Art of Message
The best storyteller I ever met ✨ II
The best storyteller I ever met was my dad. Or at least he’s one of them – I’m biased of course!
As I was saying, good storytellers like him know when and whether to tell a story in the first place.
And like any reporter or standup comic, they don’t bury the lede or the punch line; they reveal the “so what” upfront.
A good storyteller also:
- Knows their audience and senses the moment to gauge interest in their story
- Gauges that interest with a hook – maybe a joke or funny observation, maybe an odd fact or quote.
- Lets it go if there’s no interest
- If there’s only slight or polite interest, tells the story end-to-end as one short statement
- If there’s higher interest, tells the story in chapters or parts and – sometimes in great detail
- Ends it neatly after any or all of those parts
I think you can tell a great story in one sentence. But great storytellers can tell a long, detailed story and make it just punchy as the one-sentence one.
This means breaking the story into small parts in your head and rearranging them chronologically if needed. And the rarest skill: the ability to summon a great number of facts, moments, and personal details and roll them all into detailed but concise passages of speech. It’s almost as if you think and speak in full, professionally-edited paragraphs.
Until it all comes together in a tidy ending, like a gymnast perfectly sticking a landing.
Yes, but how do you apply all this to business solutions storytelling?
If that question interests you, an example approach is the Brightr Story Framework, which makes a case study a story by highlighting the people and key moments of a business engagement.
