Discussion Assignment -Business Writer Part 1

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I had been developing and using the ideas in this book for !ve years before I presented them for the !rst time in public at the seventh annual Enterprise Architecture Europe Conference in 2006. Between that !rst public showing and the writing of this book, the content has been re!ned, tested, and used to train hundreds of Microsoft employees and people in other major organizations around the world.

In 2010, Nick o#ered to work on the book with me, and we soon invited Mark to join us. Even at that point, this project almost didn’t happen. As we were conducting the market research, I found enough books with similar content that I almost gave up. However, after talking with people who had participated in my training courses I realized we had two very strong reasons to write a book. Many books had a narrow focus on a particular skill set, with very few covering the breadth of techniques, or explaining how to bring all of these skills together in a repeatable process. Hardly any of the books focused on the practical aspect, with worked examples to show how to apply the concepts. Our aim is to keep the theory to a minimum and focus on the practical. Eventually you may need those other books that dive deeper into the details and the theory, but when the presentation needs doing and your career is on the line, we believed a “get the job done” guide was needed.

Stories That Move Mountains is focused on one of the most common reasons for presentations — the need to gain commitment from other people for a change, proposal, or decision. Many presentations and communications are made each day simply to educate the audience, but I know from many years of trying to in$uence people that when you want the audience to make a decision, or want to change their behavior, you have to work a lot harder.

This is a handbook for people who are ready to go beyond the usual approach of presentation slides covered in bullet lists. This book is about content, focusing on just what the audience needs to understand. It’s about understanding your audience, and the reasons why they will be willing to act on your proposal. It’s about using stories to wrap your message in a way that has in$uence and impact. And it’s about creating your content in the right format for the situation.

From senior managers tasked with making decisions to call center operators to the followers of 24-hour news shows, people today are constantly overwhelmed with the data and information pushed at them. More and more, we see that people do not have the time to read long text documents and are bored with typical presentations. At the same time, we see too many projects fail because the people involved have not committed to the changes the project requires. In this book, we introduce you to a process that focuses your message onto a single page, and from there build out to the appropriate mix of formats to deliver a compelling visual story.

I know this process has worked for many hundreds of people already, and from all three authors we hope you will !nd it useful and interesting. If you have any questions, feedback, or examples you would like to share with us we can be contacted through the book website or on our Facebook page.

—Martin Sykes www.storiesthatmovemountains.com

www.facebook.com/storiesthatmovemountains

Preface

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 2017-11-06 12:25:30.

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In business, and in life, we often repeat the same pattern: We learn $awed ideas, we use them, and then we teach them to others. Usually, this is because our underlying assumptions are incorrect, and since we don’t like to question our assumptions, we often repeat our mistakes.

What follows is a true story showing how a good idea can be killed by poor communication and how tenaciously people can !ght to reject a good idea.

In the nineteenth century, free or low-cost maternity clinics were set up across Europe to reduce infanticide and improve the practice of medicine. This greatly appealed to poor women. In one unique institution, the Vienna General Hospital, there were not one but two clinics for childbirth. Clinic One used doctors, and Clinic Two used midwives. In the midwife clinic, on average, about four percent of mothers died during labor. In the physician’s clinic, the number was at least twice as high, and in some years, the death rate topped ten percent. Something was amiss.

The Art of Communication

Needs a System Reset

The Power of Stories

Which is worse: repeatedly performing a !awed process, learning about it without question, or teaching it to others?

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him to a mental institution, where he was beaten and then, ironically, died of an infection within two weeks of arriving at the institution. After his death, his replacement as the head of the obstetric hospital of Pest, Hungary eliminated hand washing. Death rates climbed tenfold. No one protested.

Practicing physicians continued to resist the idea that doctors should wash their hands before performing a procedure for another 75 years! The evidence was there, yet change was slow to come. What was missing?

Some scholars have suggested that Semmelweis was a good scientist, but a poor communicator. Perhaps if Semmelweis had used a simple and clear way

to communicate the e#ectiveness of hand washing, many lives could have been saved.

