A to Z of Business Storytelling -19
T — Transitions
When someone is attempting the business storytelling approach in his/her keynote address, there is every possibility that more than one story could be used. Also within a single story, there can be multiple incidents. But it is imperative that the stories or anecdotes shall not be in isolation. There is a compelling need that these individual pieces need to be stitched in a seamless manner. Transitions help doing this. To be precisely the transitions phrases help to connect between individual scenarios. Let us try to understand more on the techniques.
Transitions in storytelling are the words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or punctuation that may be used to signal various changes in a story, including changes in time, location, point-of-view character, mood, tone, emotion and pace. Different transitions effectively help the storyteller to speak more cohesive pieces and improve his/her speaking clarity. They connect ideas between new sentences and new paragraphs, setting up a more comprehensive listening experience for the audience. Let us understand the different types of transitions.
- Chronological — Most of the stories are cohesive events happen over a period of time. When we try to move on from one episode to another, the following transition phrases like “In the mean time”, “All of a sudden”, Finally” etc can be used.
- Causal — Causal transitions identify the cause before an effect. Phrases like “In order to”, “For the purpose of”, “As the situation demanded”, “Since (the need)”. These causal transition phrase let the audience know that your talk is presenting a condition, cause, or intention.
- Illustrative — Many times, we may to say a point and given an example. The connecting word for the examples can be the transition phrases. Examples are “For Example’, “To illustrate”, “To demonstrate”, “For this reason”, “Particularly”, “Specifically”.
- Outcome — Some transition phrases are used to help the audience identify the cause and effect. Examples are “Accordingly,” “Consequently,” “Therefore,” and “For this reason”.
- Conclusion — Transitions not only help to connect different points of the speech, but also helps to smoothly land from the body of the speech to the end of the speech. As a business storyteller you need to indicate the audience that the speech is coming to an end and they need to carefully listen to summary of the speech. Examples in this category would be “In summary”, “To conclude”, “Ultimately” and “To reiterate”.
Let us see the transitions phrases in the following business story.
As some of you know, I am from oil and gas industry, specifically from petroleum refining. Petroleum refineries not only produce and sell fossil fuels, they also consume some quantity of fuel they produce. Since they burn fuels on a continuous basis, hey tend to pollute the environment.
So, in every country the government puts a mandate on the refiners to cultivate a green belt around the refinery to off-set the environmental impact. Obviously we cannot stop building refineries citing environmental impact as a reason. We need to have a balance. Invariably most of the refineries built a green belt by planting random trees, plants and shrubs. The size of the green belt would depend on the throughput and the complexity of the refinery.
For example, one of the refineries in India planted so many eucalyptus trees in their refinery complex as part of their greenbelt initiatives. Ironically these eucalyptus trees were doing more damage than doing good. Eucalyptus trees absorb moisture from atmosphere. Not only that, their roots go deep and consume so much of water. In this refinery some of the crude tanks started tilting and eucalyptus trees were suspected to be the cause the problem.
When Reliance Industries wanted to construct the world’s largest and the most complex refining hub in Jamnagar in 1999, they also were mandated to develop a huge green belt. Reliance refinery was the world’s largest refining complex. Accordingly they had to build and develop a huge green belt. That is where Reliance Industries thought differently. Instead of planting some random trees, they decided to plant mango trees. Incidentally, Reliance Jamnagar refinery was planned to be built as a zero-discharge refinery. As a result, none of the effluent would be let out in any external streams. Even the final reclaimed water had to be internally consumed. Finally, Reliance decided to use this reclaimed water for irrigating the mango orchard. Yes; Reliance started cultivating a huge mango orchard as part of the refinery’s greenbelt. This drastically off-set the pollution emanated from the refinery complex.
As a result of the above approach, today Reliance’s mango orchard, known as ‘Dhirubhai Ambani Lakhibag Amrayee’ is Asia’s best mango orchard with more than 1.3 lakh plants and grows 127 varieties of mango in a 600-acre green belt at its Jamnagar refinery complex. To conclude, every threat can be turned into an opportunity, if we have the right mindset
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