Story Arcs - keeping messages simple

Story Arcs - keeping messages simple

My last post: read here:FEIP. Was about practicing new things. Today I’d like to tackle one of the how’s. Specifically story telling.

Have you ever been in an interaction where you’re sure the audience has tuned out? Would you like to be more relevant and have more productive interactions? if so, read on.

TLDR summary:

  • Story telling helps to connect, learn, teach, and retain information
  • Story telling is a framework for communication 30 sec, 3 min, 30 min
  • Well prepared stories that are relevant connect you to the audience and earn the right to learn about them and paraphrasing the story back to them confirms understanding
  • Learning the details of challenges allows you to teach or validate a solution to the challenges with measurable benefits
  • The story of your interaction will be better retained due to the connection of the people to the ideas and the data.

Story telling is universal. It doesn’t matter what you do or what information is involved stories resonate with people, they are compelling, and importantly help people learn, teach and retain information. Consider how stories have been used to pass down information from generation to generation throughout history.

My goal is to encourage the use of a simplified story arc as a framework for your thoughts and data for use in interactions so that you can share your ideas and have them remembered, earn the right to ask questions and understand your audience better and build the relationship to a trusted status.

The challenges associated with most interactions are related to mindshare, attention, and retention. Said another way is someone willing to listen, for how long, and will they remember what has been shared. This goes both ways. 

The solution I’m advocating today is use of story telling to earn the right to ask questions, story telling to show you’ve been listening, and story telling as a framework for planning interactions that is simple effective and something you can practice.

The benefit of story telling as a framework is better interactions, that are more impactful for you and your audience and more productive as information will be retained better.

You might have caught on to the format above. Goal, Challenge, Solution, Benefit. This is a simplified arc for story telling. 

If you’re interested in more information you can start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

Joseph Campbell’s research has been integral in the formulas used by great story tellers like Pixar and in the business world I’d suggest TED talks are a great example of story telling. Today I’m advocating we can use a simple story arc not only as a framework for interactions but to build those interactions through preparation.

Tons of research shows that story telling is an effective way to share information so that others retain it. Here’s a great article on the topic from Harvard business publishing: https://www.harvardbusiness.org/what-makes-storytelling-so-effective-for-learning/ stating that story telling connects people and also people and ideas. 

I’d like to cover 3 concepts of time and story. 

  1. The first 30 seconds of an interaction
  2. The first 3 minutes of an interaction
  3. The entire 30 minute interaction (assuming this as the length)

Let’s return to my story for today we’re looking to gain mindshare, retain attention, and both learn and teach during an interaction. To reach those goals i believe that you have to earn the mindshare and the attention of your audience. Once you have done that you have earned the right to ask questions and learn about the audience and also teach them new information that holds value and to increase the retention of the information we use stories.

The first 30 sec of an interaction. 

Most of the research i see online argues attention span is less than 10 seconds now. I’m not going to tackle digital marketing so I’d like to focus on another point of data. Typically in a conversation there is a lull every 7 minutes while I’ve never timed a lull i do know they happen from experience. Regardless of how long attention span is or when a conversation naturally pauses it’s fair to say we’ve all experienced these phenomenon. So my argument is not about statistics rather preparation. Earn the mindshare, and attention resulting in learning, teaching, and retention. In a nutshell i believe you can extend attention span if you have earned that attention.

In our work...

As the audience; you are looking for relevance to pay attention and in business that relevance has a lot to do with title, industry, vertical etc. do you know my business or businesses like mine and can you show that you understand the challenges that we are facing? If so, you just might earn the right to discuss solutions to overcome challenges and return benefits.

The first 30 seconds can be a short story. Let’s say you have 30 min to speak to a new customer you’ve never interacted with before. Are you going to start talking about your company profile? I can tell you from experience being in an audience that if things start about how great they are I’m out before things begin. I might politely listen but I’m likely tuned out trying to solve problems.

So here’s my pitch the goal for the first 30 seconds is to prove you have enough information to your audience to be relevant, the challenge is that you have a short period, the solution is a short story of how you’ve worked with others like your audience, and the benefit is gaining their attention.

My preferred structure, show you understand the challenges they face. In our work with other [title of audience] of [vertical] the top 3 challenges for [our topic] they face are? 1, 2, 3 and they solved these challenges using [people, process, technology] yielding benefits of money, time, efficiency (something measurable).