All new ideas, large or small, meet with some level of resistance, especially if the new idea

requires new behavior. If we want to change the way people behave, remember that comfortable ideas will not yield easily, even to evidence and authority. In order to change hearts and minds, we need to focus on enhancing how we communicate. We need to be clear, convincing, and accurate.

Do we really believe that minds can be changed with a stream of bullets in a presentation slide deck? If the existing methods of communication aren’t working very well, then we need to work out what

is missing.

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a young resident at the time, compared the practices at the two clinics and, in 1847, suggested a reason for the di#erence between the two. The doctors in Clinic One were studying anatomy by dissecting decaying corpses and then walking directly into labor clinics to deliver babies without washing their hands. The midwives in Clinic Two were not. He theorized that something was being carried on the hands of the doctors. To prove his theory, this young doctor introduced antiseptic hand washing in Clinic One. The results: Infection rates dropped dramatically. Death rates dropped dramatically.

Semmelweis’s colleagues started to share his results with the medical community, hoping to save thousands of lives. After all, this was great news! The medical community responded by ridiculing his ideas or misunderstanding him. After all, it couldn’t be the doctors who were making the women sick!

Historians have concluded that Semmelweis thought his ideas would be obvious to others and they would catch on quickly. Because of this Semmelweis didn’t write a paper on his ideas until 1858 and didn’t write the book on his !ndings until 1861. Competing papers and textbooks dismissed his ideas. Bad practices were propagated, and good ideas were dismissed. It was simply inconceivable that doctors were making healthy people sick.

After his book earned bad reviews in 1861, he wrote harsh letters to medical leaders around Europe, infuriating his peers. In 1865, two of his peers conspired to commit

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Over the years we have shared the content of this book with hundreds of people. Al Noel, a principal consultant at Microsoft, had this to say about changing how you approach presentations.

You must free your mind! No more boring lists of bullet points! That stuff does not work. You have to take a much dif- ferent approach. People absorb stories visually all the time with all our modern communications technology. Many years ago when I was in the Army, I was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. At that time, the idea of an Air Assault division that used helicopters extensively was a new idea some people did not always get. One picture in the presentation regarding the division’s capability summed it all up. It was a picture of a helicopter flying over difficult terrain. Any infantry man can just look at that picture and get the message. It is about taking a completely different approach over the obstacle and moving on. No more figuring out bet- ter ways to cross the obstacle quicker, faster, and safer; you must take a completely different approach to the problem. You only have to cross something like this once in your life as an infantryman to get the idea and appreciate it. It’s the same with the visual approach to creating and telling stories. —Al Noel

Visual

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In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath talk about an annual class they run at Stanford University. The students are asked to deliver a one- minute persuasive speech to their peers. All the students are provided with the same data. Half of the students must argue for one point of view, the other half for the opposite point of view.

As you might imagine with Stanford students, these are typically good- quality presentations that clearly impart data and arguments. After the presentations, the audience is distracted for a few minutes with a comedy video and then asked to write the key points from each speech they heard, working from memory because they don’t have notes to refer to.

The students are surprised at how little they can remember. It’s not as though they had a lot to remember, just eight one-minute speeches. These are well- educated people, being presented to by some of the brightest students on the planet. Although only one in ten students will use the presentation to tell a story, leverage emotion, or really focus on a few key messages, the evidence shows that sixty-three percent of the audience can remember facts from the story-telling presentations, compared with only !ve percent from the rest. This evidence was one of the tipping points for me. The use of stories can make your ideas stick in the minds of your audience.

Visual Stories

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Finding the Right Tool for the Job As a tool for convincing people of big ideas, a typical business presentation built from a template of bulleted lists fails in so many ways.

The reasons are plentiful. Di#erent people start with di#erent assumptions, learn in di#erent ways, and need di#erent information to make decisions. Some people are detail-oriented and some like the big picture. Some need a logical argument; others want to understand the impact on people and processes. You cannot provide all possible permutations of the information needed, yet make it easy to navigate and understand with a standard bullet list template. Yet people try, and as a result, members of the audience either become confused or angry about your presentation, or they ignore it. What could be less e#ective than that?

