“Another tool that saves time — and helps our clients make meaningful presentations — is a Visual Slide Library,” Kurnoff points out. “The library is a resource that lets people choose from an array of branded slides that are built for storytelling. Together with their Story Planner, staff members can easily pull together on-brand, targeted, visually powerful slides for each presentation.”

Lesson 3: Identify a storytelling advocate

Often after a company decides they want their employees to become storytellers, there are obstacles. “We have learned that there must be a relentless storytelling advocate within every organization,” Kurnoff notes. “In fact, the more advocates the better!”

To help the identified advocates, Kurnoff’s company arms them with a ‘walking deck’ to energize their internal selling. “A Walking Deck, as the names implies, is a storytelling explainer and course description that stands on its own. Big concepts like storytelling must be socialized into the existing culture. An effective way to do this is to let the self-navigating Walking Deck bubble up through the corporate food chain. Advocates aren’t always there to directly remind people of the value of storytelling, but a smart, streamlined, self-contained, educational resource like the Walking Deck makes it much easier to spread the idea around.”