I will admit that I am not the best at crafting formal presentations. However, I also would not consider myself the worst. I have a technical background and my slide craft and delivery tend to reflect that. Why do my presentations tend to lean towards the technical and away from creativity and storytelling? I think it may because of my misperception that developing a presentation around storytelling means sacrificing structure until the presentation becomes “fluff”.
Nancy Duarte, a self-described communications theorist and empathy architect, is the CEO of a firm that specializes in the application of storytelling and visual thinking to communications in business settings. Duarte has also authored several books on the topic of communications: Guide to Persuasive Presentations, Resonate, Slide:ology, and Slidedocs. Duarte gave a TED Talk (view here) that has changed my understanding of the structure involved in successfully integrating storytelling into a formal presentation.
Here are a few notes that I took away from Duarte’s talk:
1. Understanding Proper Role Assignment
The presenter is not the hero of the story, the audience is the hero. Duarte states that the presenter needs to play the role of a mentor, guiding the audience along from the current state forward to the presenter’s idea.
2. Three Part Structure
Every story has a beginning, middle, and end, right? Yes, but Duarte provides a little more substance. The story should start with a likeable hero who has a desire. This hero should then encounter a roadblock or obstacle. Ultimately, the hero emerges transformed. This is the kind of structure seen in most movies.
3. Presentation Shape
Should there be a structure to a good presentation? Most novels have an arch shape, in which they start, build into a climax and then return as the story is resolved. Duarte studied several famous speeches and recognized a similar structure, a repeating step function. The beginning starts with “what is” and compares it to “what could be”. Here is how things currently are, but look at how they could be. The remainder of the presentation should be based on the amplification of the gap between these two. The middle of the presentation repeats the back and forth motion of what is, what could be, what is, what could be. The goal is to make the current status quo and normal condition look unappealing. Finally, the end should be a call to action. The presentation should end on a high with the audience imaging how the world could be with your idea.
Two of the presentations that Duarte analyzed that exhibited this structure were Steve Job’s 2007 presentation to introduce the iPhone and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a Dream” speech. For more information regarding Duarte’s work, check out her website.
Hi Andrew, I really liked your post and I also watched the video.
Apparently I work in research and we need to present our research data at conferences and group meetings on a regular basis.
I think lots of the presentation I have seen would really benefit from the 3 points you made.
I think especially point one would be important because scientist tend to put themselves as the hero but not the audience. Approaching this in a different way would most likely greatly improve the presentation and would make it more captivating for the audience.
I think scientist always try to apply point 3 in their presentations. Normally, data heavy presentation are always very structured and try to build up a storyline. At the end we then summarize all our findings and try to put them into the bigger picture. (Like how the world would change and improve with our new exciting findings )
Hi Andy,
Thanks for sharing such an insightful resource. I watched the video in full and learnt a lot. She convinced me the need for story telling and also gave a simple template on how to weave the story all through the presentation.