Storytelling for business means influencing and/or persuading a decision-maker to think, feel, or do something.
The key use case for storytelling for business is the presentation. There are many kinds of presentations, e.g. formal speeches to a big group, quick presentations to a small group, meetings where you’re socializing an idea, or just hanging out and talking with colleagues (and really socializing an idea).
The idea is to tell the decision-maker’s story – rather, to deeply embed their story – inside your presentation in a way which helps you realize your objective. What makes this challenging is that the decision-maker’s story is variable:
- Decision-makers can be living more than one story at a time.
- Stories change when decision-makers overcome certain obstacles and a new (perhaps not clearly identified) obstacle takes priority.
- Market conditions evolve and other external events can disrupt and change the story you intended to tell.
The question is… in a world where the decision-maker’s incentives may be unclear, where you have incomplete information, and you’re under time pressure… how do you determine the decision-maker’s story?
Often, the decision-maker’s story is not an easy puzzle to solve.
This is why I teach storytelling using story puzzles. They are a way to practice identifying puzzle pieces and using the principles of storytelling to determine which pieces you need and how they fit together.
That, essentially, is the method. You look at all of the puzzle pieces you have, all of the story DNA, and you try them out in different configurations, following the key principles of singularity, priority, and equivalency. When you’ve got something that fits together and makes your gut tighten up, you’ve either got it or you’re on the right track.
So…
What you’re doing when you’re storytelling for business is expressing your objective in terms of the decision-maker’s story. As that story changes, your objective (or your strategy to express it) will likely need to change as well.