In this new article you’ll learn how to use storytelling in presentations.
Think about the last presentation you sat through. Now try to repeat three of its slides. Hard, isn’t it? Most people can’t, and it’s rarely because the speaker was bad. A deck of bullet points just gives memory nothing to grab.
A story does. It gives listeners someone to follow, something at stake and an ending they want to reach. That’s why storytelling in presentations shows up in so much advice, and also why so much of that advice is vague. “Be authentic.” “Share your journey.” Fine, but what do you actually do on Tuesday morning when the quarterly review is due at ten?
This guide is built for that Tuesday. You’ll find eleven practical moves, tied to research where research exists, each with a small action you can try without rebuilding your whole deck. There’s also a section on what to do when a story wobbles in front of a real audience. It will, sooner or later.
1. Pick the point before you pick the story
Most weak stories in presentations fail before the speaker says a word. The anecdote was fun, so it went in, and now the audience is wondering why it’s there.
Flip the order. Write down the one thing people should believe or do when you sit down, in a single sentence. Only then go looking for a story that proves exactly that and nothing else.
This matters because a story is a vehicle, and a vehicle with no destination is just noise. Listeners will hunt for the connection. If they can’t find it, they spend the next minute of your talk still hunting, and you’ve lost them without anyone leaving the room.
Here’s a quick test. Finish the sentence “I’m telling this because…” If the honest ending is “it’s funny,” the story isn’t ready. If it’s “it shows why we should move the launch to March,” you’re in business. The same discipline sits behind being more organized at work: you decide what the finished thing must do before you start building it.
Your move: write your takeaway on a sticky note and stick it to the edge of your screen while you build the deck.
2. Open with a scene, not an agenda
Nobody in history has leaned forward at a slide that says “Today’s agenda.” Start inside a specific moment instead.
Say you’re presenting a support overhaul. You could open with “Today I’ll cover response times, staffing and tooling.” Or you could open with “It’s 4:47 on a Friday, and a customer has been on hold for 38 minutes.” Same talk. Very different room.
There’s some science behind the pull of a good opening, though it deserves a careful reading. In a 2010 study, Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert and Uri Hasson scanned the brain of a woman telling a 15-minute story, then scanned listeners hearing it. The listeners’ brain activity mirrored hers with a short delay, and the closer the match, the better they understood the story afterwards. When people couldn’t follow the language, the match disappeared. It was one speaker and one story, and nobody compared it with a bullet-point talk, so don’t treat it as proof that stories beat slides. It does suggest that understanding is something two brains do together.
Then there’s Melanie Green and Timothy Brock (2000), who found that readers who got more absorbed in a narrative ended up holding beliefs closer to the story’s. Whether the text was labeled fact or fiction made no difference to how absorbed they got.
Think of your first minute as a kind of small talk with a purpose: warm, specific, low risk.
Give it a go: rewrite your opening line so it contains a time, a place and a person.
3. Give the story a person
“Customers” don’t feel anything. A customer named Dana, calling for the third time about the same invoice, does.
The classic evidence here comes from Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic (2007). People leaving an unrelated experiment were offered the chance to give up to five dollars of their earnings to Save the Children. Those who read about one named child, Rokia, gave more than those who read statistics about a food crisis affecting millions. Researchers call this the identifiable victim effect.
Now the honest part. A 2024 replication attempt by Maier and colleagues found no support for the effect. So I’d treat it as a strong hunch, not a law. It fits with what most presenters notice anyway: one face holds attention better than a total. Still, test it on your own audience before you build an entire keynote on it.
A few practical notes. Change names and identifying details if the person hasn’t agreed to be in your talk. Keep the cast small, because two or three characters is plenty in ten minutes. And pick someone your audience could plausibly be.
Find the single customer, colleague or patient hiding behind your biggest number, and open the section with them.
4. Show the gap between what is and what could be
A story runs on tension, and tension needs a gap. Where we are on one side, where we could be on the other.
Nancy Duarte built a whole book on this. For Resonate (2010), she spent two years studying screenwriting, mythology and literature alongside the thousands of presentations her firm had produced, then tested her presentation form against Steve Jobs’s 2007 iPhone launch and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Both fit. The pattern she describes moves back and forth between the audience’s current reality and a better possibility, and it keeps doing that until the end.
