Storytelling in the business world

I recently ran across an article on how Disney/Pixar is bringing concepts used to power some of their most successful movies to the world of video gaming. As I was reading over the article, Four lessons in emotional storytelling and plot structure from Pixar, I started wondering how these concepts might apply in the business world. One of my challenges in my positions has been presenting financial information to boards and management staff in a way that moves them to action. Unfortunately, financial information can be very dry and something many people struggle to understand, so the only movement might be to close their eyelids as their eyes glaze over. Even employing a variety of techniques to help make the information more understandable for non-financial professionals, I still find it difficult to make that connection. Perhaps Pixar’s concepts can help with this.

Create emotional attachment
According to the article, the first concept employed by Pixar is creating an emotional attachment. The most common way to do this is to introduce a character and then have them go on a journey. In business we may not have a character that we can focus on, but surely there is some topic or business issue that the board members or management is interested in. And I’m not just talking about a passing interest - e.g. we all want to know we are making money - but something that really keeps them going (the “what’s in it for me” issue). This means spending some time really listening to the recipients of our efforts to find out what items touch a nerve (hopefully in a good way) so that we can structure the development to address those items.


As far as the journey aspect, that should be a little easier to take care of. In terms of financial reports and performance, there is the beginning of the period and the end of the period and then all of the activity that occurs in between. Outside of financials, we might have a current reality, proposed steps to be taken, and then a desired reality that we are trying to reach.

Structure

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, when looking at the “journey” aspect of the information being presented, we can look at a variety of chronological patterns whether we are looking at historical information or forward-looking items. One thing that Pixar figured out over the years is that this chronological view simply works and should not be messed around with.

Scene setting

For Pixar, when starting a story the beginning needs to be engaging and informative. This includes doing things like establishing the “rules” of an imaginary world. Pixar also found the beginning needs to be engaging and accessible in order to draw viewers into the story. Obviously in the business world we are not trying to establish or describe an imaginary world (at least, we better not be doing this). However, non-financial audiences may not be entirely versed in the rules and reality we are trying to establish - after all, that is why they have hired us to pay attention to and look after these issues.

I am not so sure that all of the issues we address in the business world lend themselves to relatively quick explanations of the rules at the beginning of a presentation. Since we are not dealing with an imaginary world, these rules probably should not be changing too much, though we would certainly want to highlight any recent changes. This does suggest that perhaps we should spend some time assessing our audience's’ knowledge and understanding of the business environment, notably regulatory issues, and then conducting periodic training or providing updates.

One possible tactic to successfully launch a business presentation that we might be able to use is an illustration. This could be used in lieu of the explanation of the rules. An illustration is simply a story describing an actual incident occurring in the business that can be used to show how the topic is affecting actual people or business results. One change I made in a recent position when presenting upper level financial reports was to describe how a lower level, discrete component was performing and what kind of impact that was having on the business. This helped to set the stage for the larger discussion. I also discovered this seemed to trigger a lot of engagement on the part of board members who were interested in how the business was operating at the line level - a data point they had not been getting in the past.

The single sentence explanation

A final lesson that Pixar has learned over the years is that they needed to be able to explain an entire story in a single sentence. In the business world, we are all familiar with the “elevator pitch” in which you are encouraged to be prepared to explain your proposal in the space of an elevator ride. I most often see this in regards to sales pitches and job searches, but it seems like it could apply to almost any presentation that we might make. So the challenge is to make sure we take a moment to reflect on our work and figure out how we can summarize it in a single sentence. I would even go on to suggest that our presentations should then be guided by that single sentence.

Pixar and Disney have clearly figured out how to go about creating compelling stories as shown by the success of franchises like Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Up. Perhaps by keeping some of the truths and concepts they have discovered over the years in mind when putting together our own presentations - from financial reports to sales pitches to business recommendations to training sessions and perhaps even our regular meetings - we can more effectively communicate information and prompt action from the people receiving the information.

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