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

Decisions Take Time

In Chapter 9, we discussed the learning and decision styles of the audience. These have an impact on the structure of the visual story content, and also on the way in which you will deliver it. There is another dimension to the decision process you will need to cover when planning the delivery and that is to understand how much time your audience will take to come to a decision.

It might help to think of the delivery plan as a three-step process:

1. Include the information necessary to ensure that the audience understands what is being proposed.
2. Lead to a decision via content structured in such a way that the audience will best accept it.
3. Deliver the story in a way that convinces the audience to make the decision quickly.

The third step involves understanding why your audience may not make a decision immediately. It is one of the main reasons why we recommend creating a delivery plan, and considering different formats for your story. There are four different factors that contribute to the duration of a decision process: gut feel, repetition, elapsed time, and reevaluation.

GUT FEEL Some people will just jump to a conclusion and make a decision. Although it can appear rash, the decision is often based on experience and can develop from a small amount of data and a lot of assumptions. Here, to avoid any false assumptions, you need to understand the experience of the audience members and place the story in a context they can clearly understand.

REPETITION Some ...