Storytelling for research - key points

The goal is always to get them to catch the ball, it doesn’t matter how you get there.

Storytelling provides 3 main "ways in" for an audience: 

• empathy

• imagery

• curiosity 

Imagery – help people ‘see’ and understand new things

It’s about painting pictures in people’s heads. Most of us can’t help but picture what is described. You can also:

• use metaphors to explain unfamiliar ideas, the more visual the better

• use familiar examples of abstract stuff that’s otherwise hard to imagine

• show real images (e.g. photographs) to make it feel real

• describe or show places

Empathy – get people to care

Put people at the centre of the story to make it feel more relatable - and show us their point of view. Make the story about things that seem relevant to and connected to your audience’s experience. Or lean in to sympathy – make your audience feel for the plight of your characters, or allow them to access something new and unfamiliar.

Remember you are the easiest person to talk about.

Curiosity – this is about creating information gaps

You can grab the audience’s attention from the start – use hooks, like a strong opening line!

Embrace the problems. Talking about issues and how you solved them creates problem solution loops which are very engaging.

Or use structure to generate curiosity…

• tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them is rubbish

• use problem, strategy, outcome instead

The 4 P’s of presentation storytelling:

• point – must have one

• people – we love people, make them relatable

• places – gives us a picture to imagine, give them a bit of detail

• problems – curiosity, we want to know how/if they get solved