If the standard presentation template approach isn’t an e#ective way to convince people, why do we use it? Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting di#erent results.” And that applies here. Most PowerPoint presentations created to convince people of a new idea are about as e#ective as using a hammer and chisel to slice bread. It will work, sometimes, but not very often and not very well.

This is a reboot. We are starting over, and questioning the basic idea of the presentation itself.

This book is about how to e#ectively communicate that a change needs to happen so people will be motivated to take action. The approach we will introduce you to in the following chapters produces a clear communication that we call a visual story.

Should We Blame the Tools? We make presentations every day. This is especially true in professional settings, where we present ideas, agreements, and updates to peers, superiors, customers, partners, and stakeholders. We even make presentations at home and in our communities. Yet not all presentations are equal. Sometimes, a presentation leads to decisions, actions, commitments, and change. However, far too often, a presentation fails to produce any e#ect whatsoever. The audience may have learned something, but their actions don’t change. So, the question is, was their time well spent?

If, like us, you’ve sat wearily through boring presentations, maybe you’ve thought or heard others say, “That’s an hour I’ll never get back,” or “Did we make any progress at all in there?”

But should we blame the tools? After all, Microsoft PowerPoint has become ubiquitous in business and government settings. Speakers at major conferences are expected to use PowerPoint to deliver their presentations. Military commanders use PowerPoint to provide status updates to their superior o&cers, and teachers at all levels, from grade school through graduate school, use PowerPoint to deliver class lectures. It's clear that PowerPoint has been widely embraced as the de facto mechanism for education, information sharing, and idea sharing.

We don’t think the fault lies with the tools. For one thing, PowerPoint and other similar presentation packages are relatively new tools. Poor communication has been happening for a long time. In fact, most of our visual stories have been created by using PowerPoint as a simple design tool.

visual story

visual story 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 2017-11-06 12:25:30.

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Visual story (viz’yoo wel stôr’ ) n.

1. the telling of an event or series of

events in a form that is, or can be seen

2. a simple and clear visualization of

an idea, presented on a single “sheet

of paper,” for the purpose of guiding a

group of people to a speci#c conclusion.

Sometimes the visual story can be

as simple as a hand-drawn sketch,

sometimes it's a merger of a rich

picture and mindmap, sometimes

a high-production quality

infographic. $e key factor is that

it’s a story on a single page with the

intent to persuade someone to act

and make a change happen.

To Be Effective, You Have to Affect People A visual story is a new starting point from which you can then create presentations, animations, or just stand and speak. It is a proven, simple, e#ective technique for communicating an idea in such a compelling way that your audience will want to act on it.

A visual story does more than communicate an idea. It combines storytelling techniques with visual design to communicate a message that has been !ne- tuned for your speci!c audience. A visual story inspires your audience to act. This matters because an idea that doesn’t inspire change or motivate people to act is impotent and powerless. Even an amazingly good idea, like “wash your hands before surgery,” can go unheeded if not communicated well.

Although literally millions of presentations are made every year, most fall into three general categories. Presentations are used to CONVINCE, EDUCATE, or REPORT. Visual stories are useful primarily for situations where the aim is to convince other people. Presentations designed to educate the audience or to report on progress can bene!t from a lot of what we have to say, but the process we have developed has a strong focus on reducing the message down to the minimum necessary to in$uence the audience to take an action. A visual story provides a selected set of information, in a single complete picture, carefully designed to draw your audience from their starting place to the desired conclusion.

While you may ultimately produce your visual story in many di#erent formats, we are going to focus on !rst getting to the one-page view, as we have found that the focus and e#ort to get the message to this level enables a better delivery for a wide range of other formats, from presentations, to video, to simply standing at a whiteboard and sketching out the ideas. On the following two pages we illustrate the idea of the visual story, with a visual story about using the process to rapidly improve an existing presentation. As this is a common situation we have dedicated Chapter 16 to be a worked example based on the last two days of this story.

