Storytelling

By John Clare

Have you ever seen a great presenter, up on stage or in a meeting, and wondered what makes them so good? Have you noticed the way they engage and inspire the audience?

Have you ever wished you could do that? Now you can!

This book reveals the presenter's secret weapon and puts it in your hands:

Storytelling.

It shows you how to stop reading slides and start telling stories that make an impact in any business situation. It's packed with techniques and examples that you can start using today.

John Clare has been telling stories for more than 40 years. He's been a journalist, documentary maker and a presentation coach to some of the world's biggest companies. This book gives you the benefit of all that experience.

Your presentations will never be the same again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789552362

Book preview

2018

PART 1

THE THREE-LEGGED STOOL

The key to great presentations

Picture the scene: I’m in a meeting room in a university or corporate campus, anywhere in the world. Opposite me is a senior business leader, or an internationally-known scientist. I’m here to help them develop a great presentation which will be crucial in getting their research accepted and understood, or explaining their corporate strategy to employees or investors. I’ve only been here a few minutes, and I’ve already asked them to do something unusual, perhaps something that makes them uncomfortable: Close the laptop. Disconnect the projector or screen. Put the slides away.

The man or woman sitting opposite looks at me quizzically. I adopt my best ‘trust me!’ expression, and explain: ‘We’ll get to the slides later, I promise you. But for now, I’d like you to tell me the story. Just talk to me, without slides.’ I ask them to briefly tell me about the topic of their talk, whether it’s their research, invention, announcement, marketing campaign or financial results.

If it’s a presentation about a drug trial, I say, ‘Tell me…what was the question you wanted to answer? Why is that important? How did you do the research? What did you find? What does it mean to the people in the audience?’ Later, we’ll get onto the objections they may face and how to handle that, but for now, let’s get their story written down.

I then work with them to develop the story flow. We often start with Post-It notes. I ask them to write one point per note and then we arrange these into a narrative flow. I like this approach because the flow usually changes as we work through it, and the Post-its are easy to rearrange, discard and rewrite. When we agree the overall structure is progressing along the right lines, I transfer it to a flipchart. It’s often rough, includes lots of crossings out, and is constantly amended during our session. However, it’s an invaluable roadmap to their talk.

Once I’ve introduced the roadmap idea, we move on to what they will say, briefly summarising the main points. Finally, we get to the slides which will illustrate their talk. This is a key point. The slides illustrate the talk, not lead it. To me, writing a talk by starting with a deck of slides is, as we say in the UK, putting the cart before the horse. Putting the horse and cart in the right order would produce this sequence:

•   Ideas come first

•   Words express ideas

•   Slides come last.

Preparing your presentation

When I ask scientists and medics: How long do you spend preparing your presentation? too often their answer is: There’s no time for that. They concentrate on the research, the data or the publication and the presentation just becomes an afterthought. The same is true in other areas of business and academia. That’s the first failing.

Presentations are powerful…

and not just about the facts

Person to person communication has survived the quill, the printing press, television and the Internet. In fact, the last two have generated an enormous new appetite for good speakers.

In 1997, at Macworld in San Francisco, the world was introduced to the iPhone by Steve Jobs – a master presenter (YouTube: Steve Jobs introduces iPhone). Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk has generated 40 million views. That’s a remarkable audience for an academic taking about education priorities (YouTube: Do schools kill creativity?)

And every year, at hundreds of meetings, workshops, press conferences and the like, other highly effective orators steer scientific progress, influence their peers and advance their careers. The point here, is the enormous power of the spoken word. Getting it right requires preparation and practice.

I dread hearing the answer to my second question: How do you start preparing your presentation? More often than not, I hear the words slides and PowerPoint. If you only take away one lesson from this book, let it be this one.

Effective presentations are designed

and built away from your computer.

There’s lots to do before thinking about slides

In this section I want to ask you to take a step back and think about your presentations. This is an important mental step because too often we’re too busy to give any thought to our talks at all. So, I ask you now to pause, put the book or tablet down, and think about how you plan a talk. If you’re honest, this is what typically happens when someone is asked to prepare a talk:

They think:

‘Why me? Don’t they know how busy I am?

Oh well, I suppose I’d better get on with it. It’s pretty similar to a talk I gave last month/year. I’ll start with those slides.

Now I’ll add a few slides from a more recent talk. Wait! Didn’t I see someone with a really nice slide about this? Who was it? Alice or Rohit will know…I’ll email