“Can I make some changes to this presentation flow?” I asked the senior architect, who was travelling to a conference organized by a major cloud service provider.  

“Whatever!” came the reply.

For me, prying into these presentations is partly a job requirement and partly interest. As the Head of Marketing of a tech organization, it’s my responsibility to ensure that the architects represent the organization well. Also, having come from a tech and consulting background, these are my opportunities to keep a close watch on the latest in technology.

I made some changes to the narrative, set an interesting context, teased the audience with questions with a promise to address them later in the presentation, carefully structured the flow so that the audience does not lose focus, and removed content which I thought did not fit into the overall purpose, effectively cutting the presentation time by half, so that the architect will have more to show off their knowledge with a lot of Q&A towards the end of the session.

It worked like a charm. “The session was a breeze. I did not even have time to prepare. I just reiterated the narrative you helped me create, and the crowd loved it,” was the gleaming response. And then the whole architect community wanted to learn that skill.

Storytelling-for-techies was born!

Who gets to benefit?

Based on the above incident it is easy to mistake storytelling/narrative-thinking skills for presentation skills. People generally do. But the what I figured was, learning this skill can help techies produce quality content for marketing, which, by extension, helps bring in more business.

And that’s quite a stark contrast to the current approach in the industry -improve the tech skills of marketers to create better content- which hardly works. And why would it? Stories are in our DNA, technology is not!

And the bonus – technical professionals get to build a steady digital footprint via blogs, webinars, media articles etc. and eventually go on to become a celebrity in their line of work. A few, whom I worked with, became AWS Heroes in this manner.

How was I able to make this difference? By combining my technical knowledge, consulting skills, and storytelling skills!

Why StoryEQ?

The practice of business storytelling is deep-rooted empathy & human values, and it can transform careers, businesses, and the professional themselves, Such power should be in the hands of every individual.

Hence StoryEQ – democratizing storytelling, democratizing growth!

Follow us on LinkedIn @StoryEQ to stay connected.