Writing Assignment-Business Writer

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I am responsible for figuring out the simplest way to solve dif- ficult software and technology problems. Often I need to create a solution and then explain it to dozens of different people, each with their own questions and concerns.

Before I understood how to create a visual story I would create a long series of diagrams to explain my ideas, using different pictures for different purposes, or run- ning through a series of diagrams in a presentation. More than once, after throwing picture after picture at

my customers, I’d sit back and marvel at my skill and wait, patiently, for my customer to agree. After all, I’d given them

all the evidence they needed to see that my design was good, solid, and skillfully produced.

Usually, this approach failed. Sometimes, it failed miserably. I tried for a long time to understand why. Certainly, I understood what I was trying to say. Why didn’t they? Was I an eagle working with turkeys? Was I a conceited, self-important geek wrapped up in my own complexity? Was I speaking Hawaiian to a Spaniard?

After Martin shared the techniques for creating visual stories with me, all that changed. He showed me how a well-crafted visual story uses scientific methods, developed through decades of research in psychology, linguistics, design, and education, to motivate audi- ences to act. After a little practice I was a changed man. Now a single page from me could tell an entire story, not only to help people see what I was trying to say, but also to motivate them to care about the changes I proposed.

My ideas became compelling, and then to my surprise, easy to remember. Some of my visual stories started to “go viral,” as I presented a story to one person and he or she used it to present those same ideas to others.

CONTENT ROW Many presentations have too much content

that is not relevant to the decision or change being

proposed. If you want your sales team to search for

new customers, or your IT group to implement a new

content management system, your content must lead

the audience to understand why you want them to

act, and what they must do.

AUDIENCE ROW You need to understand the people

you’re telling your story to. What do they need to

know? How can you motivate them to respond in the

way you intend? Whether you want your design team to

develop a new logo, or your CEO to approve a new project,

you need to consider the di!erent people in the audience.

STORY ROW When you are clear about the content and

your audience, you can focus on the story structure. We

draw from centuries of practical experience of how to

tell a compelling and interesting story. Using the format

of a story, rather than simply presenting information,

makes it easy for your audience to identify with your goals,

remember your ideas, and agree with your suggestions.

TELL ROW Now you create the words and visuals to focus

on the telling of the story. Work out how the story will

be conveyed in di!erent formats and test that it has the

intended impact. Careful attention to the di!erent ways a

visual story can be told can make the di!erence between a

clear story and a muddled message.

Sykes, Martin, et al. Stories That Move Mountains : Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1040814. Created from capella on 2017-11-10 13:32:56.

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WHY People do not like to change, and where possible most people will avoid making decisions.

Your story has to give them a clear reason to act. We #nd that the best way to be clear, and remain

clear, is to make the reasons for change as explicit as possible. This includes identifying any external

in$uences that your audience should react to, as well as the personal goals of your audience that can

be tied to your story.

WHAT If the reasons for change are already known to your audience, you can bet that some people

have already thought about the “broken” things that need #xing, or the new things that need to be

added. However, you must also consider all the “working” things that may need to change, and the

things that could be a!ected but should be left alone. In a business setting the things you might have

to think about include processes, buildings, machinery, systems, people, customer experience, and

information that will change or be a!ected by the change.

Before you create a story, you need to be very clear on what the story will be about. In Chapter 1 we said that the purpose for most visual stories is to motivate your audience to make a decision, take an action, or make a change in their business or life. Chapters 4 through 7 cover the Content row of the Visual Story Map. In these chapters we show you a series of techniques to refine your content to focus on the outcome you want, and to filter ruth- lessly to remove anything not directly relevant to the desired action.

Over the decade it took us to become skilled in the CAST techniques, the hardest lesson was accepting the importance of working on the con- tent first and then building the story and presenta- tion materials. Every minute you spend understanding the relevance of the content to your audience is returned tenfold when you get the story right.

The Content row includes four elements, Why, What, How, and What If.

Good CONTENT Makes For Good Stories

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The Content row is based on questions or the common interrogatives of “Why,” “What,” “How,” and “What If.” While these interrogatives are often used by journalists, they are also used as a structure for the analysis of business problems and for the differ- ent ways in which people learn.

During the last decade, many organizations have had great results with a structured approach called the Benefits Dependency Network, developed at the Cranfield University Business School Centre for IS Research. This approach helps organizations understand the benefits of business change programs. We simplified and adapted this approach to create techniques to structure the content for a visual story, and also incorporated ideas from current research on how people learn and make decisions to help focus on what the audience needs to understand.

The “Why,” “What,” and “How” cells build a logical sequence with strong connectivity that helps underscore the reasoning and motivation in the story. Many stories fail because there are unbelievable leaps for the charac- ters, or actions that seem to have no justification. The work in this row of the Visual Story Map helps your audience understand why they need to change, what to change, and how to change it. When you build this into a visual story you will provide a convincing sequence of activities. The “What If ” cell looks at the challenges, consequences, and alternatives. The information gath- ered here can put a twist in the story that can help make it stick in the minds of the audience

Our understanding of factors that influence the stickiness of ideas comes from the book, Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, which is based on work they’ve been doing over many years. In their book, the Heath brothers describe how to make an idea stick: make it simple, unex- pected, concrete, credible, emotional, and tell the idea as a story.

