The term Death by PowerPoint is used to conjure up boring PowerPoints. But Death by Story?
We hold stories in high esteem. Much is said and written about the power of stories. The American Indians did not have a written language. They passed down lessons through the stories they told, often around a camp fire smoking that pipe.
At their core, movies are stories. The Harry Potter series is a series of stories. The Bible is full of stories. Everyone is talking about the power of stories. No one talks about the down side of a story. Until now.
I heard a speaker recently. This speaker told story after story. Good story after good story. They were just too many stories. By the end of the presentation, I felt a heavy burden had been placed on me the audience. I had to work at figuring out the lesson of each story and how to implement it in my life.
I want the speaker to work at cutting out the message he/she wants me to get. I don’t want to work that hard. And what if I cut out the wrong message?
In my rules of communication, audiences are lazy. That includes me when I am in the audience. I didn’t want to work that hard to figure out the message. Every story, good as it was, just added a weight to the audience. By the end of the presentation I was figuratively dead.
Death by story.
