Grow your business: Stories can make your presentation come alive
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
China poured 6.6 gigatons of cement from 2011-2014. That fact is not the least bit disconcerting or informative, until you put it in perspective, as Bill Gates has done. He adroitly pointed out the United States had poured only 4.5 gigatons of cement, in the last one hundred years.
The initial facts about what China did, by themselves, is probably not considered remarkable until the context and the comparison behind them caused them to come alive. Then to further give us a visual of what 6.6 gigatons would look like, Rhett Allain of Science magazine, provided a visual that told the rest of the story. Allain proceeded to do the math representing the surface area of coverage for all that cement. When he finished, it was a picture of a parking lot roughly 10 inches thick that would cover the entire Big Island of Hawaii!
“According to the data” is how the sentence usually starts. Then the remaining sentences cover the specifics: ”inflation is up 3%” or “inflation is down 5%.” The key becomes the story behind the data, not the data itself.
You might think your upcoming presentation is perfect. You know your audience and the numbers you will be providing on each of the slides make sense to you. Well, according to Thomas Graeber of the Harvard Business School, you might want to tell a story or use an example to help them remember what you said. As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
According to Graeber, storytelling is one way to be successful in your investment pitches, marketing presentations, or monthly financial reports. His study entitled Stories, Statistics and Memory goes on to validate that a well told story or anecdote, is more memorable than a particular set of data or a PowerPoint graph. The main point of his study indicates that our memory is better when it comes to stories versus statistical data. He goes on to say, “But that doesn’t mean there’s no role for statistics; arguments and pitches that rely on data and numbers, can be more effective in some circumstances.” His main point is that stories have a tendency to aid personal recall as opposed to just using numbers which can be more abstract and harder to remember.
Chip Heath in his book Making Numbers Count has said “The supervillain in any communication domain…when experts (or people who know their business model) are asked to communicate something THEY understand intimately, they WILDLY overestimate how much of their mental model of the world is shared by their audience.” In other words, Heath is describing someone who wants to impress another person with their knowledge and assumes the recipient is able to understand what is being said. Many times stories or examples can help communicate better.
An owner of a technology firm told the story of being with a client, and asking them if there was any strength that had caused the client to stay with them for such a long time. After thinking about the question for a few seconds, the client responded with a resounding, “YES! You and your firm talked to us in terms and ways that we understood, not in some techno savvy mumbo jumbo that we did not understand. You used examples that we could relate to in our business, not just in talking about bits and bytes.”
Many people need to translate their knowledge to a level where the normal person can understand. For example, the catchphrase “We network networks” has allowed CISCO Systems to describe in very simple terms, actually in three words, what they do as a company.
Jill Schiefelbein, author of Dynamic Communication, and Melanie Deziel, a content expert and influencer, make a compelling case for storytelling and using data as an integral part of the process. In a presentation sponsored by Oracle Net Suite, they do a very good job of merging data and storytelling. Their primary encouragement is to start with the data and then develop a story to go along with it. They ask the question, “What is the hidden story in the dataset?” Then they stress how critical it is to use whatever “expertise and credibility” is at your disposal in order to develop the framework of a story around the data.
Regardless of your topic, there will usually be some form of data to be presented. Once you know the data, take a step back and think about how those numbers could be presented in a way that people will find, not only to be memorable, but allow them to remember your company and directly or indirectly help it grow.
