Hi everybody, I'm Nicola Tangan of the Norwegian SN wealth fund, and today we are going to talk to Andy Craig, probably the world leading expert on storytelling in business. And the thing is, during the weekend, we are so funny anecdotes, funny stories, you know, all these kind of things. We get into the office and we are so boring. And so Andy, tell us, why is that?

It can be any number of reasons, but I think sometimes we forget what makes us great communicators on the weekends, and we leave that at the office door on Monday mornings. So if you just think back to the weekends, what makes us really good? Our language is simpler, it's much more conversational, we're to the point more often than not, and most importantly, we tell stories, stories that illustrate our point, that have vivid, concrete details to them, and that is a way of making your communication more natural, more human, more authentic, more engaging. So what weekend language really is, is the conversational translation of all that jargon, all that dense PowerPoint slide material, the three, four, and five litter acronyms that sometimes find its way into our presentations and conversations on the weekday.

Why do we switch? I think it could be anything from stress, from anxiety, from pressure inside the organization, from not feeling like perhaps we have permission, but a lot of is just baked into the fabric of business communication where jargon leads the way, and I have really two fundamental challenges with jargon. The first is it creates a crushing sameness. If every single company is the leading provider of mission critical seam of solutions that optimize, monetize and operationalize businesses with robust intelligence and actionable intelligence and a 10x improvement, then nobody is that. And then the second really the big challenge is that hey, first all tell me you you used a lot of you used a lot of super boring bargain there, but what is like what's the worst jargon you know?

Hey, first of all, tell me, you used a lot of super boring jargon there, but what is like, what's the worst jargon you know? I think optimize is a is a particular uh least favorite of mine. Monetize really, you see today people using transformation a lot. Transformational, transformative, you can see this right at the heart of AI. We're kind of going back through many of the same cycles of jargon and communication barriers that we did maybe during the dotc movement. It's we're back in a cycle, and it's because it's complex. It it's really difficult. It takes a lot of work to take an idea, a technology, a business model from complex to crystal clear. And so you see people trying to punch out of this bag, and if you look across many different AI companies, there's a lot of creating transformative experiences.

Why do so many companies use the same boring jargon? I think it's easy. I think one is it's easy, it doesn't take a lot of work. The flip side of that is it's really difficult to translate something into simple, clear, compelling communication. So that's the first part. The second part is oftentimes people feel like they, if I don't use this language, I won't be one of the mix, I won't be in the game. So it's it's almost you're acknowledging that you want to be the same as other people. And I met a lot of salespeople who want to compete uh with the same product that is described in the same way. Now you're competing on price.

In organization, is it the same between kind of bosses and people further down? Do we have the same problem? I I believe we do, and I think the the organizations that I've seen make the most progress in removing the jargon, removing the dense PowerPoint slides, getting the inside language out of the way to something more compelling, something clearer, are those that start at the top. It's like anything else in business, the person midlevel or below needs to feel like they have permission to speak in a to use different language many times and more accessible language. And so the ones where the CEO leads by the way, you see people telling more stories throughout the organization because they're modeling that sort of behavior.

We were once in a session years ago at a large software company, and we're talking about storytelling about clear computer communication translation conversational language, and a younger executive kind of raised her hand and said, I completely agree with all of this. There are many times when I'm in a session and I don't know what's being said, but if I don't use the language that the SVP is using in this organization, the optimize, the monetize, got to help us to recontextualize what happens is they don't think I understand it, that I'm not part of the the tribe, part of the group. That that's a culture issue, but there is an element truth in that, isn't it? There is. To me, that's more of a culture issue than a communication issue, but they're very closely linked.

How do you train people in this to communicate more effectively, more in a story based narrative? Yeah, you first you work on the narrative. So I would say a couple things come to mind. The first is we talk about adopting a journalist's mindset. So all of our coaches have some degree of Journalism background, either went to school for it or actually were journalists out in the real world for a while, but I really think that if you think about the craft of Journalism, it can be very valuable here on Hunting to find the good elements of a story and then crafting a story in the right order in the right flow.

