Now a days lot of focus is being placed in business meetings how to present unique proposition during presentations, how to keep engage people during the long hour meetings? How we can add new techniques to communicate effectively with the executives and not to spend too much time on high-class presentations (as some time slides kills the overall message).

In this era of where everything is require quick results, in our office we also had a training on White Boarding, Story-telling techniques lead/facilitated by Varik Torsteinsen, I thought to share all my learning with community. I never thought there are so much details and even logic to use which color marker on the white board[Symbol]. I am convinced that visual storytelling is a better way to nurture a two-way conversation, build trust, and communicate unique value to customers/stakeholders compared to power-point slides but keep in mind, in few scenarios we have to use power-point like building/showing a complex architecture or detailing some technical concepts. So it is your instinct where to use power-point and where to use white-boarding.

Stanford Professor Dr. Zakary Tormala found in his research that whiteboard visuals, using simple, concrete images, had a statistically significant advantage over PowerPoint or other static presentations in the areas of recall, credibility, clarity, engagement, persuasion, and impact. Extract from the study of Dr. Zakary Tormala is blogged by Tim Reisterer

Let’s first understand few basics of these terms:

Whiteboard: a large board with a smooth white surface that can be written on with special markers

White boarding: White–boarding is the placement of shared files on an on-screen shared notebook or whiteboard. Videoconferencing and data conferencing software often lets the user annotate the shared documents as on a physical whiteboard.

Storytelling: Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, sound and/or images, often by improvisation or embellishment

To find more on Storytelling basics, while searching I came across the illustration from Nancy Duarte’s Resonate book for a clear explanation and powerful example of the ‘Hero’s Journey’ and also downloaded another free book 7 pillars of story-telling. One more blog on effective story telling techniques are described in a very nice way by Barry McWilliams

Here are key points for storytelling:

Keep it Simple – When we are doing Technology presentations to business and IT users, we should keep simple words and avoid to use acronyms like using word of ICS how business user will know what is ICS? but we in Oracle world know it is Integration Cloud Service (ICS). Similar examples you can find in your area.

How our product can meet/satisfy Desire – to convince business users we should be knowing it what is their desire or what actually they are looking for… how our product will fulfill that desire? Hit that directly instead of round-robin on the product features.

Make memorable presentation – storytelling & white boarding enable us to leave lasting impression on attendees. It enables us to disrupt humdrum of presentations. We can mix this with high-quality relevant visuals in the form of pictures with short sentences in power point presentations and we can draw simple signs/symbols on white board to pass our key messages.

Initiate Conversations – two way conversations are the key in winning hearts of meeting/workshop attendees. Strive to find similarities/right points which foster conversation. Another important point, While making stories don’t present yourself how great you are, directly focus on how we are going to help customers to overcome their business challenges, present clearly how we are going to do it. May be customer is not interested to listen only YOUR GREAT STORY.

The epic of story-telling………..

The Story, The Hero – In your storytelling, the HERO is customer, who is listening to buy your product/service. Now you can make out what is the role of HERO in any Story/Movie, we need to treat him like that and in the end we can reach to ‘happy ending & they started living happily’

White boarding:

Here are the few basics on using different color markers for white boarding. A four color scheme can be effective while doing storytelling for your workshops/meetings:

• Black to frame the discussion, main points
• Red for business challenges or competitive limitations

• Green for your solutions
• Blue for references, anecdotes, and third-party validation.

The main marker is the black one and we use this to write all of the key information or to draw sketches or tables and other colors will be used based on the scenario.

The #1 Rule of white boarding attempt – Use of symbols and writing must be neat and clean

The #2 Rule: Must maintain balance between writing on the white board and speaking. We all know it is difficult to avoid turning your back while drawing and writing but try to maintain eye contact.

The #3 Rule: Communicate, Communicate and Communicate. While drawing, explain your symbols. What you will explain, people will only understand that otherwise everyone has his own imagination.

I will highly recommended to go for this book Bikablo 2.0

This book has very good material like Text container, Symbols, Figuren, workshop, meeting, seminar preparation visual symbols, you will love it

Feel free to share your comments and let’s to gather start putting colors in our workshops/meetings.