Why does it work? Because a talk with no gap is a report. People can read a report on their own, at double speed, in their pajamas. What they can’t do alone is feel the distance between today and tomorrow, and that distance is your job.
In a business setting, “what is” might be a clunky approval process that costs everyone two weeks. “What could be” is the same process in two days. Don’t state the first once and the second once. Swap between them, a little more hopeful each time.
Start small: draw two columns on a sheet of paper, write five lines under each, and plan your talk so it alternates between them instead of finishing one column before the other.
5. Let something go wrong
A story where everything goes smoothly isn’t a story. It’s an announcement.
Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist, described his lab’s work in Cerebrum in 2015. Participants watched a short film about a father and his terminally ill young son, Ben, which followed a classic dramatic arc of rising tension, a peak and a resolution. That version raised levels of cortisol and oxytocin. A flat version, with Ben and his dad just spending a day at the zoo, did not, and viewers reported no particular feeling for the characters. In a separate experiment, people given synthetic oxytocin donated 56 percent more to charity after watching story-based public service announcements than those given a placebo.
I’d read this with some caution, since much of the work comes from one lab and the chemistry of empathy is messier than a headline suggests. But the practical lesson holds up regardless: audiences respond to struggle.
So look for the bad moment. Not a disaster, necessarily. “Our migration went well” tells nobody anything. “On day two, the database refused to move” gets people sitting up, and what you did next is the part they’ll remember.
A quick experiment: take your best story and write its worst moment in one sentence. If you can’t find one, you may have picked the wrong story.
6. Pair every statistic with something human-sized
Stories don’t replace numbers. They carry them.
A bare statistic floats. “Thirty percent of tickets get reopened” is true and forgettable. “About one in three people calls back because we didn’t fix it the first time” is the same fact, only now you can see the people. Then add a person, if you have one. Dana again, on her third call.
None of this works if the number itself is shaky, which is where a bit of research discipline pays off. Check where a figure came from and what year it’s from, and say so on the slide. Audiences notice when a statistic has no source, and they notice faster when it’s wrong. I’d rather show one verified number with a clear story attached than five impressive ones nobody can trace.
You also don’t need a chart for every point. One well-chosen figure, translated into plain speech and tied to a face, beats a dense slide that everyone is squinting at.
Pick the one number your talk can’t live without, then say it twice: once as a figure, once as a sentence a ten-year-old would understand.
7. Get concrete
Abstract words slide off. “Operational efficiency.” “Stakeholder alignment.” Your listeners nod politely, and an hour later none of it is there.
Chip and Dan Heath, in Made to Stick (2007), argue that ideas survive when they’re simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and told as stories. Concrete is the one presenters skip most often, because abstract language feels professional. It also leaves nothing for the mind to picture.
Older memory research points the same way. In 1969, Gordon Bower and Michael Clark had students build stories around lists of ten unrelated nouns. According to Bower’s obituary in The New York Times, the story-builders later recalled about seven times as many words as students who simply tried to memorize them. Later experiments haven’t always reproduced a gap that large, so take the number as a headline rather than a promise. The direction, though, matches what anyone who has tried to improve their memory already knows: a vivid sequence beats a pile of facts.
Next time, do this: scan your slides, find one abstract noun on each, and replace it with something you could photograph. “Cost reduction” becomes “the 400 hours the team stopped spending on manual reports.”
8. Tell the story where you got it wrong
Success stories make you look good. Failure stories make you believable.
A speaker who says “here’s what I got wrong, and what it cost” is handing the audience something rare. It signals that the rest of what you say has been through some scrutiny. It also gives people permission to stop performing, which is half of why they relax.
This only works if it’s real. A fake flaw, the kind that’s secretly a brag (“my biggest weakness is caring too much”), gets spotted instantly and does more damage than silence. Pick a mistake with an actual cost, name your part in it without a pile of excuses, and say what changed. That’s essentially the same skill as taking responsibility for your actions, just done in public, and it’s the habit that separates a good boss from one people nod at and avoid.
