Storytelling techniques for presentations

Most presentations follow the order the work was done: background, approach, findings, recommendation. The audience gets the reason to care in the last two minutes, after their attention has already gone. Storytelling techniques fix the order. None of them requires you to be a natural performer, and none involves inventing anything.

Ten storytelling techniques for presentations

1. The cold open

Skip Good morning, today I am going to talk about. Start inside a moment: At 11 pm last Tuesday, our biggest client's finance head called our support line. The audience leans in because they want to know what happened next. You can introduce yourself and the agenda after the first thirty seconds, once you have their attention.

2. Give the problem a cost

Tension is what makes people listen to a resolution. Name what the problem costs, in a unit your audience counts in: money for finance, customers for sales, hours for operations, risk for leadership. Some refunds are failing is information. One refund in twenty fails, and each failure costs us a support call and sometimes the customer is a reason to keep listening.

3. One person, not a population

People respond more strongly to one identifiable person than to a statistic about many. Researchers Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic showed this in a 2007 study of charitable giving: people gave more to help a single named child than in response to statistics about millions in need, and adding the statistics to the child's story reduced giving. In a presentation, show the one customer, the one new joiner, the one engineer on call, then give the number that shows how typical they are.

4. What is, and what could be

Nancy Duarte, in Resonate (2010), studied great speeches and found a common pattern: they move back and forth between the world as it is and the world as it could be, and end with a vision of the new state. You can use a small version in any business presentation: alternate the current pain with the improved picture, two or three times, so the gap between them becomes the argument.

5. A number with a comparison

Large numbers wash over people. Put them next to something the audience can picture. 4,000 hours a year becomes two full-time people doing nothing but re-keying orders. The comparison is what makes a number memorable, and choosing the right one is most of data storytelling.

6. The turn

Every story has a moment where things change: the discovery, the failed fix, the customer who left. Give it its own slide, with nothing but one sentence or one image, and pause. Audiences remember turns far better than they remember lists.

7. Show the attempt that failed

If you went straight from problem to solution, the solution looks obvious and the audience wonders why you needed the budget. We tried adding a second approval step first. It made things slower and caught nothing. A failed attempt shows the problem is real and your solution was earned.

8. Use what people actually said

A direct quotation is the cheapest way to bring a person into the room. The customer's words were: I do not care about the new feature, I care that nobody answers the phone. It is more vivid than any summary, and it is evidence rather than your interpretation.

9. Three, not seven

Audiences hold three points comfortably and lose track after that. If you have seven findings, group them into three, or choose the three that drive the decision and put the rest in an appendix. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007 as three devices in one, and the audience remembered all three.

10. The callback ending

Close by returning to the person or moment you opened with, now resolved by your proposal: With this change, the next time a finance head calls at 11 pm, the refund will already be on its way. I need approval for the two-week pilot today. The callback makes the presentation feel complete, and it puts the ask where attention is highest.

A presentation is a story about a decision. If the last slide does not ask for one, the story has no ending.

A ten-minute presentation, structured as a story

If you are presenting to senior leaders who want the answer first, move the ask to the opening sentence and tell the story as the reason for it. Our guide on how to give a presentation at work covers when to lead with the answer and when to build to it.

Practise on situations, not slides

The techniques above are easy to agree with and hard to use on a deadline, especially the choice of the one person and the one cost. The free business storytelling check gives you sixteen real work situations, from a dashboard review to a CFO email, debriefs your choices, and then asks you to rewrite a message of your own. Its report tells you which of four skills to practise first.

A myth to stop repeating

Many presentation guides claim that stories are 22 times more memorable than facts, usually crediting the psychologist Jerome Bruner. Nobody has been able to find that figure in Bruner's published work, and there is no study behind it. It is a good example of a claim that spread because it was a good story.

The honest version is less precise and still useful. Research on narrative, and well-known classroom demonstrations such as the one Chip and Dan Heath describe in Made to Stick, consistently suggest that people recall stories better than isolated statistics. You do not need a made-up multiplier to make the case, and quoting one in a presentation about evidence undermines you.

Techniques to avoid

• The invented story. Composite or made-up stories presented as real are found out, and when they are, nothing else you said is trusted.
• The long build. If your setting takes longer than your tension, the audience has left before the story starts.
• The joke opener. Unless the joke is the point, it spends your best thirty seconds on something unrelated.
• The hero's journey for a status update. Twelve-stage structures belong in films. Business stories need three parts: context, tension, resolution, as set out in how to structure a business story.
• You as the hero. Make the customer, the user or the team the centre of the story. You are the guide.

For worked, before-and-after versions of real workplace stories, see our business storytelling examples.

Tour De Force runs this as live, experiential training for teams worldwide, online and in person. Talk to us, or play The Weekly Challenge from our gamified learning apps to see the method in ten minutes.