The Importance of Telling Stories.

Dave Stein quotes James Mayfield Smith about a top-performing IBM sales person:

“(he)… is a master of many skills, and chief among these is his ability to find the story that his customer lives and to build himself into that story as a solution provider.”

Story-telling is an important skill in giving presentations to make a point, and captivate an audience.

Three components make a story: a character, a situation, and an outcome.

The character is best when your audience can relate to him, empathize with her, care for him, or are otherwise entertained by them. If all else fails you, make your character a pet (dogs are best) or a child. But never put the child in danger.

The situation should be one that has happened to us all, or specifically relevant to your audience. The best contain an element of danger, or embarrassment, or an unintended consequence.

The outcome is how the character handles, or miss-handles, the situation.

Stories bring your presentations to life.

At the same time, I heard Lisa B. Marshall in Quick & Dirty Tips: The Public Speaker ,speak about cultural differences in communication styles. She gave a brief and clear review of anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s concept of High-Context and Low-Context communication.

Low-Context verbal communication can be understood easily by anyone, anywhere, based only on the words and symbols used. Think of programming languages. The program is independent of its field information like when or how it was written. It can be understood without knowing or seeing who “spoke it”.

High Context communication is dependent on associated information in delivery for meaninig. A wink cannot be understood without knowing who winked, where, and when. We do not know what “let me think about that” really means without knowing who and how they said it , For accurate meaning we need the surround situations, or “context” in which the communication was made. This includes the cultural rules of the communicator.

Put together the use of stories and the problems working within high-context situations, and it is clear. Stories about universal human themes transcend high-context communication. Everybody understands them. That makes them even more flexible, and useful, in your presentations.