Storytelling A Tool For More Than Just Presentations

Stories help you visualize your goals

In the Harvard Business Review article, The Irresistible Power of Storytelling as a Strategic Business Tool by Harrison Monarth (March 11, 2014), Keith Quesenberry notes:

People are attracted to stories because we’re social creatures and we relate to other people.

The power of storytelling is that it helps us understand each other and develop empathy. Storytelling is a tool that is useful for presentations, but also to help people frame their thoughts and for gathering information. A story provides both a deeper and more nuanced connection with information than most lists of PowerPoint bullets or even structured requirements documents. Here are just a few scenarios (other than presentations) where stories can be useful:

 

Systematic Problems With Goals and Goal Setting

Watch your step when setting goals!

Setting goals is important for deciding what you want to achieve in a specific period. Goal setting provides value by forcing a degree of introspection, acting as a filter to separate the important from the irrelevant and as a guide to channel behavior. Like many things in life the journey is often as important as the goal destination, however, setting goals is complex. There are many processes and frameworks to provide structure for setting goals; however, even with a framework, goal setting sometimes gets off track. Several systematic problems observed when setting goals include: