Planning Your First Five slides (Using Microsoft PowerPoint) Part 2

A dozen story types

Although the classical story structure of Act I is the foundation for limitless story variations, there is a more limited set of story types that can help you to frame your own stories. In his topic Moving Mountains (Crowell-Collier Press, 1989), Henry M. Boettinger describes a dozen story types, summarized in the following list, that reflect various situations that people in organizations might face. Many of these story types can help you to refine the Point A and Point B dynamic you set up in Act I:

1.    Historical narrative "We have a history that makes us proud, and we want to apply our high standards to the current situation."

2.    Crisis "We have to respond to the danger facing us."

3.    Disappointment "We made a decision based on the best information we had available, but now we know it wasn’t the right decision, so we have to try something else."

4.    Opportunity "We know something now that we didn’t know before, which presents us with a new possibility if we act."

5.    Crossroads "We’ve been doing fine on the path that we’re on, but now we have a new choice and we have to decide which path to take."

6.    Challenge "Someone else has achieved something amazing—do we have it in us to do the same?"


7.    Blowing the whistle "Although it appears everything is going fine, we have a serious problem we need to fix."

8.    Adventure "We know that trying something new is a risk, but it’s better to take a risk than to stay in a rut."

9.    Response to an order "We’ve been told we have to do this, so we’re here to figure out how to make it happen."

10.    Revolution "We’re on a path to disaster if we don’t radically change what we’re doing today."

11.    Evolution "If we don’t keep up with the latest, we’ll fall behind."

12.    The Great Dream "If we can only see our possibility, we can make it our reality."

No matter what type of story you have, read through these story types when you start writing your Act I headlines to see whether one of them can help you to find the words you’re looking for.

On the upside, a change could be brought on by an inspiration, a new idea, a discovery, or the appearance of a new opportunity that the main character hadn’t seen before. On the downside, the challenge could be the realization that a mistake was made, a fall from grace, the loss of market share, declining profits, or a sudden drop in status. Whether positive or negative, all of these challenges are the core reasons why people gather for presentations.

Your Point A headline should establish the challenge that the specific audience faces in this story. Do this by answering, in the cell labeled Point A, the question your audience is wondering: "What specific challenge do I face in this setting?". In this example, enter the headline what worked in the past isn’t working anymore – and you’re feeling the impact, as shown in Figure 4-8.

Write your third headline of Act I to describe Point A—a specific challenge that your audience faces in this setting.

FIGURE 4-8 Write your third headline of Act I to describe Point A—a specific challenge that your audience faces in this setting.

This headline gets right to the point by describing the challenge that starts the emotional engine of your presentation. Here you’ve moved from the macro view of the Setting headline that presented the overall state of the environment and have now gone to the micro level, where you describe specifically how the big picture is playing out in the audience’s lives. In other words, the earlier Setting headline was the big, general problem, and now with Point A, you’ve made the situation personal and identified the specific challenge the audience faces in the context of the setting.

The point of the Point A headline is to arrive at an emotional touchstone that makes it crystal clear why your audience would want to engage with your presentation. As you’re thinking of what to write, answer this question from the audience’s viewpoint: "What is it that I would stand to lose if I missed your presentation today?" Or put another way, "What makes me lose sleep at night?" It might be related to sales, an insight, or the opportunity to find clarity or direction. By focusing on what the audience might feel they would lose, or what causes them to lose sleep, you’ll find the challenge they really care about that you should address in your Point A headline.

It might appear that writing headlines is a straightforward process where you write what you need in the first pass, but in reality it’s an iterative process where you’ll write a first draft and then make multiple rounds of changes. As mentioned earlier, you’ll get the best results if you develop your headlines with a team so that you get multiple perspectives and distill the best of your collective effort.

The challenge of the Point A headline defines your story and helps you to focus. You could tell a dozen stories about any particular topic; focusing on a single challenge helps you to narrow your scope to a single story presented to a specific group of people at a particular moment in time. Selecting one and only one challenge is often a difficult process, but because the capacity of working memory to process new information is so limited, you have to go through a difficult decision-making process and choose the one story thread that is the best fit. To write the best Point A headline, you have to know your audience as well as possible and make your decision based on the best of your and your team’s experience, research, competitive intelligence, analysis, and intuition.

The Point a Headline

The Point A headline answers the question your audience is silently wondering: "What challenge do I face?"

When you’ve written the Point A headline, you’ve made sure that you will engage the audience by describing a challenge they face in the third slide of your presentation, as shown in Figure 4-9.

The headline of the Point A slide engages your audience by describing a challenge they face.

FIGURE 4-9 The headline of the Point A slide engages your audience by describing a challenge they face.

Although you’ve left your audience with a formidable challenge in the Point A headline, you’ll provide them with the resolution they want in the next headline.

Motivating the Audience with the "Point B" Headline

No one likes to remain in a state of discomfort. When you are challenged, you feel unsettled and emotionally uncomfortable until you bring the situation back into equilibrium. The same holds true for the main character in this story or in any presentation.

In the Point A headline, you described a challenge that faces your audience. Now, in the Point B headline, they naturally want to see how things will look when the situation is brought back into balance. To write the headline for this slide, in the cell labeled Point B in the template, type an answer to the question your audience is wondering: "Where do I want to be?" In this example, enter You’d like to find a new way to do things, as shown in Figure 4-10.

Write your fourth headline of Act I to describe Point B, where your audience wants to be when facing the Point A challenge.

FIGURE 4-10 Write your fourth headline of Act I to describe Point B, where your audience wants to be when facing the Point A challenge.

This headline concisely affirms what the executives want—namely, to find a better way to do things. This establishes the desired outcome that will bring the main character’s situation back into balance.

The Point A headline describes the challenge facing the audience, and the Point B headline shows them a vision of where they want to be in this context. When they see where they want to go, they’ll be fueled by their desire to get there with your help.

The Point b Headline

The Point B headline of the fourth slide answers the question the audience is asking themselves: "Where do I want to be?"

When you’ve written the Point B headline, you’ve made sure that you will motivate the audience by affirming what they want in the fourth slide of your presentation, as shown in Figure 4-11.

The Point B headline motivates your audience by defining where they want to be.

FIGURE 4-11 The Point B headline motivates your audience by defining where they want to be.

Creating Dramatic Tension Between the Point A and Point B Headlines

In the story template, the two cells that hold the Point A and Point B headlines are separated from one another physically, as shown in Figure 4-12, while the cell between them is shaded a dark gray.

The gap between the Point A and Point B headlines is the emotional engine of the entire presentation.

FIGURE 4-12 The gap between the Point A and Point B headlines is the emotional engine of the entire presentation.

Remember, the Point A headline puts your audience in an emotionally uncomfortable state of imbalance, and the Point B headline describes the state of balance that they want to achieve. These two headlines spark off one another to generate the energy that drives your story forward and makes your audience eager to hear your proposed solution. The gap between A and B engages your audience immediately with the unresolved tension of a story. This timeless storytelling technique of creating dramatic tension helps you quickly engage and motivate your audience and to further an emotional connection. It also answers another important question the audience is wondering: "Why am I here?

Tip

An easy way to remember the essence of Act I is to think of the central question the audience is asking at the beginning of any presentation: "A to B, what’s in it for me?"

The problem described by the Point A and Point B headlines not only helps your audience engage with your presentation, but later it also helps you to select and prioritize information. Of all the information available to you, how do you know which information to include? The answer is to select only information that specifically helps your audience close the gap between Points A and B. Any other information is unnecessary for this presentation and can be set aside for another story on another day.

Next post:

Previous post: