I’m a fan of the author Ursula Le Guin. What I didn’t know until recently was that she also did a lot of reviews. In her review of a book called “The mushroom at the end of the world” she observed that “Scientists and artists know that the way to handle an immense topic is often through close attention to a small aspect of it, revealing the whole through the part.“
That’s how a good story can work.
By exploring a specific thing, in a bit of detail, your audience can infer the whole thing for themselves. There are a few advantages – in no particular order:
- by inferring it for themselves the audience is more likely to trust their conclusions than if you tell them it
- it’s fundamentally more interesting
- making your audience do some of the work makes them active participants in your presentation, so they’re more likely to engage (caveats apply!)
If you’re not convinced, think of it this way… an expert (that’s important) in ecology can infer a very great deal about both it’s place in the food web of a place (and evolution!) simply by looking at the beak of a finch.
Tell the story of how the finch eats, show how its beak is shaped to help that, and suddenly you’ve got an understanding of the bigger picture.
Similarly, tell the story of one company’s restructure process and you’ve got an entry into how it can be done with the team you’re in.
There’s more to it than that of course, because no one pushes back at the story of a finch but people will definitely push back at the story of the restructure? Why? Because they’re not stupid and they know that if they accept the story there’s no reason for them not to get off their backsides and do the work themselves…
… but that’s why I train in how to pick the right story, not just any story.
