Telling Your Story
I work with a lot of technical teams as they’re preparing oral proposals for large contracts. The contracts may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Scores of people may be engaged in the process for weeks or months on end. And the presentations may involve hundreds of slides. Somewhere along the way someone — usually the capture manager or the person in charge of shepherding the proposal through the process — will ask “What’s our story?”
I’m not quite sure what the question means.
This much I know. People who ask “What’s our story?” are not thinking about story the same way I do. I think of a story, in its most basic form, as a narrative about a person (a character) who goes through a series of actions (a plot) that results in a change of some sort (the resolution), usually to the character but sometimes to the situation.
When people involved in a large technical presentation talk about its story, they’re talking about something else. (I believe that even — or especially — highly technical presentations can be improved by telling a story in the sense I described above. But that’s the topic of another post.)
Here’s what I think technical people mean by a presentation’s story. Or, at least, here’s what I hope they mean. The presentation’s story is the thread that ties everything together into a unified, meaningful, and desirable whole. It is a one-sentence summary of how you — your team, resources, knowledge, approach, tools, products, technology, etc. — can help your audience get from where they are to where they want to be.
Before I elaborate on this idea, let me ask for your input. Have you heard people use the term story in this way? Do you use the term yourself? What do you mean by it? Is it something like what I’ve described?
Tags: presentation story, storytelling in a technical presentation