Why did we go to all this effort? Because we believe that applying the most current science will help you to create the most compelling story. We made it easy by taking the research and turning it into a step-by-step process for you to follow.

HOW Wave your hands, say a few words, and everything is di!erent. This approach only

works for Harry Potter. In most situations decisions take time to implement, and the

process of change requires careful planning. Good stories include a lot of action,

where something happens, and the content you identify now will form a large part of

the visual story. You may be starting something new, stopping something, changing

an existing activity, and possibly ensuring that some things remain the same while

everything else changes around them. An important step we will cover in the “How”

chapter is to show the clear linkage back to “What” has to be changed, and “Why.”

Linking your plan to the reasons why the story is important to your audience allows

you to convince everyone that you understand their concerns.

WHAT IF There are always alternatives, the competing ideas and reasons why your

audience might not be as supportive of your idea as you want them to be. You’ll need

to explain why this change should be supported, even when there are so many other

needs and demands. Why should other worthy causes get a lower priority? Why this

direction and not another? Through the development of the Content row, we will

help you to place your change into the broader context so that you can convince your

audience to follow you now, and not wait until a later day that never comes.

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WHO To convince an audience, you #rst must #gure out

who they are. If you know who will be in your audience,

you can build an understanding of their interests, their

support for your ideas, how much they know about what

you want them to do, and how they individually might

in$uence each other. In some cases you may have never

met your audience; all you know of them are broad

characterizations. For these situations we will look at the

use of personas to help develop a focus on the motivations

that drive the group.

LEARNING AND DECISION STYLES The way you present

your content, from the selection of formats to the order

in which you present it to the di!erent members of the

audience, should be determined by an understanding of

how the audience will react to what you give them. Some

people will expect details, others will want to know how

your proposal will impact the people in the organization.

This section uses research on the di!erent learning and

decision styles to help you focus your story in a way that

produces the results you need, without missing any cues.

Understanding your audience is key to selecting the right story structure, formats, and deciding how to represent your content to lead them effectively to a decision to act. The Audience row, covered in Chapters 8 and 9, consists of two elements, Who, and Learning and Decision Styles.

Motivate Your AUDIENCE to Act

As you will discover in learning the CAST process, we believe that you will need to be ruthless in throwing out extraneous details. Deciding what to keep and what to discard can be tough. The best place to start, we have found, comes from carefully considering the people you want to influence and build- ing the story specifically for them. What motivates them? How do they learn? What kind of information do they require in order to make a decision?

If you want your story to be successful make sure it addresses the important question that is rarely voiced:

“What’s in it for me?” Sykes, Martin, et al. Stories That Move Mountains : Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1040814. Created from capella on 2017-11-10 13:32:56.

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When you use a story to make change happen, you’re often asking your audi- ence to perform two different and difficult tasks. You are asking them to learn, and you are asking them to decide. The learning and decision styles that cut across all aspects of the Audience row are drawn from the techniques used by psychologists, sociologists, salespeople, and educators. A technique that has been particularly successful for us is based on research from the 1970s by Bernice McCarthy into how children learn, work that has been developed into techniques now used by educators around the world. It is simple to imple- ment and can be used quickly to act as both a filter and guiding structure to take the content in the top row of the Visual Story Map and ensure that it fits with the range of learning and decision styles of the audience.

Our methods for audience analysis are built on the best practices from three very different professions: project managers who use stakeholder management techniques, salespeople with their influence maps and methods to convince people to buy into a dream, and professional change managers who under- stand the process people go through as they adopt change. Martin had a realization, many years ago, that visual stories need to be created with the same insights into the audience that top salespeople use when creating their sales pitches.

I was leading a number of projects to implement new IT solutions into our business. Most of the potential solutions came from some of the biggest companies in the IT industry and we were trying to pick the best combination based on our business needs and the capabilities of the so!ware.

We thought we had a good plan, but we had competitors with

di#erent plans. $ose competitors were not limited to internal people with alternative ideas. $ey included external salespeople from the big IT companies who were trying to sell us their solutions, regardless of the %t with the other suppliers or our internal capabilities.

$e approach of the sales representatives from the big companies was much more in&uential with our senior managers than our approach was. Each time we met with our senior managers, we found that the external sales teams had already been to see them and set the stage for their next discussions. $ey had a better story and a better approach for delivering it, and this was based on understanding our executives better than we did! We %nally got a solution to %t our needs, but only because we managed to get a vote on the procurement board for the project.

$e salespeople were just doing their job, and doing it well. Based on this experience, I concluded that we needed to %nd out how salespeople sell an idea and then build that approach into the process for creating stories about change.

Asking a person to learn is di!erent from asking a person to decide.