So you think about the two jobs a journalist has every day. The first one is they got to go do the reporting. I have to go do the research, I have to interview people, I have to ask great questions. I'm looking for the meaning, the summarization, I'm looking for the stories, I'm looking for the data and the translation. Those are the elements that make up a great story. The second job a journalist has to do is once they've compiled all of this and they have more options, they've got to put it in the right order, so from the most important thing to the reader, listener, viewer, audience down. So that's the first thing is really thinking through and teaching almost like a journalism 101 course.

The second thing is engage the video camera, close the PowerPoint as a starting point alone. Think about starting out loud, record it, play it back, and now consume it as if you were in in the 15th row or the other side of the conference room table, like your audience will in 2 weeks, 30 days, 60 days. So the value of the video camera is that it's going to capture everything, what you said, how you said it, what you look like when you say it. But you have to as a communicator start to consume your presentation in the same way that your audience will on game day. They're not going to just sit there and read, you're not going to send them a script and read it to them. They're not going to sit there and read it themselves, they're not going to click through your slides themselves. They're going to watch and listen to you. So start to grab it and and review it in the way that they will. That'll help you answer the questions, does this matter to them? Do they care about it? Do they understand it? Is it compelling to them?

Well, you use your hands much more than I do, so you used them already a lot. I I us right, tell me a it do what does it do? Yeah, well, the first thing you need to do is think about what your narrative is, what you're saying. That's the first step to any presentation. Once you get that ironed out, you feel good about where you are, you got a little confidence in what you're going to say and the way you're going to say it, now you get into the delivery parts, which is vocally how are you saying it and visually what do you look like when you say it.

And when it comes to gestures, I get asked all the time, are gestures good or are they bad? They're neither necessarily. With any sort of delivery thing, it's about finding a balance somewhere in between. Now what I can be accused of doing too much is being too animated, too much hands, and it can get distracting. That's a point at which I got to come back to a home base, maybe maybe something like this down below, something comfortable to bring some stillness and some calm. But having no gestures alone is not very conversational. What I found from some research years ago was that when we're using gestures, we're actually going through the filing cabinets of information in our brain saying, where was that piece of inf, oh, there it is right there. So there's a connection to what we're saying. What you want from any of these three things, verbal, vocal, and visual, is for all the messages that are being sent to be the same, because the point at which they're different, now you've got an issue, now the audience is trying to figure out what's your meaning, what's your intent.

And if we spend a bit more time on what is that makes language interesting, uh why why do stories stick? Because as human beings, we are hardwired to tell stories with vivid, concrete details. Probably more importantly, our audiences are hardwired to consume, process, and recall them. So if you look at a couple of pieces of information, Susan Winschenk is a behavioral psychologist. She wrote the book "100 Things That Every Presenter Needs to Know About People." Number six on her list was people process information best in story form. "Made to Stick" is a book that we love, we've worked with the authors Chip and Dan Heath years ago, we learned a lot from them, they're great partners. And what they clearly illustrate through their book from cover to cover is that stories are the most memorable form of storytelling.

So our objective as narrators, as presenters, is to be meaningful in the moment and more memorable afterwards. So if at your next presentation you want to give yourself the best chance of success for grabbing and hooking your audience and saying something that is memorable and recallable later on, take the most important thing you're trying to get across in that presentation and wrap a story around it that says that thing, and that way you're delivering a message but in a way that's much more human.

And how do you make a story interesting and memorable? What are the features that we need to have in there? Concrete, vivid details. That's the case whether you are using a customer example, whether you're using an imagine scenario, a backstory, an origin story, an analogy, or a metaphor. It's about having the right balance of concrete, vivid details, and the best place to start is back in the newsroom, so back to journalism 101. What does that actually look like?

So let's imagine you're going to give me your best example of what you do at your organization, Nikolai, and to illustrate that you're gonna say, let me just give you one example of what that looks like. And you're going to tell me a story about one of the companies that you work with, invest in, whatever the case might be. I want to start in the preparation process at the very least with the five ws of Journalism. Use those to build the scaffolding of the story, who was it, when was it, where was it, why did it matter to their business or your business, what actually happened, what were the results of them?