If you’ve done your research you’ll have earned yourself the right to ask if they are facing similar challenges and what the current priorities are. Not a bad start.

The first 3 min. 

Now that you’ve accomplished the first goal of getting mindshare it’s time to build on the attention you’ve earned.

In the first 3 min we can use the same framework to share more details about one customer specifically. So now we’re telling a specific story where the customer had a goal, a challenge, a solution(s) that yielded benefits. For example: say reducing security incidents via email by a measurable amount each quarter to show the board, the challenges were legion and specifically the employees opened email, clicked on links and attachments no matter how much awareness training was given and the senior executives were the worst offenders. The customer managed to solve this particular problem using a combination of CDR (content disarm and reconstruction) and preventative sandboxing which blocked malicious files from reaching the end users while maintaining user experience. The benefit was clean attachments being delivered to end users before they could click on a malicious file and web security prevented users from giving information to phishing websites, drive by malware and downloading malicious content from the web reducing incidents by 90% via email all reportable in summary format to the board. 

Does this story sound compelling? Not only is it real take note that no vendor is mentioned in that story it’s all about the audience. Did they use our technology? Absolutely. In this 3 mins you’ve earned the right to talk about solutions and how you’ve helped other customers while learning more details about the audience and their specific needs.

The whole 30 min interaction. 

Now that we’ve gained mindshare and earned the attention of the audience we’ve been able to share some real outcomes. We have the opportunity to learn more about the specifics of the customer. 

This is where I’d like to pause and talk about the two-way nature of story telling. Earlier i mentioned that interactions go both ways. After sharing in the story format you earn the right to ask for the audiences story or part of it and when things go well you’ll be able to agree on a problem statement. I’m suggesting the model of share, ask, agree. In active listening one of the best ways to show you’ve not only heard but understood is to paraphrase back to the audience and this can be in the form of a story as well. Seems to be a pattern forming =).

You might have caught on to the 90% reduction in the 3 min story and might be wondering about the other 10%. Let me bring you back to the statement about the worst offenders; the senior executives. Turns out even before mobility was a big thing for all employees, executives typically had looser policies applied to them and often used non-managed devices. My favorite story is about an executive who received a phishing email, tried to click it, sent to personal email and tried to click it, tried on mobile device to click it, and then forwarded to his assistance and asked her to click it. She was very sharp and knowing what it was simply responded that she had opened the attachment and it was nothing that needed his attention. Crisis averted.

So in paraphrasing the issue of the other 10% I understood there was a subset of users with more access and lighter policies due to the nature of their work and they needed a solution that could address unmanaged devices as well.

I got a yes and so how did we solve the other 10%? Wonderful question let me tell you a story.

I want to reduce email incidents to close to zero or practically to a number that my small team of security administrators can handle. The challenge is the first project only covered managed devices on networks the customer controlled so attachments were being cleaned but what about links to external sources from unmanaged devices. The solution was to secure those devices such that the device was not compromised using a trade-off you can connect your device to the network resources (email) if you use the small application that secures your device from attacks including phishing. The second component was to use DLP (data loss prevention) that would prevent the sending of emails to personal accounts without authorization. This maintained user experience, freedom, and reduced the incident load to less than 5 per day for the entire company.

At the end of our interaction i had told 3 stories and my audience had told me a few stories as well. We were able to confirm my understanding of their stories (paraphrasing the story) and agree on the problem as well as possible solutions.

We took notes of course and I also learned that the stories told were shared internally as confirmation that the information was relevant and retained. Mission accomplished they trusted me enough to share the story and solution internally.

If you skipped to the end I summarize in this way:

  • Story telling helps to connect people, learn, teach, and retain information
  • Story telling is a framework for communication consider: 30 sec, 3 min, 30 min
  • Well prepared stories that are relevant connect you to the audience and earn the right to learn about them and paraphrasing the story back to them confirms understanding
  • Learning the details of challenges allows you to teach or validate a solution to the challenges with measurable benefits
  • The story of your interaction will be better retained due to the connection of the people to the ideas and the data.

next time I’ll talk about more about listening and asking questions as a key skill for everyone.


Tony Jarvis

CISO advisor | Cybersecurity strategy | Cloud and Zero Trust | Keynote speaker

3 年

Understanding the importance of storytelling was instrumental in my being able to better relate to audiences. While I regard The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the gold standard, I typically use the McKinsey Situation-Complication-Resolution (SCR) Framework for brevity.

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