Presentation Skills HQ

There is an abundance of evidence that stories are essential for persuasion, to the extent that storytelling in organisations drives business results. To take facts and figures and craft them into a story links the information together and aids retention by the audience. Also stories engage emotions which also aids memory.

In the next few posts we will talk about two broad categories as they relate to the Extreme Presentation Method.

The first is anecdotes and the second is sequencing your evidence to craft a story.

Anecdotes.  Anecdotes are used to highlight the most important points of your presentation and will be typically one of three types:

1. Directly relatable to a company issue e.g. an employee did “x” which resulted in “y”
2. Hypothetical. A story about a company that is not real, but the story is possible
3. Metaphor.  A story that is symbolic of the story you want to make

The second type of story is the one where your evidence and anecdotes are sequenced in a way that juxtapose tension and release which is the formulae of all good stories. Andrew Abela calls this the SCoRE method and is based on the Method of Opposites outlined in detail by Henry Boettinger in his book Moving Mountains.

We will explore these two categories in the following posts.