When you start populating in the preparation with those concrete details, you're actually on a path to getting something that I can put in my head and I can process. Then you can start looking for what are the stories inside the story, what's the meaning of that, what that's a key point. There was actually a a funny moment in a movie "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" years ago where Steve Martin was yelling at John Candy and he said, you're constantly telling these stories, but they have no details in them. You know, here's an idea, when you tell a story, have a point, it makes it so much more interesting for the listener, you know, and it's funny, but it's true. What's the point of the story? How does it illustrate and why does it matter to me? And what are the elements that I would need to know about to engage a little bit further?

How much do you paint out the story? Just how much do you drag it out? Oh, that's a great question. I'm not sure if there's any one number. I've seen some great stories that are really short and tight, you know, 30 seconds or less. I've also seen some that might stretch to two minutes. You got to know what you're asking of your audience and you've got to make sure that that story doesn't drag on. That's why it's good to have not just a coach potentially, but to practice in front of other people. That story it's dragging on way too long, or it's really missing the point. But I would say anywhere from you know, an actual dive into an individual story, if you're looking 30 seconds to two minutes, you're probably in the right ballpark.

Is there a a danger that we are dumbing down things? Uh I mean, you you were talking about dumbing down in your book, how should we look at this? Yeah, I'm not big enough to categorize many things as fighting words, but that about does it for me. Dumbing it down, it's I find it to be really frustrating phrase because first and foremost, it belittles the hard work that it takes to make something clear that is actually complex to do or to understand. It takes a ton of work. And so to me, the dumbing down is leading provider, Mission critical, seamless, the stuff that you could just show up and throw up right now. It's it's a lazier form of communication, and I don't know that there's a ton of meaning in it.

I think that one person I look to for all of this is a particular hero of mine from the communication standpoint is Richard Fan, the great physicist who won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Quantum electrodynamics. He was a professor at Caltech, he's the inventor of nanotechnology in Quantum Computing. He was a tremendous Storyteller, use of imagine he was probably the master of analogies to first understand something new and then to communicate it to others. He used those techniques to make his ideas and his expertise and his knowledge more accessible to more people. No one ever accused of dumbing things down, and his nickname interestingly enough was the great explainer, not the great scientist or physicist or mind or inventor, the great explainer, because we revered him for his ability to make complex things crystal clear.

It's so interesting because supposedly PhD dissertations are just becoming more and more complicated, less and less uh possible to understand, and yet somebody like that is doing the exact opposite. I think we all fall into this. I think Chip and Dan Heath have the best line in history when they called it the curse of knowledge. We know so much about what we know about our area of expertise, our subject, our product, our business that we almost forget what it's like to not have that same level of interest or expertise in that topic, and that Gap can make us bad communicators.

You were talking about science and dissertations and things. There's actually an interesting study done in 2020 by two researchers at the National Research Institute in Palanza, Italy, and they were trying to quantify, put some numbers to this soft skill of communication. And so they looked at 100, no, 21,000 uh scientific manuscripts in cave science over a 30-year period, and they were trying to determine the correlation between the amount of jargon used in a manuscript title, abstract, or full document with the number of citations that it received from peers and others in the scientific Community. The manuscript is a communication to tool, the citation of course is the way that you drum up awareness and funding. The Tipping Point for the amount of jargon and the success of that document with citations was 1%. So those documents that in their title, abstract, or full manuscript used more than 1% of jargon, the citations dropped precipitously, and the highest ranked, highest cited works used less than 1% of jargon in the entire document, if any jargon at all. So the jargon stood between a potentially great idea and its audience. That's scary, that's very scary.

Andy, why do you hate PowerPoints? That's very direct. I think we were probably that direct in our book. I don't hate PowerPoint. I think our audiences sometimes hate the way we use it. It does serve as a crutch far too often. It stands in the way. People might read what's on the screen. Here's a couple of Statistics from 2003. Microsoft said that 30 million PowerPoint presentations were delivered or every single day. That's terrifying. Now I don't know what the stat is in 2025, but I can guarantee it's not any less than that.

