It was October 2018 and we were on an offsite strategy meeting for deciding the 3-year plan for the entity. Each one of the functional heads had to come up with where we are, what we want to be and what we need to do to be there, typical strategy meeting ingredients. We needed to provide this in a template, provided by our external facilitator (we call him Peter !!!) much before the event.

Although, I had resumed in the organization about 4 months earlier, I had worked hard to crunch a lot of data / information and had grouped it well in the template. I have always had the habit of asking the audience to rate my presentation and hence after my presentation was done, I tried to take a feedback from my leadership colleagues as well as Peter. While all of them including Peter, provided a 4 to 5-star rating on the content and my preparation, Peter provided me with additional feedback –

– Do you feel your audience connected with you?

– Could you have kept it simple?

– Distilled the information in no more than 3 bullet points

Into the 26th year career of my Corporate life, a feedback of this kind was quite humbling, although I thanked Peter for his candid feedback and promised to work on this. We had another follow up session in May 2019 and we were needed to provide the progress of actions of the previous strategy meeting. This time as well I prepared very well and had made some progress on the action points of the previous strategy workshop. I again received 4 to 5 Star ratings from all including Peter!!! But Peter repeated his feedback albeit in a reinforcing tone. I humbly accepted the feedback again and promised to work on the same.

In the January of 2020, Peter was on a visit to India and came to our office. He met me in my cabin and asked me “did you work on the feedback? It was at that point that I realized how serious this feedback was…I had no answer since I had not focused on this improvement action. I asked Peter – “Could you tell me in one line, what needs to be done to tick mark all 3 feedback actions at one go?” Peter smiled and said “what you need to do is, just add a compelling story line to your presentation”. When you share an experience, people tend to remember the point you are making!!!

This was a Eureka moment for me!!! As Business leaders, we rely solely on reasoning, argument and logic in our Business presentations. We crunch a lot of data, prepare charts, run pivots and what not!!! Story – telling or sharing a real-life experience is often considered as a waste of time and not something business like. Presentation driven by slide decks typically contain a lot of facts in the form of bullet points and graphs, but because they lack a compelling narrative, it is hard for the audience to join the dots.

Be it any business situation, a key question that people look for is the “Why” – why are we bringing a new product? Why do we want to acquire a company? Why do we want to outsource a business process? They need an explanation. If your narrative does not answer the why, they will make up their own why.

Story provides a context, making it meaningful and allowing you to connect and more so stories create faith. Telling a meaningful story inspires your listeners – they want faith, faith in you, your goals, yours success in the story you tell. It is faith which moves mountains not the facts. People value their own conclusions much more than highly than yours. They will only have faith in a story that has become real for them. Once people make your story their story, you have tapped into the powerful force of faith.

Any story is a Business Story as long as it has a Business point. A word of caution though is that Business story telling has its own limitations. One must not over-use it. Shawn Callahan a influential thinker and author recommends one-part story to 3 parts – Logic, reasoning and argument to convey a Business idea to your audience.