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”.