The average slide has 40 words on it. We can read three times faster than we can speak. So if you put 40 words up on a slide, I'm on the 40th word reading it while you're on the 13th word talking it through. Now the soundt track is off, and I'm not just going to wait for you to catch up to me each time. So there's just a number of complications for poor PowerPoint hygiene. I think the main thing that you could do is not to eliminate PowerPoint or not to say I hate it and I should never use it, it's to think about the process.

So the starting point is when we should eliminate PowerPoint, start out loud, start on camera, start with your knowledge, talking it out. The challenge becomes when people start in PowerPoint and they put all that information and graphs and diagrams and words and bullet points on 47 slides, and then they come back to the first one and say, now what am I going to say to this slide? You're in The Hurt Locker at that point. The PowerPoint is dictating The Narrative, you're talking to it, it's dragging you along, it's got you in control. That's the opposite of what we want to have on game day.

So if you want to inject PowerPoint or visuals into your presentation, and that can be very helpful, there are visual Learners, visual thinkers, if it supports your narrative, great. The things that support a verbal narrative are things like a picture, a number, maybe five words or less.

How many slides should a PowerPoint presentation have? Great question. I think the challenge comes into how many overall slides versus how much information on each slide. I would much rather have a 20 slide presentation with one thought per slide, one idea per slide, slide versus six slides with 20 slides of information jammed into it. So for me, it's less about the total number, although that is has to enter into the equation, and it's more about how much is on each slide or each visual.

But this you notice we're we're already right now we're trapped in this concept of slides are the only presentation visual that could be there. Plenty of other things. First and foremost, you are the visual, so it's got to start with you and what you look like when you're saying it. But then there are are physical props, there are whiteboards, there are flip charts, there's many other things that you can use to visually uh Aid a strong verbal narrative.

Why is the font size so important? Very simply, because the larger the font size, the less stuff you can put on a slide. But I also saw uh uh the larger the font size, the more credible you become, the more people actually believe in your message and believe and believe it's more truthful. I thought I think that's so interesting. That is fascinating. There are all these little pieces of of brain science and brain behavior that that pop up. I think that's the coolest thing about being a presentation coach today is that the science is finally catching up to the art of communication. We're learning a whole lot more about how our audiences consume, process, and recall information just by human cognitive behavior, and so we should take as much of that that is fully sourced and referenced and consider it as we're preparing and delivering presentations.

And you suggest we have like a detox away from PowerPoint, like 30 days without PowerPoints. How how do you think that how does it work? I'm a big fan of any forcing function that helps us ultimately get better at communication. Hiring a a coach is like hiring a personal trainer for Fitness. You should see them often, you should always have a workout, you should get playback and coaching and critique and do another rep. It's about getting the rep in the gym, getting to a point where we're at our very best self as a presenter. Sometimes takes us to strip it back to a pretty raw workout. So it can be things like get rid of the PowerPoint, prepare in a different way. When you present, don't use PowerPoint, see what that does to your presenter. I bet you it will make people practice more, prepare harder, and they will be better, more conversational at that presentation. They'll probably also be a lot more concise. That's the first thing.

The other kind of detox is is back to jargon. My son went to a school uh an elementary school for dyslexic children, and in third grade, they got to the stage where they had already decoded language, started to recode it, they're reading more fluently, making a lot of progress there. Now we had to become writers. So in his composition class, learning to construct sentences, use language punctuation, grammar, Lisa Lville was the teacher there, and I walked into that third grade class class Once Upon a Time and noticed on her whiteboard a list of words, and the title of the list of words was words we shall not use. And for a bunch of third grade dyslexic children, it was cool and good and neat and different words like that, because they were easy, they were lazy, they could go right to them, and they were used far too often, and we almost removed the meaning from those words. So these are words we're not going to use in our sentences anymore. There's a bigger broader language, let's let's learn some greater Vo vocabulary that can be more precise and more descriptive. I've actually worked with sales teams in the past where we created the list of words we shall not use in sales calls because it's too easy, it's too common, it's too much like everybody else, and we were exploring different words that could be more descriptive and more illustrative of what they do.

