What is your audience dying to know (next)?
That’s everything you need to know about storytelling.
I’m dead serious. Nothing else matters nearly as much. In fact, in a business context, I find most of the storytelling frameworks utterly distracting. The Hero’s Journey, the three act structure. That’s all valid advice. But it simply isn’t needed in a business context.
What is needed is much simpler.
In one word: relevance.
(You could also simply call it empathy.)
Because here’s the thing: You are dying to say what’s important to you. But your audience will only hear it if they’re open to hearing it.
For example, the audience isn’t dying to know: “What are the 7 pillars of our transformation strategy?”
Honestly, they couldn’t care less and it’s easy for them to tune out.
But they are dying to know, and therefore won’t tune out if you speak about:
“What does this mean for me?”
“Can we actually pull this off?”
“Why now?”
“What are we not saying?”
“Is this finally going somewhere?”
“Can I trust this person?”
If you build your talk from these questions, you’ll eventually give them the 7 pillars. But in a way that actually makes sense to them and at a point in time where they actually want it.
In other words, “storytelling” is often solving the wrong problem. It’s used to spice things up, or maybe dress them up. And so, people focus on adding
emotion,
drama,
performance,
humor,
personal anecdotes.
But many deeply boring talks contain all of those things.
Meanwhile, someone calmly explaining a spreadsheet can hold a room hostage if people desperately want to know the info in it.
Tension works exactly counter to what we intuitively think:
The story is not exciting because of the emotion.
There’s emotion because it matters to us.
It doesn’t become relevant because of the drama.
It’s dramatic because it affects us.
In high stakes moments, this tension already exists. The audience enters the room with questions.
Your job is not to make it more dramatic but to figure out where this tension already lives.
Do they care? Do they wanna know?
That is tension. It’s the only thing your audience ever actually needed from you. Not another anecdote. Not a framework. Just the simple, irresistible need to know what comes next.
That question is available to you in any room, before any presentation, before any conversation where the words need to land.
What is my audience dying to know next?
Not: What do I want to say?
But: What are they already wanting to hear that I have not yet given them?
Let’s put it that way: “Dying to know” creates a remarkably effective editing filter for you. For every section of your talk, for every slide, every data point, every detail, every sentence, you can ask a straight question:
“Would they genuinely be dying to know this next?”
If not, then
cut it,
move it,
or rebuild the tension.
(An interesting side note: Surprisingly often, a talk gets stronger when you reveal the ending first. Because now people need to understand how it happened.)
I want to be clear on something here, though. This is not about attention bait. It has nothing to do with what sneaky salespeople do who artificially manufacture tension. You don’t need to create curiosity. When the moment is really high stakes, almost every time the curiosity already exists. The tension already exists.
Your job is to uncover it and align with it. And when you do, all the attributes of a great story (emotion, drama, etc.) are a free by-product.
So, that’s what great business storytelling does. It turns your message into something your audience doesn’t want to miss.
Keep lighting the path,
Michael
PS: Interestingly, some of the strongest communicators create exactly this kind of tension without telling a “story” in the traditional sense at all. No long anecdote. No dramatic setup. No five minute detour. Just a tiny spark that triggers a story in the audience’s own mind.
And often, that’s far more powerful. The next issue of What the Best Leaders Say explores why this works, why it’s so easy to miss, and why the best leaders use it far more often than most people realize. Subscribe now to receive it.