Business Storytelling

The PMO needs people to make decisions and take action pretty much everyday. We provide reports, we have conversations, we try and influence yet still we struggle sometimes to make a message really land and even more so when it comes to people making critical decisions.
You will have heard of storytelling in a business context – most likely you’ve heard it called data storytelling – it’s the same thing. You can use storytelling structures, techniques and a whole myriad of plot devices and character details within your day-to-day work.
In this session we had long time House of PMO friend, Lori Silverman, who is the author of the Business Storytelling for Dummies book. Lori also did a keynote presentation at a past conference which you can also check out.
There’s a lot of great insights and tips featured in this session, plus we also had a go at thinking about a specific PMO story too. You can see our attempt in the link below to Miro!
We really recommend the book, it really is jam-packed with things the PMO can use in their day-to-day communications and conversations.
 

Recorded Session

If you want to check out a business storyteller that Lori really admired, a comedian from back in the day – Jeanne Robinson. She also recommend that you go along to a comedy stand up show because most of them today are brilliant at telling stories!

The Presentation Deck

Latest Research

Lori talks about how the research into the brain has changed a lot since the book was published – she mentions some of that in the session – she also advises that you should check out the session below from her You Tube channel – Level Up with Lori.
I loved the bit where she busts the theory about us being more dominant in the left or right side of the brain – the left being analytical and the right creative.
 

PMO Stories

 
We tried to come up with an example which we could all identify with and have a go at working through a story structure. Make sure you click on the image below to take you to Miro where you can zoom in and take a look in more detail.
Lori told us that the place to start is to think about the key point you want to make in the story – and to start at lessons you want people to learn from the story and the action you want them to take.
We got into firefighters and ‘predictability’ which you can hear on the session (about the 55 minute mark)