HOW DO YOU TAKE a stack of evidence and turn it into a captivating, engaging presentation? The next two chapters will answer this question.

You may be wondering, however, why evidence alone is not enough. If you have worked hard to gather comprehensive, convincing evidence, why can’t you just go ahead and use that evidence to convince your audience? The answer is that factual evidence and logic alone are not sufficient to persuade most people. And even those who are more open to logic are more easily persuaded if you also engage their emotions. Human beings are both rational and emotional creatures, and both of these faculties have to be engaged if you truly what to keep their attention.¹

¹For example, both rational and emotional factors influence consumers’ evaluation of the risks of purchasing different products (Chaudhuri, 2002).

If you want to communicate effectively, you have to engage your audience’ s emotions as well as their reason. If you engage only their reason, you are less convincing than you could be. (If you engage only their emotions, however, you may be manipulating them, violating the ethical responsibilities of a communicator—more on this below).

An effective way to make information appeal to the emotions is to present it in the form of a story. Chapter 5 will explain how to illustrate your most important data points with brief stories or anecdotes. Chapter 6 will then show you how to turn your entire stack of information into one comprehensive and compelling story. What these chapters will show you is how—even if you think that your data is inherently boring, or that you are the dullest, most uninspiring presenter around—you can take however large a stack of information you have gathered and turn it into a story that grabs and holds your audience’s attention from start to finish.

Before we turn to these chapters, we will first discuss the following essential points:

Logic is important for persuasion, but is not sufficient alone. If you only use logic, you are restricting your appeal to people who are primarily “thinkers,” and likely excluding people who are primarily “feelers.” And you will not be doing as effective a job as you could with

people who are primarily thinkers, because they are more effectively persuaded when you also engage them with something beyond mere logic.

²Feelers, which include half of all the sixteen MBTI types, represent 59.9 percent of the U.S. population (Myers & Briggs Foundation,

2006), yet only 27.6 percent of all managers, administrators, and supervisors (Macdaid, 1997).

In Myers-Briggs terms, “Feelers,” or “F’s,” represent well over half of the total U.S. population. They are significantly underrepresented in managerial and administrator roles— which is perhaps why many presenters default to using logic alone—but they still make up more than a quarter of this group. What this means is that if you focus on logic alone, you could be losing more than a quarter of your audience if you are presenting to managers and almost two-thirds if you are presenting to a general audience.²

³In a meta-analysis of research on the role of product information in advertising, Stiff (1986) found that logical arguments are correlated with attitude change, but only very weakly.

More generally, advertising research indicates that logical arguments only play a small role in changing people ’s attitudes. People find it very hard to change their beliefs, even when faced with clear logic. They tend to focus on information that supports their existing beliefs and ignore or discount evidence that challenges them.³

⁴This experiment is described in Mahoney and DeMonbreun (1977), who found that the protestant ministers were actually slower to jump to conclusions than the scientists.

This is even true for supposedly objective, fact-based people such as scientists. In an interesting experiment some years ago researchers compared the problem- solving approaches of scientists and conservative Protestant ministers. The two groups were chosen because the former were supposedly purely objective and the latter, supposedly biased by their religious convictions. The study found no significant difference between the two groups in terms of belief change, with both groups having a tendency to bias themselves in favor of supporting their ingoing hypothesis.⁴

⁵See Armstrong (2008). The correlation between logical arguments and attitude change improves when the audience is highly involved with the message (Stiff, 1986); even strong arguments can be made more powerful through greater audience involvement (Petty, Cacioppo, & Schumann, 1983).

When people hold strong, opposing attitudes, logical argument can actually cause them to “dig their heels in” on their current beliefs: the stronger the contrary evidence, the more effort they put into their counter-arguments. So if people tend to cling to their beliefs, and the more you provide logical argument, the more they cling, what should you do? One solution is to involve people in your presentations, to draw them in so that they can see the relevance of your material to their lives.⁵

Another solution to audiences’ reluctance to change their beliefs is referred to as the “disrupt then reframe” technique. This is when you surprise your audience with something unusual, and then use the moment of surprise to introduce the new idea you want them to consider. The disruption temporarily “ disables ” the audience ’s instinctive negative reactions and opens them to the new information. While this method could be used to trick or manipulate, it is included here only as a method for overcoming unreasonable resistance: to give your audience an opportunity to consider new evidence rather than writing it off without considering it.¹

For example, in one of his presentations, branding guru Tom Asacker effectively overcomes his audience’ s existing and strongly held beliefs that the fact that consumers are overwhelmed with marketing messages is a new challenge. He does this by showing a slide with a quote about how people are overwhelmed with marketing messages. Then he points out that this quote is from . . . 1918. This surprise disrupts the audience’s thought patterns, and so they are now open to his reframing, where he reframes for them what the real problems are—nothing, in this case, to do with being overwhelmed by messages.²

⁷See Tom Asacker, “On Branding: A Visual Presentation” www.acleareye.com/thoughts.

An effective way to reframe your evidence and involve your audience is to present your information in the form of a story. There is something very powerful and elemental about stories. Alan Kay, the personal computer visionary, once said, “Why was Solomon recognized as the wisest man in the world? Because he knew more stories (proverbs) than anyone else. Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom, and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories ” (McLellan, 2006).

