Need to create compelling narratives?

Want to turn data into story?

Curious about the neuroscience of storytelling?

Here, red10 ‘s Piers Carter explains his workshop on Story Telling for Business, in both video and transcript form.

Hi. Welcome to my room.

Just before I deliver the Story Telling for Business Workshop that we are running at the moment; Creating A Compelling Narrative.

There are some really interesting parts to this workshop.  It’s three hours long, it can be tailored, it can be shorter, it can be a full day.

If I can just try to help you understand the different elements:

Over here, I’ve got our aims and outcomes.  We will learn the why, how and what of building a good narrative. 

How do we do that?

We’re going to learn the three acts of a good narrative.  We’re going to look at the principles behind storytelling in a business context.

We’re going to practice telling some stories, so it’s very, very interactive and we’re going to commit to taking some sort of action so that we do something differently as a result of the workshop.

Throughout the process of the day or of the session, we’re going to explore the five and a half principles of good storytelling; notice I’ve got down here “data” and “story” are not opposites.  We can reveal data in the form of story.

And we’re going to work with three key concepts. 

One of the concepts I would love to highlight to you is this idea that you will be always communicating with two commodities:  The energy you bring to any conversation, any presentation, any moment and the information that you share in that moment.  The energy and the information will always be working with or against each other in any moment.  You can’t be all energy, like Tigger and you can’t be all information, like a spreadsheet.  You’ve got to have a little bit of both.

Then, over the course of the workshop, we’ll look at the why.  We’ll talk about some of the compelling reasons; some of the neuroscience behind good storytelling – how we mirror the empathy of the storyteller, how it releases dopamine and cortisol into the systems of the listeners.

Once we’ve built on the why, then we’re going to go into the “how”. How do we do it? What are the different parts of storytelling?

I think there’s two different ways we can use stories:

  1. Story is metaphor
  2. Data revealed in the form of a narrative

We’ll do more with that.

Then, finally, we do lots of practice. 

We’re going to do something called Fantastic Failures where we explore what it’s like to share stories about things we haven’t done brilliantly and we’re going to have a go at building some sort of narrative around the live current business topical need.

So, that’s the flow of the Storytelling for Business – Creating a Compelling Narrative Programme that we’re running.

If you want to find out more about it, please do get in touch.

Thanks