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The Story row of the Visual Story Map guides you through the process of building an effective, inter- esting, and compelling story. There are four ele- ments in this row, Structure, Character, Sense of Urgency, and Delivery Plan.

STRUCTURE Stories have a beginning, middle, and an

end. They take the audience on a journey, and they

use idioms, metaphors, rhetoric, and archetypal

plotlines to help the audience connect with your

ideas. Picking the right format and structure of a

story helps to make it memorable and relevant.

CHARACTER Your audience has to care in order to

become truly engaged. Characters are critically

important for humanizing your message and

allowing members of your audience to see

themselves, and their success, as being connected

with the struggle of the characters in the story.

The characters in your story must be meaningful

to the audience, but that doesn’t mean they all need

to be people. In Chapter 11 we look at how to

create characters for people, inanimate objects, and

concepts — in short, anything that must change.

Give Your Audience a STORY to Remember

SENSE OF URGENCY There are many types of stories, but they all have one thing in common: the characters

are placed in a situation where they must react. The sense of urgency in your story will help you to focus

on the story elements that drive your characters, and your audience, toward the conclusion you want them

to reach. Is there a con$ict to resolve, a puzzle to solve, or an obstacle to overcome? We build on lessons

learned from top salespeople to capture urgency, to make your story compelling, and cause your audience

to choose to act now.

DELIVERY PLAN We are accustomed to stories being told in many di!erent ways. Sometimes a story belongs

at a team meeting, shared with peers, sometimes in a boardroom, and other times in a company cafeteria.

Even business stories could be presented as movies or told around a camp#re at an o!site retreat. In this

part of the CAST process we cover the many di!erent ways you can tell your story, and why having a range

of channels can multiply the e!ectiveness of your message.

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characters in a visual story. In many cases, you know the story will have a hero and a villain and someone who will set the hero on his or her way, but with different plots, the hero can become a villain and vice versa.

Visual stories are not created for entertainment. Visual stories are meant to cause someone to make a decision and to take action. For that to happen, you often need to elicit a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency is often a core concept in sales training, where the salesperson’s intent is to entice the con- sumer to buy today rather than wait until tomorrow to make a decision.

As Martin described in his story about competing with external sales teams, you may have competitors (both external and internal) who are try- ing to sell their ideas, and the audience is going to make a choice. The key lesson is not to ignore their sales tactics, but rather to use them to your advantage. We built the CAST process to leverage the techniques that salespeople use to sell an idea. That way, your presentation can be as com- pelling as your competition, and thus as successful.

In Chapters 10 through 13 we cover the Story row, drawing on multiple sources to provide the structure and scope for the visual story. Our mix of sources starts with Aristotle and spans centuries to include the work of world-famous scriptwriting lecturer, Robert McKee; draws on the seven basic plots of stories identified by Christopher Booker; and the narrative and character structure identified by Vladimir Propp over a century ago. It’s a diverse mix intended to provide inspiration and ideas rather than prescriptive rules.

Story, by Robert McKee, is a book for script writers, for the people whose stories we see every day on stage, in films, and on TV. There’s a large body of evidence about what makes a great film or a memorable TV show. What McKee points out, quite forcefully in his lectures and training courses, is that no magic formula always wins. We draw on McKee’s expe- rience to create the overall story structures and advice about how and when to use them.

From Propp’s work and an analysis of common plots, we provide a set of archetypal characters that can help to clarify and define the potential

Drive your audience toward the

conclusion you want them to reach.

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DESIGN Whether through the words you say, the words that

are written, or the visuals you use, it is the mental image

you create that helps to in$uence your audience. Design

is a critical part an e!ective in$uencing process. Even a

thoughtful, creative, data-rich, and potentially successful

story can fall $at on its face if the most convincing visual

elements and approaches for your story are not identi#ed and

chosen carefully. For example, if you present two di!erent

options, one in red text and the other in green text, your

visual may be sending a message to some of your audience

about what to go ahead with and what to stop, but others

who are color-blind may just not get the message.

TEST Did you cover all your bases? Did you include all

the information you need in order to make your story

compelling? Did you stay away from using too much red?

(Just kidding.) Did you practice the “telling” of your story

and re#ne the visual story to both support your telling and

the path to a decision? In short, how do you know your

visual story is good enough to in$uence your audience?

There are no guarantees, but we know there are common

problems that derail stories, and lead to confused audiences.

In this last part of the CAST process we bring together a set

of six tests that will reduce your risk of failure.

Finally, it’s time to pull the parts together to tell the story itself. We cover the Tell row in Chapters 14 and 15, where we look at how to create visual elements for the story, characters, and supporting content, com- bine those elements in compelling ways, construct a rich one-page picture of the story, and validate that your story can be told and understood in a variety of formats.

Chapter 14 examines design, and Chapter 15 shows you how to test your story.

Visual Stories Are Designed and Tested for Someone to TELL

Design is

a critical

component to

in!uence

your audience.

20 Sykes, Martin, et al. Stories That Move Mountains : Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1040814. Created from capella on 2017-11-10 13:32:56.

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