What's the best uh presentation you ever seen? I can't limit it down to just one. I me I will tell you that I think Julie Swe at Centure is one of if not the best business communicators going right now. She has got such command and Poise, she tells stories, she sign posts often, uh for example, she might say so over the next 10 minutes, I'm going to talk about two things, and so the audience will always know where they are in that conversation or presentation.

One of the ones that I like to site though is probably somebody you've never heard of and maybe a company you've never heard of. It's a small distributor of indirect materials, it's a company called MSC Industrial Supply. And Eric Gerswin was the CEO when I started working with him, he still is a CEO today, and he was given the keynote address or a keynote address at ARBA Live in 2015. And he had never given an external presentation before, never been on a stage. The only thing he had done to present, and it is a different form of pres presentation, a sales pitch, a customer meeting, maybe a town hall at work, but never on a stage in front of the big lights, in front of 3,000 Chief procurement officers.

And so the amount of work that Eric Gerswin put into his narrative was 60 to 90 days of incredible narrative preparation, trying to find what's my lead, what's my summarization, what's my story that I can use to illustrate it, what are the different chapters of the body of the talk so that the audience will always know where they are, and I can illustrate different ways of making this progress happen. And I tuck in each of those chapters maybe an example of a customer who's doing this well, an anecdote of time where something a revelation I had. It was a tremendous talk. And he walked off stage after this first presentation, and the first person backstage said to him, man, that was a TED Talk for procurement.

So with his chest bowed up and you know his shoulders uh back, he walked to the ARBA trade show floor, stood at the MSC booth, and one Chief procurement officer after another from the audience walked up to him and said, yep, you got to help me clean up the attic. That was directly from his featured story to illustrate his main point about the difference between the garage and the attic. It's a tremendous example of somebody owning the moment and all of the work that it takes to get to that moment where they look like on stage that they're just making it happen, it's just at ease, it's effortless, they're almost looking like they're just winging it, but there's so much preparation that goes into that.

And the coolest part is the last thing I'll say, the coolest part was months later, it was some random day to me, and I get an email from the head of marketing at MSC Industrial Supply, and attached to it is a video. And inside the video, when I open it up, it's nine-year-old Jake Gershwin, Eric's one of his sons, and it's bringing your kids to workday at MSC. And somebody put a camera in Jake's face and they said, go. And he said, this, you can't fix what you can't see. Did you know that today there's $145 billion dollar of indirect materials inside of your companies, and 100 and 70% will never be used? That's 100 bill ion Dollar in waste. And he's giving his dad's presentation darn near word for word out loud. He knows it verba him because he heard his dad practicing it for weeks upon weeks out loud at home behind the scenes. That's what it takes.

So Andy, if that's where we want to get to, um what advice would you have for young people or students who want to become the best communicators in the world? Tap into your inner journalist. That journalism mindset is really important because it's a starting point. Point what is my topic? Okay, what's the point? Why would my audience care about it? Something we call the so what, who cares test? What does it mean to them? Why would they care? If I had to say it in one sentence, what would it be? In a nutshell, here's the point. Go hunt for their story that illustrates that point from with inside the business that says why it matters, why we should do more of it, what it looks like when it's good.

Think about the different things that you're going to ask of your audience or recommend that they do on those signposted sections, what are the two things that we need to do to make this happen? There are three benefits of this or two outcomes that we can guarantee. So think about it from the most important information down to the least important information. What I just drew there was the thing that the journalist uses every day called the inverted pyramid. It's a way of organizing all of your information from your audience or your customer or your reader down, so it's most important to least important.

That's one of the things I would think about. The second thing is that's the preparation. Do more practicing out loud. This is about internalizing, not memorizing, and the way to do that is get some reps going. Stand up and present it to a video camera, if you don't have that, to a mirror, into your memo app on your phone. Listen to it back when you're driving the car to work and back, walking the dog. You've got time to practice this, so you're just kind of baking it in.

Well Andy, you have painted this is uh out very loud and clearly uh a big thank you for uh for helping us and um look forward to staying in touch and big thanks for taking the time today. Thanks so much Nikolai. Thanks.