Story telling has been our means of delivering messages, educations, and entertainments since the inventions of written and verbal language. All of cultures have their way of telling stories. Ancient Egyptians crafted symbols in the wall as media for the stories to be remembered and messages to be planted in reader’s mind. The picture that depicts the story teller as the center figure in a circle of listeners can be found everywhere in every culture. In the later development, people not only delivered the narratives orally, but started using expressions, gestures, actions, and even puppets to create a dramatic effect of a story. Story telling has been essential and embedded in our civilization, second to our basic needs. It is difficult to imagine our life without any forms of story telling inside.

In business environment, we have realized the importance of story narratives in our presentation, yet most of the time, we forget. We focus on figures and statistics on our slides to the point that it becomes lifeless and flat. The historical facts that people are always attracted to story simply slipped our mind. The figures on the slides will get worse even when the presenter deliver it as it is: hard facts, statistics and numbers.

The presentation will be lively if the delivery is conducted in the same way as telling a story. Naturally as our ancestors have shown, the attention level will increase as what happens to our children when we tell them stories. The figures are now not only the facts but has some underlying interesting stories. Daniel H. Pink in his book “To Sell is Human” mentioned about different kinds of pitches, one of them is The Pixar Pitch which is basically the use of story as your pitch to sell your idea. Emma Coats, a former story artist at the Pixar Studio, shares the structure Pixar film has in common in delivering the story:

Once upon a time ………………. Every day, ………………………, One day ………………….
Because of that, …………………………. Until finally ………………….

Now, imagine we use the same structure to deliver our business presentation as shown in the sample below

In the beginning of this financial year, our monthly service revenue stayed roughly at the same level as in the last month of last year. We only saw marginal increase below 5%. But yet we had some strong pipelines that we began to develop in last quarter last year. Two of major deals in pipelines were coming near in January and after some final negotiations, we finally closed the deal in the same month and the revenue started flowing in March, right in the last month of Q1. Because of these deals, we started strong in Q2, until finally we overachieve our Q2 target with some additional figures enough to fill in Q1 revenue gap.

The impact of delivering this narrative presentation would be much more positive rather that simply stating figures and percentages. Better still if we can throw in some dramatic gestures and expressions during the narration as what the puppet master in a sunday market always does.

The same story telling techniques can be applied in other business aspects. Advertisement and promotion have been known as the biggest users of story. How many interesting and dramatic TV and radio ads have been constructed using a story. Printed media also uses the story regardless of its media limitation.

Rolf Dobelli, in his bestseller book “The Art of Thinking Clearly” introduces a Story Bias and how the background stories and side issues are prioritized over relevant facts. This is another proof of how heavy we are attracted to stories and that this tendency may create biased opinion.

We know how powerful effect a good story can bring. The excellent speaker is obviously an outstanding story teller who attracts a lot of crowds. Our business presentation will not be so boring if we say it in a story telling pitch. The most memorable TV, radio, and paper ads are those with background stories. Best teachers and lectures are those who tell stories to their students. My children used to ask me to tell them bedtime stories every night. They still do now. It is just that I am running out of stories to tell. With every story, I always try to associate it with some moral values that I hope they remember. On the other hand, as Rolf Dobelli has advised, when you hear a story, you should ask yourselves who is the sender and what he hides under the rug.

So when will you tell your next story ?