Some people may hold a suspicion that storytelling is just the latest presentation fad and that presentations that begin with “Once upon a time . . .” have no place in serious communication. This is quite false. There is mounting evidence that the use of storytelling in organizations drives business results.⁸

Stories are fundamental to how we think, learn, and make sense of the world around us. Storytelling has been present in every age of human history and in every civilization and culture. Stories appear to enable understanding and memory, and much of both child and adult learning appears to be acquired through a story format. One important reason that stories are so powerful is that information delivered through stories is more memorable. Memory is strengthened by linking information together, and stories link information in multiple ways. Also, stories engage the emotions, and this too aids memory.⁹

Audiences remember stories better than they remember lists of bullet points. This is of particular relevance to presentations, because of the popularity of the bullet list slide. Lists suffer from what are called the primacy and recency effects: we remember the first and the last items on the list, but not the middle. By contrast, stories are a coherent whole, where one thing flows to the next, so we tend to remember the whole thing (“The Science of Stories,” 1998).

I n many cases, people tend to put information they receive into a story form; if your audience is going to put the information that you give them into a story form anyway, why not give them the information in a story in the first place-so that you choose the story, not them?¹⁰

Storytelling is therefore a very effective persuasion method. But persuasion implies responsibility. How does one use a powerful persuasion technique responsibly?

⁸Silverman (2006) presents several case studies; additional case studies appear in Jackson &

Esse (2006), Kahan (2006), Simmons (2006), Smart (1999), and Smith & Keyton (2001).

⁹See, for example, Branigan (1992), Mallon and Webb (2000), and Turner (1996.) Cahill, Babinsky, Markowitsch, and McGaugh’s (1995) experiments with stories suggest that memory storage of events that involve high emotions is qualitatively different from other memory storage. Kazui,

Mori, Hashimoto, and Hirono (2000; 2003) found in studies of healthy people and Alzheimer’s patients that stories that engage the emotions are more memorable than ones that do not.

¹⁰Research suggests that juries in criminal trials use a story approach to make sense of the data they receive. When lawyers help them with this, by organizing the evidence in story form, jurors are more likely to be influenced by it and find it credible (Pennington & Hastie, 1991, 1992).

As presenters, we need techniques to overcome the resistance, described above, that most people have to new information. Storytelling is one such powerful persuasion technique. But with power comes responsibility. What does responsible—ethical—persuasion look like?

Much of unethical behavior is in the form of cheating: trying to achieve a goal in an unfair way, unfair in the sense that if others knew you were taking that approach, it would

not work, because they would not let you get away with it. One problem with cheating, for the cheater, is that you do not get any better at achieving your goals; each time you cheat, the only thing you get better at is cheating. As a result, you increase the likelihood that the next time you will have to cheat again, and therefore that eventually you will be caught. If you use persuasion to get people to do things against their own good, sooner or later they will realize this, and you will no longer be welcome as a presenter.

A useful guiding principle to decide whether you are using persuasion ethically and responsibly is to ask yourself: Are you trying to get your audience to do something that is not in their or their company’ s best interests? If so, you are being manipulative and unethical. If instead you are indeed trying to get them to do what they should, for their own good and the good of the company, then your persuasion is ethical: you are helping them overcome their own inertia, so that they will do the right thing.

The underlying assumption throughout this book is that the recommendations you are making in your presentations are good for your audience, and so by getting them to act on these recommendations you are serving them, not taking advantage of them. The techniques taught in this book are highly effective at getting your audience to do what you are telling them to do. Using these techniques for anything other than the good of your audience is an abuse of the techniques, and is directly opposed to the audience-centered theme of this book.

The next step is to identify any useful anecdotes or stories that can be used to illustrate your most important points. The idea here is not to replace the evidence you have gathered, but to emphasize it. A story is not proof; it is just illustration. A story doesn’t prove anything, but it does get your audience’s attention and can sometimes drive a point home much more than reams of data. From a scientific perspective, this can seem frustrating: people appear to be more persuaded by a story about a single incident (i.e. a sample size of one) than by a survey with a sample size of five hundred. But a story is not qualitative research as a weak substitute for quantitative research; it is qualitative research as a more powerful illustration—or an enrichment of—results from quantitative research.

In Step 4 you gathered your proof—your evidence—and in Step 5 you will find ways to emphasize that proof. Take the list of evidence that you developed in Step 4, and circle anything on the list that is not quantitative, anything on the list that is “anecdotal” in any way. Each of these anecdotal items can serve you as an anecdote or story (these two words are used interchangeably in this book). It could be a story told to you by a salesperson in your organization, a verbatim customer quote from a survey, a video clip from a customer interview or focus group, and so on.

You can use three kinds of stories, and all are effective. The first kind is one that is directly related to your organization or issue. A story that you gathered from an employee about the trouble she had using your company’ s online benefits portal when one of her children was

¹McCroskey (1969)’s meta-analysis of numerous studies showed that metaphors are more persuasive than literal statements. This is likely because a metaphor “helps to structure and organize the arguments of a message better than literal language” (Sopory & Dillard, 2002, p. 387).

sick would be one example of this kind. A story that you heard from one of your company’s salespeople, about a corporate customer who would routinely stand on the top of her desk and scream at him because she didn’t like your company’s pricing policies, would be another example.

The second kind of story is a hypothetical one. This is a story about your business that is not “real” in the sense that it has ever happened, necessarily, but it is certainly “realistic” in that it could happen. (This is very important; for your hypothetical stories to be effective, they must be immediately credible to your audience—and they must be clearly identified as hypothetical.) The details of the story are what bring out its reality. A “day in the life” of one of your customers is one example, where we see in detail what she is doing at different moments. Another example would be a run-through of how an employee would use a new system that you are proposing. Again, what makes it real is the specificity—the concreteness—of the details that you provide.

