Tell more (and better) stories

It sent me straight to the bookshelf.

I watched a colleague ace a presentation with a simple opening that changed everything: “Our customers spend 73 million minutes a year giving us feedback, whether it's calls in the contact center, chatting with us, or completing surveys. There's a lot of insight that could come from those minutes … but who's listening?”

The Zoom room leaned in.

That single moment … seeing how telling a story could captivate an audience was my turning point. I went to the shelf and pulled Matthew Dicks's “Storyworthy,” a book that had been there for more than a year and dove in.

That last paragraph? That's called a Five-Second Moment. Dicks encourages focusing on that tiny sliver of time when something shifted inside you to tell a story—a moment that might last just a few seconds but carries a lot of meaning.

The Five-Second Moment is impactful because it distills a story to its authentic emotional core, replacing moment-by-moment recounting with a focused, relatable, and purposeful moment of a true change.

Not every presentation has to include a sweeping narrative—I mean, gosh, we all know how quickly presentations tend to get interrupted anyway—so here are seven more “storyworthy” techniques that can enhance everyday communication to make points more memorable, data more meaningful, and ideas more compelling:

1. Show the transformation, not just events: Focus on how something changed. In my story, the transformation wasn't about the 73 million customer minutes, though that in itself was captivating—it was my realization that storytelling could transform a routine presentation into something compelling. And a skill I wanted to immediately start incorporating to improve my own workplace communications. That moment sent me straight to the bookshelf.

2. Use “But & Therefore”: Replace "and then" with “but and therefore.” Compare these two sentences:

3. Use present tense: “The room goes quiet. People lean forward. The data suddenly matters.” Present tense pulls listeners into the moment alongside you which is better than saying something like, “A couple of Fridays ago, I heard this great presentation that prompted me to improve my storytelling skills …”

4. Skip the rhetorical questions: Dicks advises against rhetorical questions because they pull the audience out of your story's flow. When you ask a rhetorical question, listeners stop experiencing your narrative and start thinking about their own answer. (Though the right rhetorical question at the right moment can be effective—that “Who's listening?” line had everyone's attention.)

5. Don't announce your story: “Let me tell you a story...” is not a good way to begin a story. Just begin.

6. Be the protagonist: Tell stories from your own experience, where you witnessed or felt the transformation. Dicks insists that the best stories come from your direct experience, not second-hand accounts. Instead of “My colleague found that storytelling improved her meetings,” share how “I watched my colleague transform a routine presentation by telling a simple story ... and it sent me straight to the bookshelf for my long-ignored copy of Matthew Dicks's ‘Storyworthy.’”

7. Find the beginning by examining the end: Dicks teaches that you should start by identifying your five-second moment of transformation, which is the end of your story, and should come as close to the end as possible … then work backward to find the beginning. The beginning should be the opposite of your ending. In my story, I ended with the realization that storytelling could transform communication, so I began with watching a traditional presentation suddenly become captivating through story.

One last thing: The most important factor in being a good storyteller, and this is obvious but worth sharing, is that you must have stories to tell. A storyteller needs an inventory. I know people who have a story for nearly every point they make. I don’t. Not yet. So I’ve recently taken Dicks’s “Homework for Life” to heart.

He writes: “At the end of every day, take a moment and sit down. Reflect upon your day. Find your most storyworthy moment, even if it doesn’t feel very storyworthy. Write it down. Not the whole story, but a few sentences at most. Something that will keep you moving, and will make it feel doable. That will allow you to do it the next day.”

This practice turns you into a story collector. (“Problems of output are often problems of input,” writes Austin Kleon.) These moments become your storytelling material, ready to bring your next presentation, meeting, or email to life. And finding those moments when something changes, and then sharing those moments in ways that tell a story of transformation, can help others see the potential in change too.

Around The Water Cooler ⛲

“It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that as literate culture declines, people gravitate toward epistemologies where truth is felt, experienced, or revealed rather than proven via empirical evidence and linear argument.” Seven Features of Post-Literate Politics by Ian Leslie

“When someone asks you to participate in a project, the human instinct is to want to do something. We don’t want to just stand around after getting asked to join. But sometimes doing less, or even removing things, is the best way to improve something.” The Subtraction Edition

How Millennials Learned to Sit at Their Desks and Love the Bowl by Alan Siegel

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How To Work is healthcare-focused work design inspiration (from the experts!) to nudge your perspectives and practices into better alignment with the world of work as it is, and away from what it was. Here’s my take on what we’re working through.