At first, I didn’t have the tools to build great narratives and I screwed up quite a few conversations as a result. Making your ideas engaging wasn’t something taught in my business schools, nor at my first strategy firm, AT Kearney. The way we adopted PowerPoint didn’t help much either. So, I decided to explore communication, psychology, coaching, and design. I built an approach that provides a logical and structured pathway to storytelling for high-stakes presentations. In 2016, I created MetaHelm to make this method available to you. And in doing so, I decided to add a new chapter to my own story.

We need more persuasion. Presentation coaching is commonly but wrongly paired with PowerPoint slides only. This view is only the tip of the iceberg. Engaging in a rigorous and deeper presentation process should trigger better thinking, more conversations, more alignment and ultimately more impact. In my process, we talk about business goals, strategy, story, and structure first. We sketch a lot because it’s faster and eliminates room for ambiguity. All that, way before we even think about building slides.

Storytelling used to be mostly for Marketing. Today, we are in a global idea economy, and your narrative has the power to shape everyone’s mind, from your investors to your customer service team. I’ve seen so many business initiatives stall when leaders didn’t invest in crafting a strategic story that everybody gets, and that everybody believes in. Flip that and people achieve incredible goals.