Stories Can Be A Powerful Part Of Any Business Presentation
One question that I keep getting asked over and over by speakers that I am working with is: if
storytelling is such a powerful public speaking tool, then why isn’t it used more in business
settings? It’s a good question, but the answer is a little bit complicated.

Where Did All The Stories Go?
I can’t tell you how many business presentations I’ve sat though that at the end I couldn’t have told
you what was talked about if my life depended on it. It’s not that the speaker was necessarily bad,
it’s just that nothing that they said caught my imagination and so nothing stuck.

This is where stories come in – people remember stories long after you get done with your public
speaking. We remember them because it’s a fundamental way that humans have exchanged information for as long as we’ve been around.

For some reason, people have decided that stories don’t have a place in the public speaking
environment of business – perhaps they don’t think that they are “grown up” enough and that only facts and figures should be used. This is completely wrong.

What Is The Value Of A Business Story?
Dr. Caren Neile has been looking into the use of stories in the workplace and she reports that
Makingstories.net president Terrence Gargiulo has identified 9 key values to using a story in a
business presentation:

They empower the speaker.
They can be used to create a particular environment.
They can be used to bond individuals together.
They can help your audience to engage in active listening.
They can be used to resolve differences between both individuals and groups.
They can encode information.
They can act as tools to help with brainstorming.
They can be used as weapons.
They can be used to start or enhance a healing process.

The professional storytellers define the act of storytelling as being “… a face-to-face oral narrative
that employs non-verbal communication and imagination.“ One side effect of this definition is that
when stories are told – in public speaking, in a live business setting - they are much more powerful
than when they are just written down.

What Kind Of Stories Work In Business Presentations?
Dr. Neile reports that Annette Simmons, who is the president of the company Group Process Consulting, believes that there are six types of stories that can be used in public speaking in a business environment:

Who I Am: this type of story is used to gain an audience’s trust by having the speaker explain
where they are coming from.
Why I Am Here: this story type is a way to communicate your agenda to your audience.
The Vision: this story paints a vision of the future that the audience can see and can then
decide that they want to be a part of it.
Values-In-Action: this story shares the good things that can happen when the audience has
shared values and the bad things that can happen when those values are violated.
I Know What You Are Thinking: this story shows how connected the speaker is to the audience
and that he/she has their best interests in mind.

How Can We Use Stories During Business Presentations?
Stories that your audience can relate to are the best kind of stories to use. This means that you need
to spend the time to uncover the true stories that already exist within the organization: the
successes, the failures, and people behaving both badly and wonderfully.

The power of business stories is that they provide one of the most effective ways to achieve agreement about how to resolve issues and meet goals. It’s no longer a question of IF they should be used, but rather a question of HOW MUCH they should be used.