Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations

8

Who

I don't know what the key to success is, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone.

—Seth Godin, American serial entrepreneur and author

Every company has two organizational structures: The formal one is written on the charts; the other is the everyday relationship of the men and women in the organization.

—Harold S. Geneen, successful U.S. business leader and CEO of ITT from 1959 to 1977

Convincing everyone of an idea is nearly impossible, even if the idea is amazingly compelling. So don't try to convince everyone. Every time you dilute your message to accommodate an additional person, you risk reducing its effectiveness. In this chapter, we ask you to focus on the specific people you need to convince. You must first figure out who they are.

The CAST process focuses on using stories to influence decisions, or to make change happen. Whether you are out to change the world or yourself, you need clarity of purpose and a message to make audiences commit. CAST has been designed to help you plan the delivery approach for different sizes of audience, with a process to map your content to a story structure based on an audience analysis. The first step in understanding your audience is to be clear on the size of the audience.

As more people started to use CAST and the Visual Story Map, it became apparent that these visual stories have real impact on people's lives. ...