For business leaders, the ideal communication has one simple objective. A professional communicates with a customer with emotion, empathy, and clarity, but with a colleague, they use all the complex technical jargony lingo that only they understand. In the process, they solve complex worldly problems and create unique solutions, while also remembering that the customer usually cares more about their own lives than ‘how cool’ whatever being sold is.
This professional would also have the superpower to communicate with all kinds of audiences, be they investors, government, media, etc., in their own language.
That would obviously be great, but in the real world, such professionals are rare. So over the last couple of years, business leaders have called upon us to train their teams to seamlessly traverse these worlds of various audiences—to embrace complexity of thought while simplifying its expression.
This would, they believed, result in something truly transformative for the teams and the audiences they interacted with. A communication revolution that was story-first, rather than technicality-first.
However, after training just a few teams, we realised that we had made a mistake. We launched the Narrative Thinking vertical in 2021 with an aim to train teams to build and differentiate using narratives, and we thought we could share our learnings on why narratives work and how to develop them. But we missed a key piece of the puzzle.
We didn’t really understand the depth and breadth of challenges that professionals in ambitious organisations face while communicating with diverse audiences. They have constraints and demands, and the status quo is a powerful force. So they needed storytelling techniques that fit into their operations like blood fits in a body—an intrinsic part of their communications, but working within and supporting the system.
So we decided to ask all our applicants to share the problems that they wanted storytelling to solve for them. And they spanned both ends of the narrative ladder—from abstract to concrete.
Source: Climbing the “ladder of abstraction” to evoke empathy and elevate your message, Nieman Storyboard
Source: Climbing the “ladder of abstraction” to evoke empathy and elevate your message, Nieman Storyboard
Defining purpose, identity, and vision
The first type of problem our participants had was in elevating their communications through the effective use of emotion, in order to connect with a large number of people. Done correctly, this can win over hearts and minds, inspire, and earn trust.
Here is what they said they needed narratives to do for them:
“I have gotten feedback that although our intentions and actions are in the right direction, the company story isn’t compelling enough and we are having a difficult time trying to articulate it. We want to ensure that the brand story we build doesn’t just reflect our intentions in the correct way but inspires others to join.”
“We need to apply storytelling techniques to project pitches, brand marketing, strategic thinking and long-term vision for the organisation.”
“We want to create a more likeable employee brand to attract new, young talent.”
“We want to improve the ability to empathise and connect with clients through telling of anecdotes, etc., and create a warm relationship with them.”
“We want to apply storytelling to build an alignment across the organisation on our core purpose, and to elevate customer touch points and experience. Also, to energise teams better so the work can inspire them.”
“We want to incorporate storytelling in everyday communications, conveying impact, building an organisational story arc…”
“We want to aligning the team with the overall vision, motivating them to achieve the goals along with managing their own life well.”
“We want to make customer presentations that are exciting, to communicate in a way that recharges and inspires teams, and ensure emails/slacks/tickets all reflect one cohesive story at all times.”
Make the complex simple
The second type of problem was from the bottom of that ladder. In the era of Big Data, the primary concern of many participants was to find a way to take dry staid data and create engaging stories with valuable, actionable, and interesting insights. But such data stories couldn’t just be regular dashboards, they needed to be visually appealing as well.
Overall, business leaders said they needed to turn technical information into simple, easily understandable stories for their audiences.
“Since we are a data company, we wish to publish good-quality data stories as part of our marketing initiatives.”
“There is a lot of knowledge consulting involved in the sales process, we would like to bring storytelling into our client conversation to make the client understand the technical concepts of the product easily. Also, we would like to bring storytelling in our presentations for clients to easily understand our product without sales team interventions.”
“We want to apply storytelling to all forms of communication, be it emails, presentations, sales, or data insights.”
“We want to enable a) Team members who generate analysis and insights to tell a compelling narrative (for internal and external audiences) using storytelling skills. This team has difficulty in identifying the right points, data visualisation, and narrative building. b) Marketing communications folk who have design and writing skills but do not necessarily have data interpretation skills, so struggle with meaning-making.”
“I would want my team to be able to tell stories instead of making fact-based presentations.”
“We want to use the power of insights to land impactful stories that influence decision-making.”
“We want to, 1. Have the ability to highlight relevant and precise insights for pitch presentations. 2. Capture the attention of the audience (board, investment committee) by connecting the data to a strong narrative to a clear proposition. 3. Use data meaningfully in articulating problems and objectives clearer.”
“How do we make our presentations lively, simple, and visually appealing? How do we start thinking like clients and how they would like to see our presentations, rather than make it in our own way?”
“How to craft a meaningful narrative that is understood intuitively by business folks.”
“We grapple with how to translate data into meaningful insights for stakeholders, like the sales team or senior management. These are typically communicated in emails or presentations but tend to become too data-dense and dry.”
“We need to tell the story in one hour based on the data to multiple stakeholders.”
We understood these concerns, and so we developed the curriculum in a way that teams could learn the fundamentals of storytelling and then decide which electives they wanted to opt for, depending on their goals. The programme’s initial surveys, six masterclasses, and subscriptions to The Ken ensured that participants would learn how to apply these storytelling concepts in their day-to-day work.
We got good outcomes. There were teams in large ambitious companies who applied the learnings and saw beneficial results in sales, engagement, and fast-tracking outcomes.
However, like I pointed out above, business problems can be philosophical, abstract and esoteric on one end and extremely tangible on the other end. We believed that empowering teams with a new mindset and skill set was enough, but we were soon reminded that change is hard.
See, change is always difficult, but the premise of narrative thinking is that if committed storytellers tell good stories and tell them well, they aid this change. Which is what we did.
Over the last few months, we overhauled the curriculum to offer solutions to problems on both ends of the narrative ladder—from extremely abstract to visibly tangible. We’ve now injected it with the tools needed by teams to overthrow the status quo and bring in a story-first approach to all business communication.
The new curriculum is entirely modular, designed to solve specific problems for teams. It allows them to learn the concepts, absorb the mental models, apply them using case studies, and finally, execute them. And all of it happens within the classroom.
If you want to enrol your team in an exclusively designed curriculum, please apply here.
P.S: The Ken’s Learning team is not involved in editorial decisions and operates independently of its Editorial team.
