3 Things Your Company Needs To Know About Storytelling

Kate Harrison ,  

Contributor

I write about green businesses and how to help startups succeed.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Remember the last time you were stuck in a business presentation with endless bullets, heavy data, and text-filled slides? Last week? Yesterday? Right now? Business meetings are notoriously boring, which is why companies like Facebook, Hewlett Packard and Pepsi are seizing upon a better way to communicate ideas in business — through the narrative device of storytelling.
What’s the big deal about storytelling? Why can’t sellers just get right to their product features, project managers to their spreadsheet data, or strategists to their recommendations? Because studies show that weaving data and facts into a story framework makes ideas stick much better than dry presentations.
Storytelling works better because it offers your audience an emotional connection to your ideas. Molecular biologist John Medina studies the link between emotion and recall. He says we internally repeat and think about information that we find compelling. Most of the time, that means emotional material — in other words, stories. We remember what we feel, and as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has found, emotions are even more important than logic when it comes to critical retention of the information needed for clear decision-making. If you want to make a presentation that is persuasive, that emotionally engages your audience, it needs to be about story.
But how do you actually incorporate effective story telling in your meetings and presentations? The Presentation Company (TPC) helps companies turn their employees into storytellers. They’ve developed a training to help people in business infuse storytelling into everyday communications. Here are their top three lessons for making your presentations great through storytelling.

The art of storytelling. Image from The Presentation Company 2016.

Lesson #1- Know Your Audience.
“What exactly is storytelling? Generally, it’s a way of laying out your ideas by (1) providing context and setting the stage; (2) making it relatable through well-developed characters; (3) acknowledging challenges by revealing conflict; and (4) resolving your story’s conflict in a way that’s emotionally satisfying,” explains PresentationCompany (TPC) founder Janine Kurnoff. To address issues of personality and style as well as corporate culture, when working with a new company, TPC conducts pre-workshop interviews where they ask whether people at the company value storytelling. “If they don’t, it is more difficult, though not impossible, to teach them this new mode of operating,” Kurnoff explains.

Recommended by Forbes

She adds that in addition to understanding the culture of the company, it is paramount that you find out what kind of stories resonate within it. Product? Program Updates? Pitching? Persuasion? “Much of our training in storytelling is taught through examples. For the data junkies or wordy marketers, we pull from an array of stories that we feel will resonate most with that particular audience. Data people often have a harder time understanding the need for what they consider ‘fluffy’ storytelling. Examples of how data can be directly expressed through stories is critical.”

What's your vision for the future of IT? Come get inspired at the SF for IT Keynote! http://sforce.co/2cdAkwD #DF16

 

Health. Explained.

Poor Listening Skills Are Holding You Back

Now hear this: Business is on the line and marriages are on the rocks.

by Jennifer Fallon

Chances are, your poor listening skills are costing you money. 

Got your attention? Or are you still texting with your phone in one hand and trying to do something else while reading this?

Focus for just a minute.

We’ve become a society that values getting things done quickly. Multitasking amid a nonstop flow of information flooding our lives and our brains has become the norm. But while we’re trying to soak up information from multiple sources at one time, are we doing any one thing well?A University of Maryland study from 2009 shows that hospitals across the United States lose $12 billion annually because of poor communication. Innolect Inc., a business management enterprise, says Fortune 500

Companies waste at least $75 million each year in ineffective meetings because of poor listening skills. And the average cost per year for poor listening amounts to as much as $26,042 for each worker in the United States.

It isn’t just your business life that is suffering from weak listening skills. Multiple studies have shown that the lack of communication between couples is the leading cause of divorce in this country, followed by financial trouble and infidelity.

HealthZette

Can’t Hear a Thing You’re Saying

The noise overload that is wrecking our ear

 Julian Treasure, chairman of the Sound Agency in Chertsey, England, says our listening abilities are under threat.“It’s rare that we encounter silence or even a high level of stillness or quiet,” he told
 LifeZette.

“We start to habituate to that noise, we start to suppress it, so we get into the habit of not listening. We have a multiple-stream culture where kids are quite happy to be watching TV, texting somebody and talking to somebody all at the same time. We get accustomed to more and more layers. Real listening is paying 100 percent attention to someone speaking, not using 10 percent of our bandwidth,” he said.

“Our society is much more oriented around sending than listening. People are much keener to be heard than to hear.”
Treasure also said the high level of noise we encounter can negatively affect our health. He points out that sound has an influence on our heart rate and hormone levels and that it can influence our behavior. He cites frequent police reports that describe crime scenes with excessive and loud noise.
Laura Janusik, associate professor of communication at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, has done research that shows the decline of listening throughout the years. She found that the amount of time we spend listening each day has decreased from 45 percent in 1930 to 24 percent in 2007. That’s a startling statistic.

Jobs Report: Good Listening Skills Could Land You A Job

CBS Dallas-Fort Worth

Janusik believes the decline in listening is in part due to our ready access to written information.
“We know how easy it is to retrieve because of Google. So we don’t try that hard to listen to understand,” she told LifeZette.

She also points out the learning gap around listening skills.
“It’s the most used communication skill (as rated against reading, writing, and speaking), yet it’s the one that is least often taught. Though most of us figure out how to get by with some basic listening skills, most individuals do not fully develop their capacities to listen because they think they don’t have a problem,” she said.