The third type of story is one that takes a more metaphorical approach—which is not in itself about your situation or company specifically, but which is symbolic or illustrative of the point that you want to make. While metaphorical stories might seem less valuable because they are not specifically about your particular situation, research indicates that they are also very effective. If possible, apply the same metaphor at different points in your presentation, and try to stick to a single metaphor for the same point, rather than using several different metaphors.¹

Here is a great example of a very powerful metaphorical story, in which the author tells a great lesson he learned about advertising (du Plessis, 2005, pp. 109-110; quotation reproduced with permission).

“When I am asked where I learnt most about advertising theories, the answer is not a book about the brain, or a book about advertising, or any journal paper, or a specific professor. I learnt the most about advertising from a miner.

In 1994 South Africa had its first democratic election, which effectively moved power from the mainly Afrikaans white government to a black government. Obviously emotions were running high, especially because (since there were many more black than white voters) the outcome was a forgone conclusion. Afrikaners felt threatened by what the future might hold for them, and blacks felt liberated and able to make aggressive statements in public showing their new-found ‘power.’ Afrikaners in rural areas felt especially threatened. During this time I was asked to do research among the black miners in a rural coal mine, to establish what they saw as their major problems. I did this under the condition that the results would be shown to representatives of their management (white) and trade union (black) at the same time.

To my dismay the black miners rated as their third biggest problem the fact that ‘White managers insist on giving their instructions in Afrikans.’ I was dismayed because I knew, from my experience with focus groups, that the black miners spoke better Afrikans than English. They preferred to speak Afrikans rather than English, and to listen to Afrikans programs on television. So why would they want the

management to give them instructions in English? It seemed obvious to me that the only reason for their giving this problem such a priority was that they were making a political statement. This was not an unlikely explanation at that time.

Because mining is such a physically demanding job, both managers and face workers tend to be big, strong people. As an Afrikaner, I felt rather uneasy at the prospect of presenting this politically sensitive result in a meeting of these big people in a small room. I tried to gloss over the point in my presentation. The leader of the trade union asked me to go over it again more slowly. I tried to gloss over it again, and he again called on me to spend more time discussing it. I told him outright that I believed it was a political point-scoring exercise, and best left out of the meeting.

He then proceeded to give me a lesson in communication, which I still rate as the most valuable I have ever had. His words went something like this:

‘It is true that most of us Zulus are more proficient in Afrikans than in English. However, Afrikans is our third language and English is our fourth. Most of us speak two native African languages better than we speak either Afrikans or English.

Afrikans is the managers’ first language. When a manager gives an instruction in Afrikans, he will give a concise instruction, believing he has expressed himself clearly, and then be upset when we do the wrong thing.

When a manager gives an instruction in his second language he feels more insecure. He will probably repeat the instruction a few times, using different words, and will use a lot of body language to demonstrate what he means. Then he will ask us whether we understand - and patiently re-explain if we don’t.

The difference is that when he instructs in his first language he believes he has done a good job of communicating, but when he does it in a language we are both less proficient in, he really does a good job of communicating!’

We all tend to forget that the people who create advertising, the agencies and marketers, are doing this in their first language (so to speak). They have been trained in the language of advertising, they have a lot of experience in the language of advertising, and they know the product very well. The people they are creating the communication for are not steeped in either the language of the product or the language of advertising. In fact, they mostly cannot be bothered to learn either.”

The story is about miners. On the face of it, it has nothing to do with advertising. But du Plessis uses it to make a very powerful point about advertising, and about communication in general.

You can use stories—actual or metaphorical—to illustrate any aspect of your presentation, including the business problem that the audience has, the solution you are offering, and any of the evidence that you are including. This means that stories will have a big role to play in your presentations. Some people are natural storytellers, and they instinctively incorporate stories into their communication and do it well. The rest of us need some help in telling a story: how to get the plot right—how to identify the essential elements of the story and tell them in the right order.

Have you ever had the suspicion that there are really only a few basic stories in the world? If you have, you are not alone. Christopher Booker had that thought back in the early 1970s, and worked on it for almost thirty-five years, reading thousands of books and watching numerous plays and movies. The result of all that effort is a book he wrote that claims that there are really only seven basic plots in all of Western literature, and he does a very convincing job of proving the claim with examples from the books, movies, and plays he studied (Booker, 2005; quotations reproduced by kind permission of Continuum Publishing Group).

Booker identifies the sevenplots as(1) overcoming the monster; (2) the quest; (3) voyage and return; (4) comedy; (5) tragedy; (6) rebirth; and (7) rags to riches. He provides

numerous examples of each plot and then describes the unique sequence of essential stages that each plot has. Table 5.1 summarizes each of the plots and the stages in each and gives a story and a business example of each plot.

This plot structure is useful if you’ re trying to structure an anecdote. You can figure out what type of story plot the anecdote represents, and then make sure you’ ve got the right pieces from the column on the right- hand side.

Once you know what the main elements of your story are, you can tell it, without any visual accompaniment, or else you can support it with one or more graphics or photographs in your presentation or with some artifact, such as a product sample, a faulty part, etc. If you have a very good story that someone else has written, and you don’t think you can do it justice without reading it word-for-word, then do so, if it’s not too long. Tell your audience that you have something you think they will find interesting and relevant, and you would like to read it to them. It is helpful to let them know how long it will take, since most people expect to be bored if they are being read to. If you say “ I would like to read this extract to you—it’s short, about two and a half minutes . . . ” they will be less likely to expect to be bored, and therefore less likely to be bored.

