Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.
—Robert McKee
Stories have power. They delight, enchant, touch, teach, recall, inspire, motivate, challenge. They help us understand. They imprint a picture on our minds. Want to make a point or raise an issue? Tell a story. — Janet Litherland
Stories are all around us. They are what move us, make us feel alive, and inspire us. Our appetite for stories is a reflection of the basic human need to understand patterns of life — not merely as an intellectual exercise but as a personal, emotional experience. Stories are the way to reach out to people and emotionally connect.
Yet most of us are used to the business-as-usual approach to communicating ideas, looking at the umpteenth Powerpoint bullet list or Word document. We may even build presentations that we ourselves wouldn’t want to sit through. Why do we do that? How is it that we such expert story consumers that we can confidently walk out of a movie after only a few minutes, but we often fail to recognize both the importance of a good story and the weakness of our own approaches to communication when it’s our turn on the stage? What happens if we move beyond business-as-usual, and start building content that is engaging and powerful, by harnessing the energy of the well-told story?
