Storytelling- 3 tips from the pro's and 4 practical tips

Storytelling is an important business skill. A few months ago, I tried summarize what I knew about it. That summary wasn't very good. When you realize you can't explain it, you don't really know it.

As I thought more about it, it felt like there were two aspects to it-- techniques of the professional storytellers and practical tips to help with business storytelling.

We can learn from the professionals, but it is hard to implement those ideas in a business setting. Instead, we need to steal bits and pieces from the professionals to help with business storytelling.

These ideas are published in two blog posts.

In the first blog post, you can start to learn about professional storytelling from three sources: Kurt Vonnegut's famous "the shape of a story" 5-minute lecture, Mathew Dick's book Storyworthy where he gives tips for 5-minute Moth talks, and a famous fill-in-the-blank approach.

In the second blog post, you can find four tips that I've found useful for business storytelling. These include using examples, minimizing the introductions, using ideas from Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's book storytelling with data, and what I think is called the Challenger Model for framing a big story.