A to Z of Business Storytelling -11

Kaleidoscopic

A business storyteller may be giving speech which may be an informative speech or a persuasive speech or an inspirational speech. Irrespective of the genre, the speech would primarily have 3–4 bullet points. The bullet points may be any of the What, When, Where, Why, Who and How aspects. Or it can be chronological like Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow kind of scenarios. Or they would be based on spatial North America, Latin America, Continental Europe, Middle East and APAC. In any case, the bullet points need to be backed by supporting points.

In todays edition, we are going to be talking about the support material. The support material need not always be corporate stories or personal stories. In order to break monotony, they need to be of different variety. That is what we call as Kaleidoscopic.

Kaleidoscope is a toy that consists of a tube containing mirrors and small pieces of coloured glass. When you look into one end of the tube and turn it, you see changing patterns of colours. Not only as a child, even as an adult all of get excited when start seeing through a Kaleidoscope. The patters appears on a kaleidoscope is bright and colourful, which delights the user. Not only that, the pattern generated in the toy is unique and always unexpected. For these reasons, a kaleidoscope always entertains the audience.

Like the kaleidoscope patterns, the business storyteller may have to use a variety of support materials in his speech to keep the audience engaged. All the bullet points need not be supported with the same genre of support materials. When they are of different genre, there is variety and suspense element is too enhanced. What are the different types of support material that can bring a kaleidoscopic effect?

Corporate Stories — No need to highlight the importance of using corporate stories in business storytelling, which is obvious. In some other chapters, we have already emphasized the significance of corporate stories in business storytelling. As mentioned in the previous edition, it can be a success story, failure story, strategy story etc.

Personal Stories — Personal stories are good since they are not borrowed stories. No one would have heard about them. But one has to remember that the personal story shall be from a corporate perspective. That is how he/she struggled to mange the customer in critical situations. As long as they are not purely personal (Parental affection, Sibling rivalry, love story etc), they are good to go.

Testimony — These are quotes or opinions from the business leaders across the globe having universal acceptance. While using these quotes, one has to ensure that they are neither generic nor motherhood statements, which do not add value to the corporate audience. The quotes shall be very specific to the context. Some examples are:-

• “Forget about your competitor; Just focus on your customer.” — Jack Ma
• “You cannot get into business for the fashion of it” — Azim Premji
• “In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will be just leaders.” — Sheryl Sandberg

Statistics — These are numerical ways of conveying information about incidents, data and events. They always bring authenticity to the speech delivered by the business storyteller.

Visual Aids — These could be diagrams, charts, pictures, models or other objects. Even today, boring data can be presented as data storytelling. We’ll cover this in another edition.

When we talk about the various support materials as mentioned above, there is no need to all of them in a single speech. One may use just few of them bring in the kaleidoscopic effect to engage with the audience.

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