“Form ever follows function.” - Louis Sullivan
You've heard it said, "Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to engage, influence or persuade your audience." We've probably said it ourselves a few thousand times.
It makes sense until you actually have to use one. That's when the questions begin. Where do I find a story? Which one should I tell?
And one of the most practical: how many stories do I need? Do you open with one? Is the entire presentation supposed to be a story? Can you tell more than one?
My response is usually a helpful, “All of the above.” My partner would probably answer with the universal truth, “It depends.” He'd be right.
A story can do different jobs in a presentation. It can give people a reason to listen to you. It can set up an argument. It can make an unfamiliar idea easier to understand. Or it can carry the argument itself. And your presentation may require you to do more than one of these.
The easiest way to see this is through three examples.
Data Presentation When Swedish researcher Hans Rosling gave a talk about the relationship between GDP and infant mortality, he opened with a two-minute story about teaching Swedish students. The story established his credibility as a public-health researcher and introduced an idea that would run through the rest of the talk: “...the problem wasn’t ignorance; it was preconceived notions”.
Then he moved to the data. For the next 15 minutes, the data—how infant mortality changed with increasing GDP—itself became the story, rendered in Rosling’s inimitable style.
Two stories to do two different jobs. One to deliver the core premise and another to challenge and educate the audience’s perception of nations.
Fireside Chat Now compare that with Pixar founder Ed Catmull talking to Stanford students about working with Steve Jobs.
He opens his story asking Jobs what happens when someone disagrees with him. Jobs replies, “I just explain it to them until they understand.”
From there, Catmull describes what disagreeing with Jobs actually looked like: make an argument, have it shot down, wait a week, come back with a counterargument, sometimes for months. And one of them defers to the other and if they don’t, Jobs “just let me do it my way. Never say anything more about it.”
In about three minutes, Catmull uses exactly as much narrative as he needs to make his point.
Keynote Talk Finally, consider surgeon and writer Atul Gawande explaining why modern medicine needs to work more like a system.
Over the course of his talk, he moves between several stories and examples. He takes us back to what medicine looked like in 1937, tells us about a surgeon in Cedar Rapids who discovered how many CT scans his community was doing, and describes his own work with the World Health Organization to develop a surgical checklist.
These sit alongside data, argument and a recurring analogy: doctors have been trained to be cowboys when modern medicine increasingly needs pit crews. Near the end, Gawande tells us about meeting an actual cowboy who describes the protocols, constant communication and checklists they now use. “Even the cowboys are pit crews now.”
Gawande’s talk is filled with several stories and examples, each doing a specific job within a larger argument.
Once you know what you need a story to do, how many you need becomes much easier to answer.
Watch It In Action
Hans Rosling uses one story to prepare us for another. Ed Catmull moves almost imperceptibly between anecdote, story and observation. Atul Gawande moves between stories, examples, data and analogy to build a larger argument.
Try This Week
Before your next presentation, look at it before you go looking for a story.
Where could a story do useful work? Do you need to establish why this audience should listen to you? Make an unfamiliar idea easier to grasp? Help people see the problem differently? Make the case for action?
Then consider the audience, what you want them to do, and how much time you have.
You may need one story. You may need several. You may not need one at all.
From Elsewhere
In Japanese rock gardens, karesansui, raked gravel represents flowing water and placed stones represent mountains or islands — nothing in the garden is literal, yet the arrangement is precise enough that visitors read the intended meaning without being told. The craft lies entirely in choosing which elements to include and which to leave as empty gravel. More on karesansui here »