Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Collection of tracks for demonstrations
Micro Stories and Presentations
Brought to you by Assemble You.
It's time to work on YOU. So sit back and listen to practical, actionable advice to accelerate your progress.
You’re about to learn how to tell micro-stories. We all know that stories work in business. Storytelling creates an emotional connection with our audience that mere facts can never attain. Reciting dull data about sales targets and employee churn rate isn’t enough. But how can you use storytelling in your everyday life? In this track, you’ll learn about three different types of micro-story. We’ll tell you how to structure stories about the past, the present and the future. Your tales will be so good that people will want to repeat them.
We finish this track with three very practical tips about how to use these short, punchy stories in your presentations.
So, what’s a micro-story?
Andreas Loizou is a trainer and author who’s an expert in business storytelling. He tells us that micro-stories are those short tales we share, almost in passing, with one or two other people. Micro-stories are the urban myths of a company that you hear all the time if you’re working at a big organisation. These stories don’t need a huge budget or Hollywood-scale production values. There’s just enough detail for the listener to connect with your worldview but not enough to get in the way of the message.
Let’s look at three examples of micro-stories.
Our first type tells our audience how we’ve changed. They’re called The Way We Were stories. The Way We Were stories highlight what’s different at our organisation. Sometimes it’s about what you’ve lost: before we contracted with the content agency, our website copy was more personal. Or it could be about what we’ve gained. For example, our customers love the fact that they can now order direct from Etsy without having to speak to our sales team and pay before delivery. People working in sales and marketing often use these stories to show how the customer experience – which includes such diverse factors as product support, delivery and individualisation – has improved since they started working at the company.
Andreas Loizou works with financial institutions that use The Way We Were micro-stories to explain how, for example, their communications strategy or internal organisation is different. ‘The Way We Were stories are easy to write; you just need to make clear what’s changed between the past and the present. These stories are more effective when you let listeners come to their own conclusions about whether the change is positive or negative, rather than ramming a moral down their throats.’
The Way We Were stories have two parts:
1. What we did in the past
2. How it’s different now
*
Our next story type is about urgent problems. This type is called Burning platform. Burning platform micro-stories stress that change is needed right now. They’re urgent and insistent. No one wants a full-length novel when the floor is on fire.
Look at any business that’s gone bust, and you should be able to find a burning platform story in its ruins. The Finnish tech giant Nokia was once the world leader in mobile phones. But it focused on hardware rather than software and believed its brand was strong enough to see off the competition. Nokia didn’t respond to the changing demands of its users, so its market share collapsed. Their burning platform was that they hadn’t noticed that data, rather than voice, was driving demand for nimble upstarts like Apple.
A more recent example is FTX, whose multi-billion dollar collapse sparked panic in the crypto-exchange world. Several whistle-blowers within the company – and many external commentators – identified the burning platforms in the days before the company’s collapse. But their concerns about management, inter-company lending and insider trading weren’t heard until it was too late.
Some critics complain that burning platform stories are negative because they point out a problem without suggesting a solution. Here’s Andreas Loizou to explain why they exist. ‘They’re a shock, not an answer. Burning platform stories spread whenever a complacent company is threatened by a disruptive new entrant. They describe the moment a fax machine manufacturer received its first order via email, or the first evening the CEO of the Blockbuster chain of video shops stayed in to watch Netflix.’
A burning platform story only needs two elements.
1. What’s the problem?
2. What happens if we do nothing about it?
This is the right place to repeat that a burning platform story doesn’t need a resolution. Its job is to highlight the problem, not to offer a solution.
*
Our third micro-story is called the springboard. A successful springboard story sets an example for your audience. Because springboard stories start in the past, listeners instinctively trust them to be true. The positive outcome inspires them to act. ‘Parable’ is probably too loaded a word, but you get the idea.
Jack Ma is the richest man in China, worth around $25 billion. His company Alibaba sells more than eBay and Amazon together. But Ma was a terrible student and was rejected by every employer he approached. He failed in the traditional routes of Chinese society, but he succeeded when he realised he was a natural entrepreneur. His most famous quotation is a great example of the positive emotions we feel when we hear about someone’s struggles and eventual success. ‘Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.’
His springboard story – about being the only candidate not to be offered a traineeship at KFC – is a classic. He asks, ‘If you can not get used to failure — just like a boxer — if you can’t get used to being hit, how can you win?”
You’ll probably have worked out that a springboard story only needs two elements to work.
1. What was it that I was failing at?
2. How did it feel when I succeeded?
It’s good to talk about the emotions of success – joy, a sense of achievement, relief – in the second part. If you talk to successful salespeople, they’ll usually have a couple of stories about how they smashed through a client’s objections or negotiated a great deal despite tough competition.
*
One thing the experts agree on is storytelling is the way to connect.
No one knows more about influencing people than the social psychologist Robert Cialdini. He spent many years undercover with charity fundraisers, restaurant workers and political scientists learning how stories change minds. Cialdini’s analysis of cold-callers and salespeople was carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, well before the arrival of the internet. But his findings are more applicable now than ever. Technology hasn’t changed fundamental human behaviour, but it has speeded it up.
Cialdini heard stories every day. He learned that our behaviour is governed by entirely predictable forces. Short stories can turn a cautious browser into a hot prospect. How? They connect you to your audience at a human and emotional level. When you can talk honestly about your wins and defeats, about your plans and your struggles, you open the hearts, minds and even the wallets of your listeners. For Cialdini, it’s this connection that changes how we react. He said, ‘As a rule, we prefer to say yes to the requests of someone we know and like.’
Let’s have some practical tips on how to write these stories.
You may not yet be skilled at making presentations and could be nervous about slipping micro-stories into your everyday conversations. So here are three ways to give you confidence as you plan and share your stories.
Number 1 - Have a positive mindset because your personal perspective is valuable. We are all different, and we all have a point of view to share. Your work experience might be an eight-week internship or thirty years as a top CEO. No matter. Your life experiences give you unique stories that no one has heard before.
Number 2 - Choose everyday language over business jargon. Speak and write like a human. Drop the pompous cliches – helicopter view, going forward, at this moment in time. Many writers and presenters fear they will come across as unprofessional if they use everyday language. You won’t. Instead, you’ll be seen as someone who communicates clearly and is approachable and self-aware.
Number 3 - Rehearse your stories. Practising makes you sound more authentic, and that’s absolutely crucial for building rapport with your listeners. Even if they’re only twenty words long, rehearse your delivery and try different tones and structures. A tip for you is to use a voice recorder to shape your ideas into a story. Practising makes you sound more authentic, and that’s absolutely crucial for telling stories about your life.
In summary, we’ve seen how stories help people connect. They’re all around us at work, and some people find it easy to create and tell them. If you’re looking to tell more stories, we recommend three structures to help you come up with micro-stories.
You only need a few seconds to share a micro-story. They can be about how you and the company have changed – we call these The Way We Were stories. A Burning Platform story is an effective way to tell people about the most pressing problem you face and what the consequences are if you do nothing. The third type of story, The Springboard, allows you to share your feelings of success after you’ve conquered an obstacle.
It's worth rehearsing your micro-stories. Remember to use human language rather than bizspeak. And always remember that your personal experience makes a story unique.
We’ve looked at three examples of micro-story, set in the past, the present and the immediate future and the far future. Your job is to write down something that’s happened to you or your organisation that fits these three patterns.
This isn’t a test of your writing skills. It’s more about your memory and your imagination. Can you come up with three ideas that people will find interesting or revealing, moving or funny? If you write full sentences, that’s great, but it’s not a necessity.
That’s all for today. Have a productive day!