Tell me a story, Uncle Businessman

If your job has anything to do with vision, leadership, business growth, external sales, internal sales, marketing, or PR, then there is one skill you cannot live without:

You must have the ability to tell a good story.

Your company's vision is a story. It's the story you tell your staff, the story you tell your customers, and the story you tell your investors. Most of all, it is the story you tell yourself.

If you want to communicate your vision and lead your staff to its achievement, you MUST have the ability to make your story compelling and tell it effectively. You must have the ability to get them to buy into the story and to care about what you are trying to accomplish together. That is the primary purpose of a vision: to create a unifying, galvanizing, shared story.

And it's not just business leaders who need the ability to tell stories. If you ever deliver presentations or create reports, you're in the process of telling a story. Doing it well will have a dramatic impact on how your message is received.

So how do you do it well?

1. Tell the story backwards.

   Start with the most exciting bit, and progress down the "interest chain" to the least exciting bit.

   This is different to what we expect in stories; in most movies and books, suspense builds until the end. Even movies that start at the end, like Memento and House of Sand and Fog, still build up to a dramatic conclusion.

   Unlike movies, in business stories there are three things you have to remember: we are all busy people, and we are all inherently self-interested, and we are all being overwhelmed with information from all directions at all times. So if you want to get my attention and hold it, you have to play your high card first.

2. Take out all the irrelevant bits, and then remove the unnecessary ones.

   David Koretz, the CEO of BlueTie, wrote a great article a few months ago called Every Word Matters:

   Nobody cares about your product. Sorry, but they don't care about your technology either. I come from the software business, where it is common to have a 45-slide deck that is 43 slides of technological garbage. Customers do not buy technology or products, they buy benefits and solutions to their problems. Take the number of technology slides in your current pitch and cut it in half. Then cut it in half again. Use those slides instead to tell them why they should care.

   In order to figure out whether a part of your story is irrelevant or unnecessary, you have to do something that can feel quite unnatural: you have to put yourself in your audience's shoes. Is this something they will care about? Why? How does it affect them? Do they need to know the detail in order to get excited about the story?

   No matter how interesting something is to you, leave it out if you don't think your audience will care.

3. Don't be afraid to make it personal.

   My friend Melissa is one of only two New Zealanders trained to deliver Al Gore's Climate Project presentation from the movie An Inconvenient Truth. I went to watch her speak last night.

   In a consistently compelling presentation, the moment that truly stood out for me had to do with how she got involved in this work in the first place. She described taking her eight-year old daughter snorkeling for the first time and the two of them following some turtles around underwater -- a magical experience. Then she said, "It struck me that I didn't want to have to tell her daughter that there used to be turtles."

   It may have lost something in my retelling, but at that moment I got a chill down my spine, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. All of a sudden, this massive, impersonal, abstract issue of climate change gained a laser focus. This child. This grandchild. They're why we need to care.

   This is a direct follow-on to the previous point: most of us don't understand or care about an abstract shift in CO2 parts per trillion, but we can understand and care about our own children.

The next time you have to communicate a big idea, whether it's to your staff or your superiors or your peers or your customers, think about the story you are telling. Think about how to make it compelling and why your audience should care. Then invite them to curl up next to you with a mug of hot cocoa.

It's story time.