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Convincing Evidence Early in the development of the visual story process, well before it had the name and structure we use in this book, Martin used the technique to help change the relationship between the IT department and the rest of the organization in Her Majesty’s Prison Service.

Every year, the senior executives met to review

the strategies for di#erent parts of the organization. Each year, the IT director

presented the updated IT strategy to the board. He was usually allocated 15 minutes on

the agenda. For many years the IT director had pre- sented a document of approximately eight pages, and each year, the group of executives indicated their approval. There was no real discus- sion, and the IT department wasn’t seen as strategic to the performance of the organization. Each year, real opportunities for change were lost because changes in technology and the Internet were not considered a priority by the senior sta#.

A new IT director was appointed at the start of a major period of change. This wasn’t a small reorganization. Whole departments were undergoing changes, and at the same time, a major update of the IT infrastructure and line of business systems was planned. I was hired to work on this upgrade and to support the implementation of the IT strategy. It was an ambitious program that would a#ect every major business function. Over a two-year period, it would replace tens of thou- sands of computers, upgrade the network and data centers, and replace core business systems.

Failure to convince the executive sta# of the need for this strategic, and expensive, change could mean that the people we needed to involve would not be ready, signi!cantly delaying the program and really increasing the costs. There was also a big risk that opportunities

f o r improve- ments to the business processes would be lost if we didn’t secure the engagement needed across the organization. As the date for the annual strategy presentation approached we knew we had a golden opportunity to change the way the prison service worked with its technology team. This opportunity was rare, and because we were both new, we could try something di#erent.

The day of the meeting came, and at the appointed time, we turned the projector o#. Instead of showing a PowerPoint deck or an eight- page document, we distributed a large-format, printed copy of a visual story, one page, and held our breath. What they were looking at was a well-known picture of a training prison with a series of small stories around the edges, each relevant to di#erent members of the board, in the context of the overall business of the organization. The stories captured the impact and detail of changes over the next three years.

The original one-page visual story is probably somewhere in the prison service archives, but it would have far more detail than is appropriate to share here. This sketch gives an idea of what the visual story looked like and the topics for the stories.

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The Visual Story Process This book is for visionaries and educators, change agents and revolutionaries, motivators and drivers. If you prefer the status quo, or your business is not changing, you probably don’t need this book. But if you want to in$uence oth- ers to make a decision, improve something or agree to a change, read on. We can help you.

We’ve been experimenting with the production of visual stories for years. We’ve utilized research from a wide array of !elds, conducted some of our own, and looked at the work of many other groups struggling to make e#ective com- munications. We have failed as many times as we have succeeded. When we examined why we failed it was clear that we had skipped some part of the analysis, or rushed to create a visualization without !rst getting clarity on why it mattered to the audience. When we succeeded it was also clear that we had !rst created a good one-page visual story to clarify the focus of the message before developing other formats to communicate the story.

The visual story looks simple, and in its simplicity, it is powerful. Clear simple messages are easy to consume, use, and follow. But clarity and simplicity are not easy to produce on demand.

We have made it as easy as possible to create a visual story, but doing so still requires work — more work than you would normally put into preparing a presentation. Making change is hard. Communicating change is hard. With visual stories you can at least improve your success rate.

What do you have to gain? !at’s up to you.

Where do you want to take the world today?

The di#erence was immediate. No one said anything. All eyes were on the visual story. After a few minutes, the IT director began to speak. He talked them through the major technology changes from the perspective of the prison, using di#erent parts of the central image as the starting point for a series of small stories.

After 30 minutes, the questions were piling up. After 45 min- utes, the session was called to a halt. We had exceeded our time, but the outcome was very di#erent from prior years. All of the department heads now had an action to establish regular one-on- one brie!ngs with his or her IT representative. It took a little while for the IT strategy to get approval. Many questions now needed answering, but the change in the relationship between IT and the department teams had started.

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