No matter how nice the font

Why business storytelling is important

I once sat through three hours of a thing called a Tactical Departmental Refresh. The name didn't ooze excitement, and neither, it turned out, did the meeting. Slide after slide, fact after fact, graphs we couldn't read from the third row, and – the pièce de résistance – a single slide showing the new operating model in such fine detail that we couldn't read it in the room, and still couldn't read it when the slides were emailed round afterwards. Nice font, not a lot of understanding.

Three hours we were in there. At the end of it, not one of us understood the direction of the department any better than we had walking in, and there was certainly nothing you could feel – nothing to place yourself inside, no reason to care. And no tea and biscuits either.

Some months later I watched a different leader, at a different company, do the opposite. No slides. No gimmicks. Just a well-rehearsed, well-crafted heartfelt story of change – where we were, why it couldn't stay that way, what the next move looked like, the obstacles we'd meet on the way, and a genuine thank-you for the time and energy and attention it would cost every one of us. And something happened in that room that hadn't happened in the first. We leaned in, we put ourselves into the story. We felt part of it. We could see the future in our own minds – and we knew, with astonishing clarity, why the change had to happen. In other words, she had explained the cost of inaction, and the benefits of action – and it resonated with us.

Here's the idea worth playing with. The second leader wasn't necessarily more talented than the first. What she had was a decision – to be understood rather than merely to present – and it beat a hundred slides without breaking a sweat. Because stories go to places in the mind that facts alone simply can't reach. They're emotional, and emotion and motion come from the same root. Stories put people inside them, so you can see how you fit and what you role is, and how you contribute to the overall narrative. They bring a wonderful lightness to heavy, complicated things. And they are, after all, how we've passed understanding between us for thousands of years – a habit that, frankly, is not going to be replaced anytime soon by a slide deck, no matter how nice the font.

Communication, after all, is not really about the transfer of information. It's about the gaining of understanding. Facts inform, but they don't orient. A spreadsheet can describe the present with total accuracy and leave a room with no idea why anything needs to change, what part they might play, or what the path ahead even looks like. A story does that work – not by elaborating the facts, but by arranging them into a shape a person can see in their mind and actually hold on to.

I came to this early. Around five, in fact, when a story I'd scribbled in a notebook became a class presentation that made people laugh – that a thing which had existed only in my head could reach out and do something to a room. After that I wrote whenever I could. As a teenager I sat on my bed inventing a hamster called Dave, who stole radio-controlled cars and tore around Sheffield in them, and a pair of superheroes, Ratman and Flumpster, who lived in our garden shed and solved elaborate crimes before afternoon tea. I chose to study subjects built on the same skill – media, communication, a degree in Media Science, whose whole premise was taking a complicated idea and making it land with a particular audience through whatever medium suited it best – and then spent time in journalism and editing, and a couple of decades since making things across print, web, audio and video. Long before anyone said the words "business storytelling" to me, I was practicing it.

But business storytelling, I should be clear, is not the storytelling of car-thieving hamsters, or superheroes who live in sheds. The useful lessons come from the journalism, not the animals. You gather the evidence. You verify it. You decide, ruthlessly, what actually matters. You arrange it so someone else can understand it quickly and cleanly and without distortion. One of the first rules I ever learned there: if in doubt, leave it out. Credibility is the whole currency of it, and it's often an easy trade for inflated figures and opinion posing as insight – and once credibilities gone, it is very, very hard to coax back.

So, a business story is a curious hybrid of fact and craft. It isn't fiction; it's interpretive. It takes today's reality – the data, the constraints, the pressures, the goal – and arranges it into a narrative that explains what's happening, what has to change, and why that's worth anyone's effort. Its job is never to embellish the facts. It's to organise them into a form people can grasp. (A painted picture of the future works the same way – it moves people through excitement and belief, because the future, in my experience, is staggeringly unmoved by facts and prediction alone.)

The shape it takes is older than any of us, and it's the same shape that sits at the heart of the idea-to-value work. There's the current reality – where we honestly are, named with evidence and not smoothed down for comfort. There's the desired future – where we're trying to get to, specific enough to be believed and compelling enough to be worth people walking it. And there are the obstacles between the two – named honestly and clearly, not minimised – people need clarity about what they're actually being asked to do.

Every story that has ever moved anyone, from a film to a folk tale to a Tuesday-morning meeting, is a variant of that shape: where we are, where we're going, and the gap we have to cross. It isn't a trick, it's the story arc brought to life. It's simply how human beings make sense of experience.

And the discipline of good business storytelling is mostly subtraction. It starts, before you've even put pen to paper, with two questions – what do I want to be different once I've told this, and who exactly am I telling it to. Then you find the one thread and you hold it, because business stories come apart most often from trying to narrate seven initiatives and three priorities and a strategy document all at once; a strong business story carries a single thread, and everything else is in service of it. You gather your evidence, because business storytelling with no evidence underneath is fiction, and evidence with no story around it is just facts. You build both ends with care – an opening that earns attention quickly, right at the start, a close that leaves people holding one clear thing as they leave the room, and you make sure the middle never wanders, that every sentence either moves the thing forward or comes out.

Then you write it all the way through, read it aloud, and murder your darlings (the line is usually credited to Faulkner, sometimes Stephen King, and it hurts every time): take out everything clever that isn't earning its place, and use no more of the audience's time than the story genuinely needs.

And underneath the whole craft sits one non-negotiable – restraint. No exaggeration, no drama the evidence won't support, no cleverness because it feels good to you. Telling a story inside an organisation is an act of trust, and every embellishment that's later spotted as embellishment spends a little of that trust, from an account that's pretty tough to refill. When it's done, show it to a small handful of people who'll tell you the honest thing rather than the comfortable one, people you trust. They'll tell you that the evidence doesn't hold, or the ending fizzles, or the start needs more emotion – and listen to them. Editing and refinement is where the real story is crafted.

None of which, I realise, sounds anything like the leader with no slides. But it's exactly what she'd done – the 90% of the hard work before the moment. She had almost certainly gathered every fact the first leader had, and probably a few more – and then done the far harder thing than putting them on a slide, which is arranging them into something a room full of tired people could feel and connect with.

That isn't a softer, lesser form of rigour – a poor relation of a proper deck. It's the rigour required to reach the other person's mind, and create understanding. Facts inform; stories orient; understanding is the entire point. And in twenty-five years of watching people try to move rooms, I have never once seen a slide deck, however lovely the font, make anyone feel part of anything.

Bibliography

Chantler, P. and Stewart, P. (2009). Essential radio journalism : how to produce and present radio news. London: A. & C. Black.

Jordan (2022). Types of Stories: 7 Story Archetypes (and Ways to Use Them) – NN. [online] Now Novel. Available at: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/types-of-stories-archetypes/ [Accessed 11 Jan. 2023].