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

Use Your Tools

Take every opportunity to try creating visual stories. Become a collector of stories. Keep a notebook with you and record the anecdotes and stories you hear. You can use these to add points and interest to your future work.

Keep a copy of the Visual Story Map handy. It was designed to help you.

When you're creating a story, the Visual Story Map helps you to remember the key activities and to record the main points. You've seen the detail required to build a visual story, and that cannot all go on one page, but you can capture the key points for quick reference in the development process.

The Visual Story Map can be used as a learning aid to review other people's stories. Simply listen to a story and analyze it to identify the messages, the audience, how it has been structured, and the characters. Ask yourself if the sense of urgency is well defined. Do the visuals support the story or reduce its effectiveness? If you're watching a presentation that is a series of bullet point slides, try to capture them and see how you can restructure it.

While CAST was originally developed for creating stories to promote organizational change, we also discovered it is useful for creating stories about personal change, including losing weight and stopping smoking, and even for creating the cover letter and curriculum vitae for job hunters. CAST is not a silver bullet for every problem, but it's amazing to use the power of a story to grab attention and get results. Certainly, ...