It is hard to find a good story to fit a particular point in your presentation “ on demand. ” I suggest that you start to collect good stories as you come across them, and file them away. Once you start looking for good stories, you will quickly become good at identifying them. And then when you happen need a story, you can look into your story file.

You can find stories within your organization and outside. Within your organization, some useful sources are customer interview notes or video; focus groups notes or video; any kind of qualitative or ethnographic research; anecdotes told by sales representatives or any other employees; or verbatim quotes from survey research.

Outside your organization, useful places to look for good stories include the front page of The Wall Street Journal. which often contains “human interest” stories. Mary Wacker and Lori Silverman’s (2003) book Stories Trainers Tell contains more than seventy “ready to use” stories, categorized by topics such as “problem solving,” “customer service,” and “living our values.” Silverman’s website, Say It With a Story (www.sayitwithastory.com), features three stories from the book each month, along with numerous free articles on story use and has a story shop where additional stories are available for sale. Websites such as the Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) contain amusing and sometimes shocking information from legal documents, arrest records, and other manuscripts acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests and public records, which can form the basis of engaging stories. Another source is the work of great storytellers such as Malcolm Gladwell. His bestselling books The Tipping Point and Blink are packed with mesmerizing stories, as are his New Yorker columns—which are archived on his website (www.gladwell.com).

Still another source of good stories is your own life. Grady Jim Robinson, one of the pioneers of the recent revival of interest in the use of stories in business communication, advises that some of the best stories come from your own experience, where you learned useful lessons that you can then share with your audience. Stories that allow you to admit some vulnerability, or share an embarrassing moment, can be endearing to audiences. Nevertheless, do be careful with these, and avoid any story that could in any way put your authority in the area of your presentation topic into question. (“You see, I don’ t know as much as you think I do about depreciation schedules, folks!” Then why are we listening to you?)

Outright humor is a bit more delicate. If you are not comfortable with yourself as a humorist, then avoid it. It’ s not necessary for a successful presentation. It should go without saying (but it doesn’t, so I will say it) that you should never use any kind of potentially offensive humor in a formal gathering. I once organized a dinner meeting in New York City for a group of chief marketing officers of large corporations. The invited speaker was an authority on branding. He began his talk by describing a Harley-Davidson billboard ad that he saw on his way to the gathering that evening, and how much he liked it. “It showed a motorcycle rider from behind,” he said, “and on the back of his black leather jacket it said, ‘If You Can Read This, The Bitch Fell Off. ’” The shock and horror from some members of the audience (which was only exacerbated by the uproarious laughter coming from other members of the audience) was just not worth it.

The safest way I know to use humor is to make sure that your joke has an important point to make. In effect, use the joke as a metaphorical story. That way, if nobody laughs, it’s not a failed joke—it’s just a story. This gives you a safety net, taking away your fear of telling a joke, and paradoxically—because you’ Il be less nervous without the pressure of getting it right—makes it more likely that you will deliver your story well and therefore that your audience will laugh.

FIGURE 5.1A PowerPoint Humor

"Sure beats hassling with PowerPoint."

Another easy way to use humor safely is to include a good cartoon in your presentation. CartoonResource (www.CartoonResource.com) and The New Yorker's Cartoon Bank (www.CartoonBank.com) both have large collections, searchable by topic. Figures 5.1a and b are examples of cartoons about PowerPoint, from CartoonResource (reproduced with permission).

Finally, if you want to improve your storytelling ability, there is nothing better that you can do than to read more stories. Not just any stories, though. Newer fiction doesn’t work as well. Since contemporary fiction competes with video entertainment—television and the movies— it tends to rely more on the inherent interest of the content— the violence, sexual interest, or other highly emotional content—and so the burden on the actual story plot is not so great. Older fiction tends to be more restrained, and so the plot—the structure of the story itself—had to work hard to keep the reader interested. To really improve your storytelling ability, then, be sure to read some of the classics of Western fiction. Appendix E contains a selection from the “ 1000 Good Books,” books that have been popular and in print for at least three generations.

The next challenge is to decide how to sequence all the evidence that you have gathered so that your entire presentation is in the form of a story. It turns out that the seven basic plots are not as helpful here. Fortunately, there is a fundamental principle that underlies all good stories, which we will uncover in the next chapter.

At this point, you should know who your audience members are and what the communication implications for each of their personalities are; what the specific objectives are for your presentation in terms of how you will change your audience’s minds and actions; and what business problem they face and what solution you are offering them. You should also have a stack of facts, analysis, and anecdotes, which embody the content of your presentation. Step 6 is all about taking this stack and ordering it into a compelling story that will capture your audience’s attention while you deliver your message.

While the Seven Basic Plots described in the previous chapter are useful for structuring individual anecdotes, they are not so helpful for sequencing your entire presentation into the form of a story. This is because you do not want to lock yourself into a specific plot type while you are still working on your presentation. You want to allow yourself flexibility as you iterate through the process to change the plot. You may start out thinking that you have a Tragedy on your hands, and as you work through your presentation you might find a solution that turns it into a Rags to Riches story.

Fortunately, there is a fundamental insight about all good stories, no matter which type of plot: they proceed by creating and resolving tensions. The way to take advantage of this insight is as follows. First, introduce your presentation with a “situation”—Why are we here? Write this down on an index card. Then write down a “complication” and a “resolution”—typically the problem and solution that you identified in Step 3. Write these down on two separate index cards. Then follow the resolution with a specific example, also on another index card. I call this the S.Co.R.E. method (Situation, Complication, Resolution, Example).¹

Then ask yourself: At this point, what is the most likely objection the audience would raise? Write that as the next complication. How would you respond to it? That’s your next resolution. Then add an example. Each of these is on its own index card. (The point of using index cards is so that you can easily move things around or substitute others as you work on the sequence.)

