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

Success Is a Commitment

Decisions can be changed. Keeping the decision at ‘Yes’ and helping your audience avoid distractions to make the change happen means using the visual story to keep the sense of purpose alive. Visual stories can evolve. Once the decision has been made and action is in progress, we often see new versions of the visual story, updated to reflect the changing situation.

When these updates are done well, they maintain the sense of urgency and also show how progress is being made toward resolving the situation defined in the visual story. Updating a visual story simply means repeating the process, but starting from the well-structured content you have from the first story. A visual story created for a major bank transformation in 2005 was updated every three months for two years to keep all the staff focused on the final goal as new services were introduced. Each update moved the story to include the recently added services, and described the changes to come in the next six months.

On the following pages we continue the examples. You will see how both Marina and Tom build on the reasoning identified in their analysis of the “Whys,” but use their analysis of the audience and the story to identify the sense of urgency. Tom in particular maps out his two potential stories to the different variations for urgency identified in this chapter.