Being successful in business by being a better storyteller

Great movies, business presentations, and great speeches all have a common core and that is an emotional influence that you insert into your story that makes them memorable. In business understanding, the impact of emotional presentations is as important of a factor as the goal of the presentation.

Let's say you are pitching a Digital Transformation project to your customer in the middle of a pandemic. You are pretty excited about this big-ticket investment, which has the potential to solve remote-work challenges for reaching customers for your client and the ability to add to their bottom line.

However, your client's response to your presentation is lukewarm at best. You discover that business teams don’t share your excitement. The CIO is on your side but his team, burdened with multiple priorities, worries that this could lead to more work stress in this critical time. You truly believe that this project is just what this client needs to move forward and if they do not do this project they will certainly fall behind their competitors.

As consultants, we often find ourselves in this predicament. What should be our next step and how we should move forward?

Even the best-laid plans falter due to ineffective communication. Industry reports say that poor communication costs organizations over $37 billion annually. Yet, we don’t pay as much attention to fixing our communication woes be it internally or with clients.

We need to look at the similarities between blockbuster movies, stellar product launches, and successful marketing campaigns.

As Tech leaders we can learn a lot from expert storytellers. Expert storytellers have the ability to move us at our core by understanding the human factors.

Picture your all-time favorite movie. The chances are that you watched it a long time ago. But I can bet that it’s fresh in your memory like you saw it a few weeks ago. What makes these movies so memorable?

The power of stories to transfer information and define our own existence has been shown time and again. Stories are encoded in art, language, and even in mathematics and physics. We use equations to represent both simple and complicated functions that describe our observations of the real world.

We tend to prefer stories that fit into the molds which are familiar and reject narratives that do not align with our experience. It is the understanding of the emotional state of the person or persons you are trying to connect with during your presentation.

Researchers say that there is a deeper connection between great movies, speeches, and business presentations. It’s the narrative of the story or as they call it "shape of the story." The story's narrative is a series of emotional ups and downs in the story that hooks the audience, like a rollercoaster ride. The excitement that drives you to continue to read that book or not leave the couch because you want to know what happens next.

A plot in which a struggling boy reunites with his girl is cliched, but it never fails to work. Remember "Pretty Woman" or "The Notebook"? They play with the time-tested emotional narrative of "boy gets the girl." There are ups and downs in each of these stories. It is a very simple concept. Hallmark Channel has made this narrative a 24/7 movie channel concept based on the same narrative for almost Christmas, Fall, Summer, or winter movies. As viewers, we bite our nails when things fall into the negative. We cheer for the hero as he rises again to reclaim the girl, lifting the emotions high up again. If you look at some of the most-watched TV shows of movie’s they drive the same narrative. From Star Wars to Cinderella.

What’s the commonality across all of these? Each one of them uses a variation of the emotional narrative to take the audience through ups and downs.

MIT’s Lab for Social Machines and McKinsey Consumer Tech team studied thousands of Vimeo videos using advanced analytics to establish the connection.

Algorithms that use computer vision and audio analytics scored emotions for every scene, by the second. With the emotional arc for each story sketched out, they used machine learning to club them into eight families.

The final part of this analysis was to bring in the outcomes – user engagement metrics such as "likes" and "comments." The researchers found that the emotional arc of a story, generated by the AI algorithm, could predict whether or not audiences would like it.

How can you use this emotional narrative to be a better leader, a better communicator, or a better consultant?

1. You have to think beyond Technology. Think about how technology touches your audience. While talking about technology, we tend to focus more on its features. We do a good job of covering the "What" and "How" but miss out on the "Who" and "Why."

The journey to connect with your audience must start by first thinking about them. What are your client's needs and preferences? How do they get their job done, and what are their worst nightmares?

When the master storyteller Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, he didn’t talk about its cool engineering or the great design. Instead, he told the audience that they could now carry 1000 songs in their pocket. The focus was squarely on the users and their aspirations. He understood the emotional narrative of his customers and what they needed.

2. Think beyond the facts and what it is today. You should take your audience on a journey of what it could be. You have to show them the possibilities. You have to show them the utopia and put them in that world. The emotional narrative of your presentation has to talk to their emotional side. Make the audience experience the possibilities. Take them on the rollercoaster ride. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, people may forget what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel. Often, our communications are a dry recitation of facts, and that’s why they don’t connect. Messages delivered as stories are up to 22 times more memorable than just facts, said cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner. Good stories must paint a vivid picture of the scenes as they unfold. They must use words that convey powerful emotions to move people.

For example, when launching your presentation for digital transformation, don’t just quantify the pain areas. Get personal by picking a (fictional) user and show us her world. Explain how the challenges lead not only to lost business opportunities but to deep frustrations for the user. Tell her story from her view. Put your audience in her world like a good Sci-Fi book or a great love story. You have to make them feel her pain and what she deals with on a day to day basis.

Introduce your initiative as the hero that will save the day. Describe the outcomes and show how it will put this user out of their misery.

3. Think beyond the traditional narratives. Introduce variations to build an emotional narrative for your story. With a clear picture of the audience and an experiential message to connect with them, now make the story interesting by playing with its emotional narrative. Just as a musical note has crescendos and low points, you must introduce variations into your communication. Talk about the user's problems and how your hero comes in at the right moment when he is falling off the cliff and saves the day.

Think about your last presentation, did it have any variations? Did you just sequence the good news and bad news? How did you conclude it? Most of our presentations are informative but sequential, and...boring. The insights are arranged logically but fail to connect emotionally.

View your communication as a series of sections, like the chapters of a novel. In each section, introduce elements of suspense and tease out the resolution. Repeat this structure iteratively to keep your audience hooked.

Finally, end on a high with a vivid call-to-action to stir your audience towards the next steps.

Also, remember that all stories improve through iterations. Take time crafting and critiquing them. Test them out on friends, peers, and sample audiences. Take detailed feedback on what worked and where it needs to get tighter. Then incorporate changes and repeat it all over again.