¹The S.Co.R.E. method is based on the Method of Opposites, outlined in detail by Henry Boettinger in his Moving Mountains (1969, pp. 82-96).

Develop a training series to strengthen staff core skilly, to improve/ their effectiveness and therefore morale

No - were recommending a broad-based/ survey so that all employees willhave input into the skills they want to develop

Keep on going in this way until you’ve covered all reasonable objections. You will most likely have included all the information you need. Whatever remains probably should not be in your presentation—put it in an appendix instead. Figure 6.1 contains an example of what this could look like for a presentation proposing a new training program.

Why does this approach work? It works because you are not giving any information to your audience without first creating the need for that information. That’ s the role of the complication in this process: it raises a question, which creates the need for the answer, which you then provide— the resolution.

• How exactly to use the S.Co.R.E. (Situation, Complication, Resolution, Example) method to sequence your evidence in a way that captures and keeps your audience’s attention

The order that you deliver your information in is of critical importance. The exact same information delivered in different sequences can achieve wildly different results in terms of audience persuasion.²

So how do we sequence our information for maximum impact? We sequence it so that it tells a story. How do we do that? By following a fundamental truth about storytelling. This fundamental truth about all good stories is that they repeatedly create tensions and resolve them. This is what makes them so interesting.

This structure of tension-resolution is also true about all great art. Great drama, painting, and music all create or highlight and then resolve tension.

Once tension is created or uncovered, the desire to resolve it can be so strong that we sometimes feel it as a physical need. Have you ever sat in the car after you arrived home to hear the end of a song? Or stayed up at night later than you wanted to watch the end of a movie or to finish a novel? In the Extreme Presentation workshop, we demonstrate this compulsion by singing a popular song together and pausing part- way through. Everyone in the audience can feel it: the desire to finish the song is felt as a physical desire. You can try this yourself. Play a good piece of music, and pause it right at the point at which the music reaches a climax. Don’t you feel the desire to have it completed?

By presenting your information in the form of a story, by setting up a tension and resolving it, and repeating as necessary, you can create this physical desire in your audience for your message. You will have gone from fighting for your audience ’s attention to them fighting to hear you! That is a nice shift. But how do we do it, exactly? According to Henry Boettinger:

Present your idea in this structure and sequence: statement of the problem, development of its relevant aspects, and resolution of the problem and its development.

Use this structure and you send your idea rolling down the well-worn grooves of the human mind. Ignore it and you sent it into rocky, unknown canyons from which is may never return. (Boettinger, 1969, p. 37)

Every interesting story goes through this structure. It begins with a situation: “Once upon a time . . .” Then it hits you with a problem or something that creates tension. We’ll call that the complication. Then it offers a solution to the problem—the problem is resolved, so we’ ll call it the resolution. The story could end there. Or else you could have another complication, and then another resolution, and so on.³

To explain this, let’s look at a couple of fairytales. Consider Little Red Riding Hood. Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood went for a walk in the forest (situation). She met a wolf (complication—this is indeed a scary thing). The wolf, after speaking to her, left her alone (resolution—the complication, or threat, has been removed). The wolf went on to Grandma’s house and ate her up (next complication). The woodcutter cut the wolf open and freed Grandma (resolution).

²McCroskey and Mehrley (1969), in a review of empirical research on message organization, found that poorly sequenced presentations are less effective at achieving attitude change.

³Other storytelling experts use similar structures to this, including Robinson (2000) and Booker (2005). Minto (1996) uses the words Situation, Complication, Resolution, but very differently from the way they are used here.

Or Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ Goldilocks goes out for a walk and enters an empty house (situation). She tries two bowls of porridge, but finds them respectively too cold and too hot (complication). The third bowl is just right, and she eats it all up (resolution). She tries to sit down, but finds the chairs too high and too low (complication). She finds a third chair that is just right (resolution). She then goes upstairs to lie down, but the first two beds are too hard or too soft (complication). The third bed is just right, so she falls asleep (resolution). She wakes up to find three bears staring at her (complication). She runs away, back to her home (resolution).

Notice three things about these stories. First, they all begin with a situation, and this situation step (unlike the complication and resolution) is never repeated. Second, every complication is resolved by an accompanying resolution. And third, you can have as many complication-resolution pairs as you need to complete the story.

There is one other important thing to add to this structure. The human mind also needs time to rest after each resolution and to clarify and absorb it. If you keep hitting your audience with one complication-resolution pair after another, they may begin to get a little on edge. To give them the rest they need, you should follow each resolution with an example. And the example will typically be one of the anecdotes or analogies you identified in Step 5. Here is Boettinger again:

An example brings the idea down to earth. It reinforces the truth of a specific presentation, so that the next floor of development takes off from a firm base ’ . . . After the clash of a resolution, give them the analogy as a restful period for absorption. (Boettinger, 1969, p. 86)

So here is an example. Sometime in 2000, BWM marketing managers in the United States were thinking about what kind of advertising to run the following year, and they came up with the idea of “ BMW films”—short movies presented online. Here is the kind of outline they might have used to present this idea:

Complication: All luxury car advertising is alike: a car, driving through the mountains, with classical music playing. Is it a BMW, a Mercedes, a Lexus? All the ads look the same. We want something different.

