Being able to communicate effectively is surprisingly uncommon in many workplace settings, despite how important it is in order for a business to run efficiently. It’s not practised nearly as often as it should be, which can lead to issues both big and small. Lack of communication can cause problems like a lack of a centralized vision on a project to people leaving out entire parts of a project because they all thought someone else was doing it. There ares tons of situations that can arise from a lack of communication.
Storytelling can help you communicate more clearly to people in many ways, and also help you remind yourself of what’s important for you to tell others. When you start to get strategic about how you tell stories, you’ll be able to communicate very easily. One of the benefits of storytelling that helps communication is that you’re able to give more context to something when you talk about it in a story. Stories inherently need context to be coherent, and often times context can help in communication.
Context allows your coworkers to have a better understanding of the ultimate end goal of your project or the overall experience you want to give to your clients. It’s easier to frame something like that in a story than it is to just dump information all at once. If you want to use storytelling as a method for better communication, though, it’s important that you be strategic about how you tell the story and what details you include. You could tell one story two different ways and get different reactions.
For example, if there’s something important you want to drive home as the central point of the story, you need to consistently relate the other parts of the story back to that point in order to reiterate it.
This reiteration will help solidify the most essential parts in the listener’s mind. The extraneous details keep it from feeling repetitive, but all the same, they’re getting much of the same information repeated in order to make it stick.
You should also learn how to keep stories to appropriate lengths with only the important parts, for most situations. If you keep getting sidetracked and start talking about unimportant stuff, your overall message is going to get lost.
By keeping things short, sweet, and simple, you can more effectively get your point across without people getting confused by random unnecessary details or plotlines in your stories.
