What has storytelling to do with your daily business?

But what can storytelling do for you? Storytelling gives your project, your research result and finally your product a soul. Storytelling makes people chat about your innovations, as emotions are addressed. Furthermore and most importantly, storytelling helps listeners to identify with your product.

What if…

Yes, you are doing science in your laboratories. You are collecting facts and you are compiling numerous tables to emphasise the brilliancy of you invention. Do not get me wrong. What you are doing is absolutely right and more than required. But this does not necessarily mean you should explain it in the same language which you are speaking in the lab. What if you would report about obstacles? What if you would talk about hard times in the innovation process? What if you would allow people to have a glimpse behind the curtain?

You would…

You would talk about something everybody knows about. You would talk about a thing everybody encounters on a daily basis. Something, everybody knows and nobody dares to speak out loud, especially if competitors are listening. (If you are already scared, do not read further.)

This thing is called: P-r-o-b-l-e-m.

You could…

You could start to talk about problems. You could tell people a story about your product. You could give your innovation a soul. And you could make people feel empathy with the innovation process behind your invention. There is absolutely nothing to lose, as everybody knows about problems. Just because you are not talking about problems, people are not that naive to think there haven´t been any.

You can…

You can easily win people´s minds with a good story. A story with a hero, who struggles at first and comes back stronger than ever. When I was a child, I loved to be the hero in stories I constructed. To be honest even today I like to be a hero. And the best thing about telling stories like these? YOU are one of these heroes who has been victorious in the end. YOU solved several problems and YOU came up with an ingenious product.

These thoughts bring me to my final question: Why are today´s heroes so shy and do not show up although there are just benefits of doing so? Let´s be brave together, talk more about solved problems and do not hesitate to leave a message via mail or a comment.

Kind regards, Michael Richter