Resolution: Let’s use advertising that really shows off the BMW’s capabilities as a performance car.

Example: Like we do with the BMW Roadshow, where we allow potential customers to see what the BMW can really do.

Complication: But the TV networks won’ t allow us to show the kinds of performance driving demonstrations we want to show, because of their concerns about l iability (if someone copies what he sees on TV and has a car accident, the networks could be sued).

Resolution: Let’s do an online campaign instead; there are no such restrictions for online advertising.

Example: We tried an online campaign last year that was very successful. (Details of this campaign would be added here.)

Complication: But performance driving situations are very expensive to shoot, much more expensive than a car driving through the mountains.

Resolution: Let’s use a viral campaign, where all we have to pay for is creating the advertising, and make it so interesting that consumers will pass it on to each other themselves.

Example: Some examples of other successful viral campaigns, from other industries.

That’s the way it works. And it works very well. Using this approach, you create an interesting presentation that grabs your audience right at the beginning, and keeps their attention throughout. It is radically different from the typical presentation, which follows a structure that may be logical (e.g., objectives, strategy, plan, financial implications, staff implications, measurement, etc.) but can be quite boring.

Instead of having an agenda slide up-front, which you keep returning to (“s . . and now we’ se on point number 7, the financial implications s . .” snooze), you are now telling a story. When you are watching a good movie, you don’t expect a message to come up every now and again reminding you of where you are (“and now we will move on to scene three, where the hero is captured”). You do not sit there wondering where you are in the movie—unless it is a really bad movie. Similarly, you will no longer have to keep reminding your audience where you are in the presentation, because they’ll be so interested in the story that they won’t stop to think about that. It’s a very effective approach.⁴

The reason that this method works so well is that you don’t give your audience any information without first creating the need in them for that information. The complication creates the need for the information, and the resolution and example provide the information that satisfies the need. (Figure 6.2 shows a visual overview of the S.Co.R.E. method).

⁴3M replaced bullet-point descriptions of strategy with stories made up of situation/complication/ resolution and found that this approach was more effective and persuasive (Shaw, Brown, & Bromiley, 1998).

In this section we will explain in detail how to use the S.Co.R.E. method to develop a captivating outline for your presentation. We will answer the following questions:

• I need to create my outline right now—how exactly do I use the S.Co.R.E. method?

Especially when you are still starting out, it helps to use colored index cards; you’ ll need yellow (for situations), red (for complications), green (for resolutions), and blue (for examples). It’s not strictly necessary—you could do this with just a piece of paper and a pencil— but it is useful to be able to move the pieces around as you think through your outline.

Situation Take a yellow card. Write the word “Situation” at the top left of the card. Immediately below that, write down a one’ sentence reason for your presentation: We are here today to discuss . . . This should be something that everyone in the room will agree with. Often this is the generic form of the problem that you are dealing with. So if the problem is “Our pricing is too high,” then the situation could be “We’re here today to talk about pricing.”

Don’t spend more than a few seconds on the situation. How much time should you spend covering the background that they already know? If it’ s clear that they already know it, then just mention it and move on quickly. If there are essential parts of the background that you’ re not sure people are familiar with, or if you have an original take on some aspect of the background, then include this information within a complication, resolution, or example, but not in the situation.

First Complication Take a red card, write the word “ Complication ” in the top left corner, and then immediately below it, write out the first complication, which is usually the business problem you identified in Chapter 3. Be sure to phrase it as a problem, not a question. So, for example, write “Our problem is that we don’ t know how to increase revenues,” not “How do we increase our revenues?” (As you fill in the cards, try to keep the bottom half of each index card empty; we will use this space later, in Chapter 7).

Your first complication should be a real attention-grabber. It should be something scary and painful - you have to catch the audience’s attention here. To do this, make sure you are focusing on a painful business problem that they have. This is the one complication that you get to choose, so make it a really big one—choose the biggest problem they have that you will be able to contribute to solving in this presentation. After this one, the choice of each subsequent complication is driven by what you would expect the audience to be thinking.

It is very important (as we saw in Chapter 3) that the problem be one that your audience has, not that you have. “They’re not acting on the information I have provided them” is still your problem. Rework it until it is clearly their problem—where the pain is unmistakably felt by them: perhaps “They are missing a business opportunity.”

First Resolution Take a green card, write the word “Resolution” at the top left of the card, and then immediately below that, write your response to the problem raised in the first complication: “The solution we are proposing is . . .” This is usually the solution you came up with in Chapter 3 .

⁵Meta - analysis of empirical studies on the use of metaphors in communication found that the use of one consistent metaphor increases persuasion (Sopory & Dillard, 2002).

⁶An experiment conducted by LeFevre and Dixon (1986) found that people prefer examples to instructions.

Example Then take a blue card, write the word “Example” at the top left of the card, and write down an illustration of the resolution on the previous card. In Chapter 5, you identified a number of useful anecdotes; this is where you can insert one of them into your outline. As we mentioned in that chapter, you can use actual stories from your company or industry, hypothetical situations, or stories from outside your industry that are relevant by analogy. Any of the three types will do. If you are using an analogy, it will work best if you take a single analogy and carry it all the way through your presentation, showing different aspects of it at different points.⁵

What you are trying to offer is a specific instance of your general solution—you are trying to make the resolution concrete for your audience and bring it to life. The resolution is the generic response; the example gets specific. In Myers-Briggs terms, this helps you to speak to both N ’s, the conceptually oriented people (in the resolution), and S ’s, the detail-oriented folks (in the example). The example should allow you to say, “Let me show you what I mean.”⁶

The example is an absolutely critical step. Not only does it allow your audience to rest after each resolution, but it also grounds your presentation in reality. We live in an age of abstractions and generalizations. (And I recognize that the previous sentence is itself is a generalization.) If you want your audience to follow you and find you credible, you’ ll want to keep returning to specifics. And this is what your example does: it tells them about a specific person who did a specific thing, at a specific time and a specific place. (The example is yet another application of the Reality Principle.)

