then this 2-minute read is for you. I remember watching a *video sometime ago, in which Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsico and Doug McMillon, Walmart President and CEO, were having a conversation on design. At one stage during the conversation...

Emphasis on Empathy is theoretically ( can't say practically ) gaining momentum in corporate settings. In his new book, Hit Refresh, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says his highest priority is renewing the company culture with "a growing sense of empathy." The word "empathy" appears 53 times in the book, but Nadella admits he didn't always have the empathy he does today. However, much like many...