Summary
Most of us remember storytelling from our childhood. No matter how long ago it was, we remember the stories as if they had been told yesterday. What's more we often read hidden meanings into them, something that is invaluable in a corporate environment. Telling stories attaches no blame, challenges no one and the message lingers long after the storyteller has gone. The corporate 'grapevine' is just an unofficial storytelling machine so why not make use of stories to tell the official version of your corporate story, to capture your corporate culture?
Stories need to be carefully crafted for business use and their placement in presentations carefully calculated, however they are amongst the most powerful tools available.
Those who attend a Business Storytelling workshop will:
- Learn how to craft stories and include them in presentations
- Understand how to 'perform' to an audience
- Be able to use stories in scenario planning
Your business will benefit through:
- Improved PR and external communications
- Less resources wasted on overcoming resistance to change
- Effective scenario planning
Detailed Description
After mastering personal communications, attendees will be introduced to Storytelling as a powerful tool for use in a business environment. Storytelling can be used to enhance business presentations, de-personalise tense or awkward situations and engage the audience. Delegates will be introduced to different types of stories, their uses, where to place them within a presentation as well as using language and humour for maximum effect. The aim is not to tell stories just for the sake of it, they are valuable nuggets that are inserted into speeches and presentations to provide the 'wow factor' that ensures that both you and your message are remembered.
This part of the workshops covers the following areas:
- Why stories work
- Choosing stories
- Developing stories
- Crafting stories
- Adding humour
- Performing
Stories are a powerful way of facilitating change as well as eliciting thoughts of what can be in the minds of those listening. The stories that are most successful all have certain characteristics. They are stories that are told from the perspective of a single individual who is in a predicament typical of an organisation's business. This predicament is usually familiar to the audience, and indeed, it is this very predicament that the change proposal is meant to solve. These stories have a degree of strangeness for the listeners, so that their attention and imagination are stimulated. Yet at the same time, these stories are plausible, even eerily familiar, like a premonition of what the future is going to be like.
Such stories are often known as springboard stories because of this ability to imagine 'what could be' in the future. These stories are valuable in facilitating change where management may not have all the answers and it is necessary to turn resistance into enthusiasm. It is also possible to take a greater leap into the future and use springboard stories as part of a scenario planning exercise. When the event in question actually happens, those involved already know what to do in great detail, they have already lived the scenario through a story. This concept is often known as 'future memory' and is at the leading edge of corporate storytelling.
Delegates will be introduced to the background of springboard stories with most of the available time spent on crafting, building and performing them. The techniques used are borrowed from the ancient art of storytelling but these are most definitely business tools.
Participants are encouraged to try out their own ideas and craft relevant stories to take away and use in their own workplace. This is guaranteed to be an enjoyable learning experience at the cutting edge of leadership and management development.