I often recommend to leaders that their presentations or other communications tell a story.  I sometimes get some strange looks and reactions: “I’m just reporting quarterly sales, are you saying that I need to tell a story about how one of our customers bought the products?” or “My boss doesn’t have time for stories, he just wants me to get to the point.”

Such comments demonstrate the confusion between “story”, which is the manner in which a message is structured and “storytelling” which is a form of communication.

Over the past twenty years or so, storytelling has become a staple in leadership communication training. There are many books on how effective leaders use stories to motivate their workforce or create a vision. 

Storytelling is about weaving a compelling narrative full of descriptions, details, emotions, and reflections.  It can be an effective and useful communication tool.  But as with any tool, there are times for which it is best suited and times for which it might not work.

Story, on the other hand, is important regardless of the style of communication you are using.  It’s not about what you communicate; it’s about how you communicate.

Story means having a structured, connected, and logical flow to whatever is being communicated.  Having a coherent story in your message improves its clarity and impact.

That may sound obvious, but many presentations or reports don’t have that clear simple structure.  They simply provide a series of successive facts (e.g., data on performance, lists of key initiatives, strategies, organizational, structures, etc.). While the facts might be related topically, they often aren’t linked conceptually.   For example, one slide might be key initiatives followed by quarterly sales, then quarterly expenses.  This is just information.  There is no story.  You aren’t helping the audience see how sales, expenses, and initiatives relate.  Nothing would be lost of those three slides were reversed because there is no connection between them. 

In a presentation that has a story, the slides are conceptually related.  Each slide is a continuation or an elaboration on the prior slide.  Or, a new slide might be the conclusion drawn from the prior slide(s). 

This isn’t about just having an advanced organizer and then a subsequent slide for each of the bullets.  That’s still just information.  Thinking through how those points interact with, support, and create meaning from one another and making that link clear to your audience is what story is about.

A story-based approach to the sales/expense data might look like this:

Slide 1: 
Title: Prior to last quarter, we were experiencing major declines in sales.
Contents: Historical sales data

Slide 2: 
Title: Historically, we’ve had great success with direct marketing
Contents: Relationship between direct marketing and sales

Slide 3:
Title: Therefore, we implemented the following initiatives around direct marketing
Content: Initiatives

Slide 4:
Title: To support these initiatives, we had to put more money into personnel costs
Content: Personnel-related expenses showing differences between prior quarters

Slide 5:
Title: This extra investment paid off, however, as we saw a spike in sales
Content: Sales data

You don’t have to put the story text slide’s title (although it is a good way to see whether you have a coherent story and flow) but you do need to communicate it.  In fact, in most cases, the story is more important than the specific data.  Remember data should support the story of how you are running your business, it shouldn’t be the story. 

Sometimes a presenter has the story in his or her head but doesn’t communicate it.  This shifts the burden of creating or finding meaning to the audience. It also increases the likelihood that they might miss your point.

More often than not that story doesn’t exist.  The slides are just arranged in some topical fashion. The presenter simply drains the facts from each and moves on to the next point.  This leaves the audience wondering why the information was being presented in the first place.

Look through your most recent presentation.  Is there a clear flow between your slides?  Does one logically lead to the next?  Here is simple test to see if you have an underlying “story” in your presentation.  Re-order the slides (or talking points, if you aren’t using slides) from the body of the presentation.  If the presentation still makes sense and does not lose any meaning, you are probably just reporting facts.

You don’t have to tell stories to have a “story” in your communication.  But you do need to help your audience clearly see the idea that you are laying out.

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Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm.  He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com