After you work through the initial S.Co.R.E., what remains is one (or more) iteration(s) of the Co.R.E. (the Situation only appears once, at the beginning of the sequence, and is never repeated); carry on repeating the Co.R.E. as long as you need to, until you’ ve disposed of all reasonable objections.

Next Complication This is the most important step in the entire S.Co.R.E. process. To decide what goes on your next Complication card, imagine that you presented the information in your first four cards and stopped there. What is the first “come-back,” objection, or “Yah, but ’ . .” that you would expect to hear? (“That will never work!” “That’s way too expensive!” “Senior management will never agree to that!” “We tried that already!”) That will be your next complication: the strongest, most likely objection you would face, if you had stopped there. (Note that while the first complication should be phrased as a s tatement, not a question, the subsequent complications work equally well whether phrased as statements or as questions.)

But why should you bring up the arguments against your recommendation? What if no one in the room was going to bring it up—why would you bring it up yourself? As we discussed in Chapter 4, all the empirical evidence indicates that persuasion is stronger with a “two-sided” message, where you present your own arguments as well as the opposing arguments, and refute each of the opposing arguments, than with a “ one - sided ” message, where you just present the arguments in favor of your recommendation.⁷

⁷See Allen (1998), Pechmann (1992), and Williams, Bourgeois, and Croyle (1993).

It is far better that you bring up the complication yourself—even if you can’ t dispose of it completely—than risk someone else in your audience bringing it up. The tougher the objection and the lower your ability to address it, the earlier in your presentation you should bring it up. Be very straightforward about it, and lay out the facts and options.

Sometimes there might be a complication that, for good reasons, you ’eally hope will not come up, and you certainly don’ t want to bring it up yourself. Perhaps it is a very complex issue that would derail your discussion and take up a lot of time, but is not actually relevant to the issue. In such a case, you could include a slide on it in your appendix (which you will not hand out in advance), and then if someone does bring it up, you can reveal the slide to show that you have actually thought through the issue.

Example Then you have a blue example card that gives an illustration of that response.

You will then continue working with the Co.R.E. (complication, resolution, example— because the situation is not repeated) until you have covered all reasonable objections.

The main point about the S.Co.R.E. method is that you do not give your audience any information without first creating a need in them for that information. The Complication creates the need, and the Resolution and Example satisfy the need. How could they ever be bored?!

The S.Co.R.E. method may seem like it takes up a lot of time. For the first few attempts, you will find that you do have to invest a bit of time. But not that much. During the

Extreme Presentation workshops, participants typically take between twenty and forty minutes to complete their first S.Co.R.E. sequence. Once you become proficient, it will take you a lot less time. And think of what you are accomplishing in this time: you are taking a stack of information, each item of which may or may not fit into your presentation, and turning it into a compelling outline for your presentation. That’ s a good return on your time investment.

Once you have completed the exercise, use the checklist in Figure 6.3 below to assess your storyline. Go through your S.Co.R.E. cards and answer each of the following questions. Make a check mark beside each question that you can answer positively. If you have a negative answer, then you need to go back and fix your storyline until you can answer the question positively.

□ Is your situation completely non-controversial, so that no one in your audience could possibly disagree with it? Complication

□ Does your first complication really grab your audience? Does it address a painful problem of theirs?

□ Is it a problem primarily that your audience has, rather than one that you have?

□ Does your first complication represent the biggest problem that they have that you will deal with in this presentation?

□ Does your presentation make a significant contribution to solving the problem in your first complication?

□ Does each subsequent complication represent the most likely or most significant objection or “come-back” that you would expect from your audience at that point?

□ Does your first resolution lay out the overall solution to the problem raised in your first complication?

□ Does each subsequent resolution address the concern raised in the preceding complication?

□ Is each example a specific instance/illustration/case-in-point of the preceding resolution?

□ Could each example allow you to say “Let me show you what I mean . . .”?

□ Is every important new piece of information in your presentation preceded by a complication that creates the need for that information in your audience?

In Chapter 3 we mentioned an example of a head of market research trying to convince the product marketing groups to hand over control of their market research budgets to the market research department. As an example, let’ s see what that would look like after applying the S.Co.R.E. method. We’ll begin by identifying some mistakes that you would catch with the checklist in Figure 6.3.

Bad Example 1 Situation: We’re here to discuss moving ownership ofthe marketing research budget away from the product marketing groups to the market research department.

What’ s wrong here? The situation is itself controversial. We can imagine that the product marketing folk are not going to be too keen on this. We don’ t want the very first thing out of your mouth to start a disagreement. So instead try:

Situation: We’re here to discuss managing next year’s market research budget.

Bad Example 2 Complication: We do not have enough funding for strategic research we want to do.

No! This is the presenter’s problem, not the audience’’. Why should your audience (the product marketing groups) be concerned about how you manage your budget? The problem must be a painful problem that the audience feels. Instead:

Complication: We’re not identifying enough breakthrough growth ideas because our research is all focused on short term, tactical issues.