It’s likely we all have a problem. Good news: It’s possible to improve. Janusik says listening is composed of two parts — behavior and cognition. Cognition refers to whether you can mentally comprehend what is being communicated to you. Behavior refers to the nonverbal and verbal communications you use to let the people speaking know they have been heard and understood.
She says there’s actually a large gender gap in how men and women communicate.
“Women typically show listening through eye contact, head nods, facial expressions, asking questions. Men often listen solely cognitively, so they know they understand, but they don’t show the other person that they understand,” she said.

How good are you at listening? Ask yourself:

1: Do you use nonverbal communication (such as eye contact and nodding) to let the speaker know you are listening?

2: Are your thoughts focused on what the other person is saying?

3: Do you ask clarifying questions to help you understand what the other person is saying?

4: Can you remember most of what you discussed in a meeting without looking at your notes?

5: Do you consider and build on the other person’s ideas?

6: Do you take time to sit in silence for a few minutes each day?

7: Do you set aside all distractions and devices during a conversation so that you can listen effectively?

If you answered yes to these questions, you have probably acquired some good listening skills. If you answered no, chances are you have some work to do.

Related: The Power of the Present Moment

If you’re interested in improving your listening skills, Janusik suggests making some adjustments to the behavioral side of your listening. This means using nonverbal cues — such as nodding and eye contact, as well as verbal cues — such as paraphrasing and asking questions to show that you are hearing what others have to say.
The better you are at listening, the more others will want to listen to you. Listening is one of the most under-recognized and yet most important of leadership skills.
“Conversation is a two-way process,” said Treasure. “Most great leaders are great listeners. It’s hard to inspire people if they don’t feel understood or listened to.”

If you like this, read

I Hear My Kids Loud and Clear

 

By Teena Hammond

Technology is no stranger to change. Finding out how the technology landscape will evolve, and which products and vendors will stay relevant, as well as what companies and IT departments will do to stay on top of the game and embrace change, is what IT leaders need to know in order to make the right technology decisions.

Tech Pro Research conducted an online survey in September to find out what is predicted for the future of IT. The resulting report, IT Leaders’ Tech Predictions for 2015-2018, gleaned results from 418 survey respondents. CXOs and non-CXOs were polled, and the results compared to get their views on what the next three years will bring. The opinions of the two groups were largely the same, but some interesting insights can be gleaned from where they differed, showcasing business leader priorities as well as those in the various fields and trenches of IT.

Key findings include:

• Improving security, lowering costs, improving applications to match business processes and project management are company priorities.
• Increasing productivity through technology and improving efficiency and business processes are key issues for IT departments.
• Moving data and services to the cloud is seen as important (more so by CXOs), but there is also a level of dedication to in-house systems and servers, which is based on a certain degree of skepticism.
• Cloud computing turbulence is expected and a push to on-premises software may take place.
• The Internet of Things is strongly expected to take off.
• There is more faith in the future of Linux desktops than in the possibility of Apple surpassing Microsoft in the enterprise.
• Security, mobility and big data are the top three technologies to watch.

SECURITY IS A TOP COMPANY PRIORITY

In order to compare organizational versus IT departmental goals, the survey asked respondents to analyze technological priorities on a company-wide basis. Improving security, improving applications to better fit business processes, lowering costs and project management were seen as significant priorities by both groups. The least-chosen option, automation of software/settings/configuration, was still selected on average by nearly half of the survey respondents.

CXOs chose the following technological priorities more often than the average respondent:

• Project management (14%)
• Implementing mobility-based operations for company processes (13%)
• Ensuring IT personnel are properly trained (9%)
• Improving applications to better fit processes (6%)

The biggest gap between CXOs and overall respondents appears in the choice of project management, which, while considered a desirable priority by at least half of both groups, was chosen 14 percent more often by CXOs.

IMPORTANCE OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

To gauge what the IT department will face over the next three years, the survey looked to see which emerging technologies respondents considered important. The charts below are for all respondents, and also for CXOs only:

All respondents thought that IT security would be a major factor for their company's IT department over the next three years, with 81 percent selecting 'extremely important'. Approximately the same amount of CXOs agreed. Given the steady stream of news stories on vulnerability outbreaks and serious data breaches, it's no wonder security is seen as so crucial.  Mobile device management was also seen as extremely important by the majority of both groups, followed by big data/analytics.

Over a third of respondents thought that 3D printing and wearables will be 'not at all important', suggesting that these may be deemed niche or unestablished products of uncertain universal value. However, on average CXOs marked these technologies as 'extremely important' more than all respondents (7% compared to 5%), perhaps because they are perceived as possible trends by business leaders via a wait-and-see approach.

CXO respondents also marked digital marketing and The Internet of Things as 'extremely important' 9 percent more often than all respondents, on average.

Other topics covered in the report include:

• Changes and challenges facing IT departments
• Biggest structural changes predicted in IT management
• Favored vendors and soon-to-be obsolete vendors
• Relevance of current technology over next three years
• Most important endeavors and issues to IT departments over next three years

Overall, the survey showed that there are many priorities afoot in technology and IT professionals and leaders recognize their duties and are keeping up on the trends. Topics that are hot today will continue to echo down the road; security, mobility and big data will remain top priorities. These will advance into new areas as developments arise, but the core concepts behind them will remain critical.