Visualization and Storytelling. A Pig does the Trick.

No one has a benefit from bulletpoint-loaded slides. Neither you as a presenter or speaker, nor your audience.

Go back a couple of thousand years, to the time before paper (and Powerpoint). Caveman. Fire. Families, a tribe sitting around a fire, shadows cast to the wall, simple drawings, while elders tell stories of the past, pass on their knowledge.

That’s as far back as Storytelling goes. Use it in a business context!

Let’s go back to my previous meeting experiences, where I finally get to pitch my business idea including a marketing plan.

Clever as I was, I had started working on Powerpoint all the way from the beginning.
Unfortunately – as we were actually using Powerpoint primarily to document these plans – the slides weren’t really suitable for a presentation anymore. The result: overloaded slides, boring and difficult to follow, the discussion then drifting into unrelevant details, no focus on essentials, no one really happy.

So, instead of chiming into the calls for “banning Powerpoint” in meetings (Which in my opinion totally misses the point. It’s like taking a pianist the piano away, just because she plays too many notes…), let’s take a look how you could spice up your Storytelling with sticky Visualization.

The Petting Zoo – “small is beautiful”

A couple of years back I was tasked to set up a Continuous Improvement Program. Some predecessors haven’t been successful. Allow me to put it simply: they flew to Japan, got themselves “Kaizen 2.0”, came back, double-clicked and then …. not really much happened.

We wanted to give it another spin, make sure that we were able to embed this urge to continuously improve into our DNA.
The challenge: our (unspoken) mantra “big is beautiful”.
You would get attention, if you were running a big unit, running a big project, launching a big product, had a big idea, were having a big problem, or (in my case) having a big mouth.

So, our challenge was to create room in every day work life for these small, tiny improvements to take place, to give them a fair chance. It was my job to convince top management, and then other colleagues that we needed to be careful, sincere and make sure that the necessary environmental factors had a chance in a culture where “big is beautiful”.

Inspired from a visit to the petting zoo with my kids, I came up with this visualization.

The small ones have their own space. Its access is limited by height. So, the big ones can’t come over and – even if it’s only by accident – sit on some small ones, or slurp away the food (the resources for the small improvements).

It was a picture that stuck!

What makes stories stick?

I won’t break into too much theory – others have already done a way better job, than I could ever do.

But, think about telling a great joke (or hearing one told, of course). It’s storytelling in a very compact form, and has the most important ingredients.

It is …
– simple.
– unexpected.
– concrete.
– credible. (at least some parts so the joke works well on you at the end)
– emotional.
– and, it’s a story.

Use the ingredients above as a checklist for your story.

I am a great fan of Nancy Duarte’s work. She’s got a fabulous book on Storytelling.

What struck me was her analysis of great speeches (like Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, etc.) where she finds a zig-zag pattern – a “sparkline” that switches between “what is” and “what might be” statements and will eventually result in “bliss”.

Well worth reading, if you’re really into storytelling, and preparing a great speech that resonates with your audience.

Here’s a screen shot from her book and the link to the book “Resonate” (on Amazon.com).

“Back of the Napkin” by Dan Roam

Also, in all those training sessions in Design Thinking, we wanted as many participants tolose their shyness about visualizing, drawing.
Dan Roam with his “Back of the Napkin” has been a revelation for all of us. He has developed a whole method of “problem-solving with pictures” and has become very successful with it. You should check out his website. It’s beautifully made.

Get started
If you’ve never dared to draw, visualize – or like me, stopped right after High School, because you were officially untalented… – do the following:

1. Watch Dan Roam’s introductory clip “Solve any problem with a picture” (about 4 mins.)
2. Get yourself a couple of felt tip pens (not the pointy ones, the cut/flat ones with a square tip, 2mm is perfect)
3. Steal some empty sheets of paper out of the printer next to you… and just give it a go!

Even better, do this with a couple of colleagues, each with a pen and paper: get giggly, and call out things to visualize.

– Stay playful.
– Focus on what is essential.

For example: a dog. Is it the claws, the teeth, the pointy ears, the leash, the collar, the poop? You don’t have to visualize all of it, just one or two aspects.

Now try, a mouse, a house, a bicycle, … etc.

Now try, stress, love, hate, hunger, exhaustion, … etc.

Now try, budget, plan, competitors, … etc.

To round things up (in this post), here’s the top level vision and as such also the presentation material for top management in our project on the Billing Experience.

Can you spot that we wanted to achieve that “customer’s could do 80% of the things themselves, because they were as a easy as brushing teeth”?

(c) Lars Diener-Kimmich, (then) Swisscom

There must be a PS this time.

PS: I strongly recommend not to use the picture and visualization catalogues you can buy, that contain hundreds of icons, simple pictures that you could copy onto your flipchart. It might sound convenient to quickly find a good one for “love” or “stress” etc. But in my experience your by-passing your own (and important!) reflection on what is truly essential before you draw.

Don’t do that! It’s so much fun.
And, even if it took me several attempts to get this piggies pictures, I am very proud of my own work. And that’s how it should be for everyone.

Now, let me know when you got your felt tip pens and also, if you have good joke, please use a comment for it. I always like a good laugh! Thanks.

Also, I’ll come back to Storytelling when I write about Pitching & Watering Holes.

Creative Reframing. Dr. House at your Bed.

Agile@Home. Sticky in the Kitchen.