Nail your narrative

Collaborative whiteboarding

If you’re co-presenting with someone, I recommend whiteboarding your storyline with them. You can follow one of my recommended story structures, or build your own. Sticky notes on a physical whiteboard work fine, but if you’re remote, you can even use tools like Miro or Mural.

Sticky notes offer a distinct advantage for crafting your narrative. You can move stickies back and forth, edit them, or trash them. Colour-coding sticky notes helps you visualise related themes, and placing them close together helps you notice adjacencies.

If whiteboarding is your thing, I’ve created a Mural template with all my favourite story structures and panels, so you can outline your big idea and describe your audience persona.

Diagram-centric narratives

Of late, I’ve found myself creating presentations that start as a boxes-and-arrows style diagram in my notebook, or even on a slide. In these situations, the diagram becomes the spine around which I construct the rest of my narrative.

For example, when I was starting my most recent role, I doodled the diagram you see below, on a piece of paper. It was my way of thinking about how I intended to play my role as head of culture at Thoughtworks. After a few more hours of scribbling and making notes, I reproduced the diagram on a slide. I built my final slide deck using a combination of animations and nested slides. I’ll expand on this example further down in the article.

Figure 2: A core diagram can start as an excellent spine for your narrative.

Narrative-based writing

If you don’t enjoy whiteboarding, I suggest writing your narrative in text. This approach can work well if you’re a solo presenter and prefer writing as a thinking tool. You can start with a bulleted structure for your ideas and flesh them out as you go.

If you want to use one of the story formats I described earlier, I’ve created a pack of Google Docs templates that you can use as an alternative to the Mural whiteboarding option.

Voice memos + AI

Since AI voice transcription has gotten better in recent years, I’ve also used voice memos to flesh out my thinking. The Voice Memos app on iOS and the Recorder app on Android offer excellent transcripts, and once you’ve picked a story structure, you can use these apps to record your thoughts for each segment and then pass the transcripts to any AI chatbot to clean up and structure your narrative draft. You may need to clean up the AI-produced draft, but with some practice and by creating some custom skills, you can push AI tools to get you close to a usable narrative. Of course, you can’t, and you shouldn’t outsource your thinking to AI.

Whichever approach you take, the success criterion remains the same — you should know your narrative well enough to voice it without any visual aids. And if you achieve that outcome, you’ll have a solid narrative platform, which you can then enhance using audio-visual aids.

Storyboarding using slides

These days, I often create my storyboards using slides, especially when I use a diagram-centric narrative. The slide sorter or light table view in your presentation tool is excellent for creating storyboards because it allows me to drop in text and sample images and reorder my panels until I’m satisfied with the plan.

The trick with slide-based storyboarding is to resist the temptation to design slides. When storyboarding this way, I limit my focus to the spine of my slide deck. The polish comes later.

Remember the diagram I shared earlier in this article? The images below show my final diagram, the storyboard that I created using that diagram as the spine, and then a light-table view of the final deck after I added a few layers of polish.

If you’re accustomed to starting your presentation design by opening a presentation tool, my suggested approach will perhaps feel onerous. From experience teaching presentation skills to hundreds of Thoughtworks colleagues, I find this approach to be a way to start slow so I can go fast later. Once you try this approach a few times, you’ll notice that it doesn’t take as much effort as you may fear. It also speeds up slide creation because you’re working off a plan, as against playing it by ear.

On the other hand, if you’re a skilful presenter, my suggested approach may seem rigid and linear. That’ll be a fair criticism. I’ll use a Pablo Picasso quote in response to that reaction.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

-- Pablo Picasso

Here’s what I’ve noticed when coaching colleagues to present:

• Presenters who aren’t accustomed to thinking about their narrative, audience, and presentation outlines benefit from a structured approach to these aspects of their presentation.
• As people gain skill and experience, they shift to a more fluid process. They may skip a step because it feels intuitive, or they may bounce back and forth between other steps without adding to their cognitive load.

All this said, the narrative won’t be a static artefact. As you build your storyboard, you may tweak the narrative. Even as you design your slides, you may reconsider your narrative, storyboard, and even your assumptions about your audience. None of these artefacts and considerations is a one-and-done. The outline feeds the design, but the design can also challenge the outline. That’s the narrative you want walking into slide design: solid enough that building your slides becomes an exercise in execution, not invention, yet open enough to flex when the details teach you something new.

With that narrative platform in hand, let’s explore some principles for slide design in the next few posts.