Storytelling is an essential part of design. When it comes time to deliver your new idea, you risk it dying in front of your stakeholder's eyes if you don't convey it in a compelling way.  

How many times have you had someone try to convince you of an idea by telling you about it, or showing you a bulleted Powerpoint deck, or pointing to the data from a spreadsheet or a graph? Was that enough? Were you emotionally engaged? Perhaps you have tried this yourself and you found the audience not nearly as excited about or connected to the topic as you had hoped.

Storytelling is a human-way to convey information. It engages, captivates, stimulates emotions. And while stories are often for entertainment, they are also a way of teaching and conveying creative vision of an alternate world...exactly the role of a designer or anyone who is trying to convince someone else that things could be different from the way they are now.

In addition, stories can help facilitate change. Effective stories connect your audience to a character (or characters) they can identify with. And, as your audience begins to see parallels between the character's life and their own, they can more easily digest the change you are proposing and even get excited about your future vision (especially because the character usually ends up better off!).

Using stories to engage an audience in our vision of the future, no matter how big or small, is within reach for all of us. Pixar, makers of animated films like Toy Story, Monsters Inc, & Finding Nemo, are masters of storytelling, and they have captured a set of 22 storytelling rules that you can lean on when it comes to your own storytelling work. One of the most prominent rules of Pixar's storytelling list (#4) is the "Story spine", a technique developed by playwright and improvisor Kenn Adams. The story spine provides simple prompts for creating a story that establishes a character and context (Once upon a time there was a...), a norm (And every day...), a shift in the norm (until one day...), and the result (and because of that......until finally....). This flow helps gently move an audience from a familiar place (the status quo) to a new place (your vision of the way things could be). This is the power of stories.

Telling stories will help you bring life and emotion to your work.

For the practiced storytellers out there, I offer an additional challenge.  Engage people further by shifting from story-telling to story-feeling. It is one thing to tell people about a character who goes on a journey, encounters an obstacle, overcomes that obstacle with some great new tool, and then lives a better life because of it. This is certainly more intriguing than a bulleted list of specifications and data targets. But what if your audience is IN the story? Imagine the impact when your audience is the main character and they experience the story first-hand? What if they experience the obstacles you describe and heroically overcome them with the new product (process, environment, ap, etc) you have designed? Wouldn't that be a compelling way to promote the new tool or solution you have created?

If someone can internalize and emotionally connect with a new idea, they will do more than agree with it. They will begin to own it. The experience you describe in your story becomes their experience and even greater than identifying with the character, they become the character. This means they are emotionally invested and can provide real, honest, constructive feedback - two powerful components that will increase your idea's chances of success moving forward.

So, as you work to change the world a little bit at a time, consider this: How might you convey your ideas using storytelling? Who might be the main characters in your stories? How will you tell the story in a compelling way? And most importantly, how might you get your audience to not just hear your story, but to experience the story first hand?

Photo credit: Disney/Pixar 2015

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