Now it’s clear that the problem is one that the audience cares about— they want breakthrough growth ideas, and if you can’ t get any for them, then that is a problem for them.

Bad Example 3 Example: Here are the details of the process for making sure that the product marketing group has their needs met.

Actually this is not so bad. Providing details can serve the role as an example. Better, though, is to use an actual or hypothetical case study to illustrate those details.

Example: Here’s a case study of how we managed Brand G’s research using this process. Good Example Now let’s look at the whole example, done properly:

Complication: We’re not identifying enough breakthrough growth ideas because our research is all focused on short-term, tactical issues.

Complication: Wait a minute! How would the market research department know what the research needs of the product groups are? How do we know you are going to give us the right research?

Resolution: We already have a process in place for understanding the research needs of each of the product groups, and we'll keep using it.

Example: Here’s a case study of how we managed Brand G’s research using this process.

Complication: Why can’t we just set aside a percentage of the total budget for strategic research?

Resolution: Because from year to year, we don’t know the proportion of strategic versus tactical research we’ll need to do.

Example: Chart showing the types of strategic research we should have done over the past three years, and the varying total costs.

Complication: Why don’t we make it a joint responsibility and meet as a group to make the decisions?

Resolution: Right—that’s just what we need, another meeting to add to our calendars! You all know that these things change very fast. We need someone to be responsible so that at all times our market research budget is being invested where it will give us the biggest return.

Example: Slice of life from last quarter, how our priorities changed dramatically three times over the course of five weeks.

Complication: But as an individual product group, aren’t we going to get less for our money, since you’ll be spending part of it on strategic research that may not even be relevant to us?

Resolution: First, we think your bang for your buck will go up, because if we’re managing the whole research budget, that will allow us to negotiate more effectively with our vendors and get greater efficiencies. Second, we are going to make it a priority to ensure that the stra-tegic needs of all product groups are addressed.

You’ll use this method in every presentation. Even in training presentations. People sometimes think that training presentations don’ t need to use this persuasive story form. But, as we have mentioned before, training is an attempt to change the participants’ behavior to incorporate the new skills. Here’’ an example of a S.Co.R.E. outline; it is from the beginning of the Extreme Presentation workshop—so it is a presentation outline for a presentation on how to design presentations!

Situation: We’re here to talk about designing presentations that get people to act.

Complication: People are busier and more distracted than ever, and yet we have a lot more data that we want to present to them, and less time to prepare.

Resolution: We need a straightforward process for developing the logic, rhetoric, graphics, politics, and metrics of your presentation in an integrated, effective way.

Complication: But different audiences have different needs, in terms of amount of detail, amount of discussion, etc. How can one process work for them all?

Resolution: Audience analysis using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and implications for presentation design.

Complication: I’m not sure I’m clear on what exactly my presentation is supposed to be achieving.

Example: Completed SuperClean Vacuums From-To/Think-Do Matrix example and Exercise 2.

So that’s it. Take your stack of evidence and anecdotes developed in Chapters 4 and 5’ and then go through the S.Co.R.E. process to turn them into a story. Then use the checklist above to ensure that you have developed a good outline for your presentation. If you find that you keep working on it but you can’ t get your first complication and resolution to fit well together, then you probably have a problem upstream: wrong audience, wrong objective, or wrong business problem. Go back and revisit those steps, and then return to the S.Co.R.E. method.

four studies that demonstrate how the “disrupt then reframe” technique was used to persuade householders to contribute to a charity.

Basic Plot	Story Example	Business Example	Main Stages
1. Overcoming the monster—“seemingly all-powerful monster whom the hero must confront in a fight to the death”	Star Wars	Facing a major threat to our business	1. The Call. 2. Initial Success. 3. Confrontation. 4. Final Ordeal. 5. Miraculous Escape.
2. The Quest—“Far away . . . there is some priceless goal . . . [the hero sets out on a] long hazardous journey . . . ”	The Lord of the Rings	Embarking on a major new product initiative	1. The Call. 2. The journey. 3. Arrival and Frustration. 4. The Final Ordeals. 5. The Goal.
3. Voyage and Return—“hero or heroine . . . travel out of their familiar [world] . . . into another world completely cut off from the first”	Wizard of Oz	Shared an important experience	1. Fall into Another World. 2. Initial Fascination. 3. Frustration. 4. Nightmare. 5. Thrilling Escape and Return.
4. Comedy—“general chaos of misunderstanding... [finally] sorted out” (not necessarily humorous)	War and Peace	Resolving misunderstanding among different work groups	1. Confusion. 2. Nightmare. 3. New Information Transforms the Situation.
5. Tragedy—“tempted or impelled into a course of action . . . in some way dark or forbidden . . . [eventually] culminating in the hero’s violent destruction”	Hamlet	Business about to go bankrupt due to mismanagement	1. Anticipation. 2. Dream. 3. Frustration. 4. Nightmare. 5. Destruction.
6. Rebirth—“hero or heroine falls under a dark spell which eventually traps them in some wintry state . . . [until] from the depths of darkness they are brought up into glorious light”	Sleeping Beauty	Recovery after long period	1. Hero Falls Under Dark Power. 2. All Seems Well for a While. 3. Living Death. 4. Apparent Triumph of Dark Power. 5. Miraculous Redemption.
7. Rags to Riches—“an ordinary, insignificant person . . . who suddenly steps to the center of the stage, revealed to be someone quite exceptional”	Cinderella	Sudden success	1. Initial Wretchedness. 2. Initial Success. 3. Central Crisis. 4. Independence and Final Ordeal. 5. Final Union.