In this instructional talk, the presenter outlines advanced techniques for business storytelling, emphasizing the importance of not only perfecting a story’s content but also altering how it is delivered to create greater impact. He introduces the concept of "changing up the story" by modifying elements from his 12‑piece story‑build checklist—such as feeling, sensory focus, chronology, and detail—to shift audience perception. A central technique, the "bounce," involves looping a question or insight back to listeners to make the narrative more interactive. The speaker illustrates these ideas with a detailed 1996 SAP implementation case in Minneapolis, where he used a bounce to confront the finance team with concrete competency numbers, leading to an extended hyper‑care period and a significant project outcome. The talk blends practical tips, a structured checklist, and a real‑world example to demonstrate how strategic storytelling adjustments can drive business decisions.
Chapters
Okay, so the third piece. So now you, you're, you're changing the story, which is, which is great. You're perfecting the story. Next one I'm gonna do is change up the story for significant impact. One thing is to perfect it, get it smaller, more compact and everything like that, but then change up, Change up the story. What do I mean by that? Um, you all have the story build checklist that I sent out with the 12 pieces in it. Oh, change one of the 12 characteristics, or two or three of them. So that's not changing the— that's not changing the storyline, it's changing how you tell the story. Change up the story. That's what I mean by that. So, and, and I wrote down here, um, you can change up the feeling in the story. So typically you tell the story this way to emphasize this feeling. Change it up so you have a different feeling that comes up. Put the depth and the lift in a different place in the story. Chronologically start the story in a different place. And, and I'm going to talk about bounce. Bounce is where you go like, have you ever experienced that? You know, so, so you bounce it back to the audience, part of your story. I'm going to come back to that one. Um, change some of the senses. Focus on what you hear instead of what you see. Focus on a feeling that people have. Change some of the details. Add some details that you never added before. Be more expressive in different pieces. Good storytellers will change up how they tell the story. Does that make sense for folks? It's not just the story and the context and the details and the facts, but it's how you tell the story. So I'm going to tell you a story about a story about the Valley of Despair again. Where I used a major bounce. Okay, so I was, uh, on a project in Minneapolis. This is now 1996. So I went from '91, '93, now it's 1996. This is 5 years in working the Valley of Despair. And I was telling the story, we were implementing SAP, and I was doing it with the finance organization. So the controller was in the room and all the direct reports to the controller. So Accounts payable, accounts receivable, treasury, all that kind of stuff. When I'm doing the Valley of Despair, we're going to implement SAP, and we're talking about the Valley of Despair, and the question that often comes up is, what's the depth or what's the depth and breadth of the valley? Guess, remember those kind of questions like, how long, how long is the, how long is the Valley of Despair? Mm-hmm. Depends. The consultant. And I took a breath and I did a major bounce with my story. I didn't answer it the way I typically would, like, it depends. And it's like this and it's like that. I looked at, uh, and the guy's name was Paul, by the way. So I looked at Paul, who was the accounts payable guy, the lead. And I said, Paul, how many accounts payable people do you have in your department? He said, about 30, 33. I said, okay, so if you have 33 people in your department and they all know what they're doing for the most part, 80% competent on everything that they're doing, he's like, yep, yep, yep, yep. That we got that. And I said, if you hire somebody that, you know, an experienced professional, but they have to learn how things are done at this client, you know, at this company, How long does it take them to get 80% proficient? And he said, I don't know, 6 to 8 months. It's like, okay, got it. So now when we're implementing SAP, and if it's truly transformational on how we do everything in finance, because we wouldn't just do an incremental change and spend all this money to do an incremental change. So we're fundamentally changing how finance is done and accounts payable is done. And everybody's in the room going like, yep, yep, yep, totally agree. We're gonna change everything. And I said, so now you have 3 super users that are 85% competent in the new way of doing things and 30 people that are not. It took you 6 to 8 months to get one person coming into a context that you, they knew everything. How long do you think the valley of despair is when you implement this? He turned beet red because he was in front of his boss, and he said, longer than 6 to 8 months. And I said, correct. That was huge for the project. Because, uh, Hypercare was scheduled for 6 weeks and, uh, we extended it to 6 months. We sold a major piece of work because, um, because the valley of despair was going to be so long. But again, um, the engineer in me, it's like I used the numbers, I used the curve, you know, and it's not just— and so I didn't get known as the touchy-feely change guy. You know, it was like, the guy's got hardcore numbers and hardcore logic attached. So that was the right story at the right time with a significant impact on the project. It wasn't just my team. It was the entire project was impacted by this, and that was 1996. So, um, that came because in that moment I hadn't planned on that, but I told the story with a bounce. I gave— I took it and put the story in the hands of the people in front of me. Think about that as part of your storytelling, is how can you make a more of a major bounce as part of your changing, changing up the story. Does that make sense? Okay, cool.
