Storytelling for Finance

Do you have any workshops or material on Storytelling Andrew?

It’s probably the one question I get asked the most. Like there is some magic elixir we can cover in two hours that will make every finance person brilliant at this.

The reality is storytelling and crafting your narrative and delivering it in a cohesive and impactful way takes work.

It’s a build of a number of techniques and tools you can draw on to make it compelling.
In my early days I used to spend 70-80 % of my time doing the analysis, copy and paste some graphs and visuals into a powerpoint document and take everyone through the facts.

That’s NOT storytelling

In fact, it misses the main component of storytelling which is engagement of your audience. And that is a right-side brain thing.

These days I understand the analysis is the easy bit. And I spend 70-80% of my time crafting my message and my narrative so that my audience is engaged and understands it.

Storytelling takes work, experience and practice.

Luckily there is a four-step method that makes it easy. And if you follow it, you can craft a sequence that your data, visuals and analysis can slide into.

Step 1: Once Upon a Time

Show us and tell us what the world was like “once upon a time”. What was going on and how we got to where we were. In other words, set the scene.

Step 2: Identify the Event

In any good story there is an event that disrupts the scene setting and changes things. Highlight this to your audience. “Here is where things changed” and there are some consequences to that.
This change in things is what grabs people’s attention.

Step 3: Transition them

Once you have destabilised the status quo with the event use specifics and details to transition your audience to a different place. We did or are doing this this and this.

Step 4: The new place

Show them what it looks like now after you have changed some stuff. Or what it will look like if you do.

Throw in a number in step 1 and then what that number looks like now in step 4 and voila…..you have a story.

For more on this google Freytag’s Pyramid. It’s the classical story telling process most storyteller use some version of.