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On occasion, something akin to magic happens in a talk. As the speaker is going through their talk, a sweep of the room reveals that everyone is watching the speaker intensely, no one is fidgeting, looking at their phones or other devices and it feels like the whole room is in sync. When that happens, the audience is connected to the speaker in an almost physiological way in a deep form of engagement.

What does it take to transform the audience into that deep state? In a previous post, students recounting memorable talks often cited emotional responses that deepened the impact of a talk. And one of the best ways of evoking emotion is to tell a story.

Storytelling is a uniquely human form of communication. Carl Alviani (https://medium.com/the-protagonist/the-science-behind-storytelling-51169758b22c) has argued that storytelling is a survival skill. Our great advantage as a species is our ability to cooperate at scale and that requires seeing your neighbor’s welfare as tied up with your own. It also requires imagining outcomes that have not yet happened and this is where storytelling comes in. It invites listeners to put themselves in the role of the protagonist of the story. In essence, the listener experiences the story as if it had happened (or could happen) to them.

Alviani’s take on the classic story structure is:
old normal > clear goal > obstacles > external allies > struggle > new normal.

And when it comes to science, this structure most simply becomes:
old view of the world > scientific hypothesis to test > technical and conceptual challenges > collaborators > experiments > new view of the world

When a scientific journey is recounted in this form, the scientist becomes the protagonist – the hero of the story and the audience will naturally follow along, even putting themselves in the place of the speaker. Since it fits perfectly with the age old structure of a story, it easy to tell, easy to follow, memorable, authentic, engaging and effective.

There are do’s and don’ts to telling a scientific story. Evoking emotion is important, especially when it comes to the motivation for doing the studies. The story should flow so that one part leads naturally to the next. Simply stringing experimental descriptions together with linkers like “..and then we did this..” forces the audience to fill in the connections and can be exhausting. Rather, providing the thought process or the very human arguments over competing ideas can help the audience to link parts of the story into one narrative.

One key element is the ‘surprise’ – the unexpected result that changes everything and leads inevitably to the conclusion. In classic storytelling, this is the equivalent of the climax and should be emphasized using a change in speaking tone and a description of how it made you feel. Don’t bury the lede!

There are many additional elements that go into a great story and I will be covering them in future posts. I would like to challenge readers of this post to think of their own work and how it can be told in the form of a story. Feel free to reach out to me either here or on LinkedIn if you would like help putting your story together.