Keep it proportionate, too. Thirty seconds of ownership is a story. Five minutes of self-flagellation is a different kind of talk, and probably not the one you were booked for.
Test it this week: choose one real misstep from the past year and sketch it as three beats, what you expected, what happened, what you’d do now.
9. Use humor sparingly, and aim it at yourself
A laugh in the right place does something slides can’t. It resets attention and tells the room you’re a person.
The safest target is you. A light line about your own overconfidence, your terrible first draft, the time the demo crashed on its first run. (Only use the ones that actually happened.) Jokes that rely on a group of people, a competitor’s expense or an in-joke half the room doesn’t share tend to cost you more than they earn.
There’s no need to be funny in the stand-up sense. Humor in a presentation works more like seasoning, and a good sense of humor usually shows up as observation, not as punchlines. If something struck you as ridiculous while you were living the story, it’ll probably strike the audience the same way.
Don’t stack jokes either. One light moment early, one near the middle, and you’re done. Anything more and the room starts waiting for the next one instead of listening to you.
Here’s a simple way in: look through your story for the moment you felt most embarrassed or most surprised, and let one honest sentence about it stand as your joke.
10. Watch the room
A story told to a screen is just reading out loud. The best presenters seem to tell the story to the people in front of them, and they change it as they go.
That takes some attention. Are eyes up or down? Is anyone leaning in? Did the laugh you planned just get a polite exhale instead? Reading those signals is a form of emotional intelligence, and like most of it, it improves with practice rather than talent.
Build in flexibility so you have something to adjust. Prepare each story in two sizes: a thirty-second version for when time is tight or the room is restless, and a two-minute version for when people are clearly with you. Both should carry the same point and the same turn. You simply decide mid-sentence which one you’re telling.
It helps to think of a presentation as a conversation where one person happens to talk more. The habits behind having a good conversation, such as noticing, pausing and responding to what you’re hearing, carry over directly.
Before your next talk, write the short and long versions of your main story side by side, so cutting mid-flow feels like a choice and not a panic.
11. Rehearse the story, not the slides
Most people rehearse by clicking through slides and murmuring. That practices the clicking.
A story needs to be told out loud, to somebody, without the deck. Find a friend or a colleague, or talk to a phone propped against a mug. Notice where you ramble and where you rush the best part. Then tell it again. You aren’t memorizing a script here. You’re learning the shape well enough that your own words show up without effort, which is also when you get closest to that absorbed state people call flow.
Pay attention to pacing. A pause before the turning point gives it room. Slowing down on the one detail that matters tells people where to look. And the thing people usually call charisma is, in my view, mostly this: someone who clearly knows what they’re saying, and isn’t hurrying to get it over with.
One rehearsal trick: tell the story in sixty seconds, then in three minutes, then in sixty again. By the second short version you’ll know which details you can’t cut.
What to do when a story falls flat
It happens to everyone. You lose the thread. You forget the name of the town. Somebody checks their phone during your best line, and then somebody else does.
First, don’t panic out loud. The audience usually knows far less than you think about what you meant to say. If you’ve skipped a detail, you can often slide past it without comment. If it’s essential, say “let me back up” and fix it in one sentence. That’s honest, and it’s human.
If the story just isn’t landing, cut to the point. “The short version is this: we moved the date, and it saved the project.” Then keep going. Nothing in a talk is sacred, and an audience will forgive a trimmed story far faster than one that drags.
Another useful move is to turn a stall into a question. “Has anyone here been through something like this?” gives the room a job and gives you ten seconds to breathe.
Afterwards, resist replaying it for the rest of the day. Write down one thing to change, and one thing that worked. That’s the entire review. If the rest of your day starts to sour, a few of these steps for turning a bad day around are worth keeping handy.
Start with one story
You don’t need all eleven of these at once. Pick the one that scares you least and use it in your next meeting, even a small one. A single scene in your opening. One named person behind a number. A mistake you’re willing to own.
Presentations are one of the few places where a few minutes of preparation can change how a room feels, and that’s rarely true of other work tasks. You’ll find more practical guides like this in the Work section of Perfect 24 Hours.
Now go and find your story. It’s probably already in your calendar.
