"How can we stay human in business communications and increase the effectiveness of our writing?

Associate creative Paul Draper shares insights from his creative fiction writing and how this can be applied into developing impactful digital communication and learning for the clients we work with.

Curiosity drives engagement with stories. The key motivation for following a narrative is “what happens next”? This is how we hook an audience.

In the context of business storytelling a learning outcome needs to land and engage with the target audience early on. Curiosity delivered on the B of the bang.

A story comprises a character and a change. We can have one or the other but it stops being a tale. We want to find out how the change might affect us if we were in that position.

Effective storytelling helps the audience empathise with the requirement to be talked about - a culture change in the workplace, a new service to deliver, a policy to enact or new learning for better alignment.

A story must have an emotional point. How do you want your audience to feel?

Emotion creates a human connection with the content. How we want the audience to feel and sets the compass direction for the whole story to flow towards. An emotional vision is a stronger and more compelling goal than simply information or instruction.

These are the fundamentals of an engaging story. How we deliver that story is in the production craft we can apply to the story. These are some of the delivery choices we can make to shape the tone and the feel of the story.

• Storytelling perspective - who tells the story?
• The voices we hear
• Illustrative conflict to propel interest
• Visual treatment
• Style choices

How we bring these storytelling elements together requires a thoughtful balancing of engagement and message. We should be looking for the 'just right' mix, not too heavy, not too light or (as is can often be the case with business communication) not bland and overloaded with information.

The skill of the storyteller is to use the fundamentals of what makes a great story to create an emotional, human, connection. The story shouldn't feel like hard work to understand what needed to be told. It should fly like an arrow.

Get in touch with us about your next project or communication challenge, we’d love to hear from you.