Structuring your Messages

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Storylining structure is how your messages tie together and flow from start to finish.

The structure you want to use will depend on the content of your messages, your audience, the story’s goals and your own style.

A common business storylining structure is called SCR, which is an acronym for Situation, Complication, Resolution.

Imagine how your audience would react to each of your messages as you go through them in sequence.

By imagining how your audience might react, you can re-structure your storyline to make it more conducive to your specific audience.

Great storylines also exhibit certain characteristics. You want to ask yourself:

You can leverage the goals you defined as a checklist too. Imagine yourself as the audience and determine whether your storyline, as it stands, would achieve those goals.

Your task for today is to spend 10 minutes structuring your storyline into your first full draft.

Creating your Messages

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You need 5-10 key messages that will form the backbone of your storyline and lay the foundation for everything else you want to say.

Initially, don’t worry about their order or their precise wording, just write down the the first 5-10 bullet points that come to mind as the most important points you would want to make to your specific audience.

Try to ensure your messages are appropriately synthesised - If you can imagine your audience asking you the question “so what” in response to you saying one of your messages then identify how you’d answer them and use that as your message instead.

Next, run through each message, checking to see whether it needs to be supported. If you’re asserting a conclusion, you need to ask yourself whether it requires facts or insights to be shared in order to back it up.

Next, read through your points again removing any superfluous adjectives. These are adjectives which are subjective and which don’t add value to the message.

Your task for today is to spend 10 minutes writing down your main messages, as well as any keys facts and insights you need to justify them.

Analysing the Audience

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Audience is the second component of the GAME framework. GAME stands for: Goal, Audience, Message, Expression.

Explore what you know about the audience, in order to determine how that should affect the messaging and overall storyline.

We can understand our audience better by performing what’s known as “audience analysis” - a series of questions that we need to ask ourselves.

Your task for today is to perform audience analysis for your upcoming meeting, so grab a pad of paper and draw up up 8 columns.

In the first column, write down the names of your audience members as rows. Then in the second column, note down the goals for each audience member.

Then column by column we will be answering relevant questions for each audience member:

Once you’ve gone through these questions and considered them for your audience, it may be worth validating these with someone else if you can.

Setting your Goals

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When it comes to defining a Goal for a storyline we suggest being tactical and having specific goals for your specific audience, around the themes of:

The clearer you are on what you’re trying to achieve with your storyline, the easier it should be to create the right messages.

Defining goals also acts as a very helpful checklist once your story’s been drafted to compare against and confirm whether the story you’ve developed will actually help you achieve them or not.

Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes thinking about your upcoming presentation or meeting and its audience, in order to determine what you’re trying to achieve.

Remember, you want your goals to be granular and clear, but not overly complicated.

How to be a better storyliner

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If we want to do better, we need to be intentional and apply a structured process that can guide our approach to storylining.

In this series we’re going to talk through a structured approach to building storylines, and practice on one that you need to write currently. We’ll be leveraging a framework called “GAME” developed by an expert in the field called Steve Seager, as well as leveraging some techniques used by the pros at the consulting firms.

“GAME” stands for:

Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes choosing a communication or meeting that you have coming up where you know you’ll need to convince others of something. Identify who will be at the meeting, what it’s about and broadly what you’re trying to convince them of. The meeting will need to be in more than two weeks, in order to have the necessary time to progress through the series, assuming that you do one session a day.

What it means to storyline

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When you do need to affect someone in someway, then there are few ways to do this more powerfully than with a good story.

Your messages, the actual substance of what you’re saying, are crucial to affecting your audience. How you word them and the order in which you deliver them matter just as much as how you deliver them.

In the business environment, a storyline would look like a series of bullet point messages, one after the other, which if your audience read from start to finish would not just convey key facts and insights but also their meaning and implications for the audience. The messages also need to be written and sequenced in such a way as to make them clear, coherent and compelling.

And it’s crucial to develop this storyline before you start putting together slides or preparing speaker notes for a presentation in order to realise its power.

Since messaging is such a crucial competent of storylining, a pre-requisite skill is the ability to synthesise - to be able to draw out the meaning and implications of facts and insight. You need to be able to take a step back from data and information, go beyond what is merely interesting and ask yourself “so what?”. Why does this matter? What does this mean?

Your task for today is to start warming up this skill by practising some synthesis. Spend 5 minutes choosing your favourite movie or book and try to synthesis its meaning into a single sentence. For example, my synthesis of the movie Titanic might be “arrogance results in tragedy”.

Ongoing feedback and support

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Asking whether someone wants ongoing support from you, hearing what they have to say, and being honest about what you can provide them with is a great step forward.

If they ask you to provide ongoing feedback on a specific area or relating to a particular task, be sure to make a note of that and find a suitable trigger to ensure that you follow through.

Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes adding notes to your feedback log for the person you most recently shared feedback with:

Keep your feedback log to hand and add to it when you make an observation that you want to share feedback on. Alternatively, spend 5 minutes on it daily, capturing what you observed in the day. A calendar reminder in the afternoon can serve as a trigger to make this a habit.

Delivering feedback constructively

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Before sharing feedback, consider the other person’s feedback preferences to determine:

If you don’t know the other person well, or you’re concerned about how they might react to the feedback, then there’s a feedback delivery framework you can try called OILS:

When you share an implication, it’s crucial to steer clear of subjective judgements about them as an individual, such as who they are or what they believe. Either stay objective or if you make things subjective, make it about your own feelings.

Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes preparing some feedback for someone in particular. Determine the time and place, as well as outline what you’ll share with them. Refer to your feedback log and be sure to prioritise what you want to share, trying to include both strengths and development ideas.

Once you’ve shared feedback with them, consider asking them for feedback on your approach.

Developing actionable feedback to share

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Being intentional about when you choose to share feedback, considering the other person’s preferences and the feedback you have to share, will generally lead to a better outcome.

In the event that you share feedback in scheduled 1-to-1 settings, it can help if you’re prepared for it by arming yourself with actionable comments that you’ve developed beforehand.

A great way to do this is by taking notes on those you’ll be sharing feedback with, keeping a feedback log always to hand such as a notebook or mobile app.

When you see something worth providing feedback on, you can take a note of:

This will help make your feedback fact-based, targeted and actionable - key ingredients to making it more valuable for them.

Your task for today is to spend 5 minutes preparing your feedback log and adding the people you want to offer feedback to, as well as incorporating any feedback you already have for them in the above format.

Why share feedback?

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A common wish for many is to receive more actionable feedback from their colleagues. Feedback that will help them improve, help them to develop and also, make them feel valued.

If you help others grow through effective feedback, they’re better able to support you and more likely to commit to your shared endeavours.

So your task for today is to spend 5 minutes reflecting on this and making a list of:

Then consider: