How to tell a story like Malcolm Gladwell

Welcome to this blog - my aim is to make a difference to the success of your presentations. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Olivia

I bought Outliers two days ago. And though I’m familiar with many of the stories that Gladwell tells I’m still entranced. They work on the printed page and they’ll also work for you in a presentation. How does he do it?

Here’s my analysis of Gladwell’s storytelling techniques -  illustrated by Chapter Five of the book.

1. He starts with one subject

Gladwell’s book explores why certain people are exceptionally successful. We hear personal stories and detailed statistics - but Gladwell always starts with a story about one particular person.  So Chapter Five is entitled “The Three Lessons of Joe Flom”. Flom is a Jewish lawyer born in the 1930s. We get a detailed trajectory of his career from his humble beginnings to his later successes.

2. He paints word-pictures

Before he starts his story, we get a description of Joe Flom:

He is short and slightly hunched. His head is large, framed by long prominent ears, and his narrow blue eyes are hidden by oversize aviator-style glasses.

So as Gladwell tells his story, we can visualise Flom in our minds.

3. He gives us detail

He doesn’t just tell us that Joe Flom’s family was poor - he tells us:

His family moved nearly every year when he was growing up because the custom in those days was for landlords to give new tenants a month’s free rent, and without that, his family could not get by.

That detail helps us plunge into Joe Flom’s early life - you imagine yourself having to move every year just to get a month’s free rent - that’s emotive and memorable.

4. His characters speak

Gladwell doesn’t just narrate a story - he has his subjects tell the story in their own words:

“I was ungainly, awkward, a fat kid. I didn’t feel comfortable,” Flom remembers. “I was one of two kids in my class at the end of the hiring season who didn’t have a job.”

5. He makes us curious

Gladwell tells Flom’s story without revealing exactly why he’s an outlier:

“Joe Flom is an outlier. But he’s not an outlier for the reasons you might think…

Then Gladwell sets the curiosity trap:

“By the end of this chapter…we’ll see that it is possible to take the lessons of Joe Flom, apply them to the legal world of New York City, and predict the family background, age and origin of the city’s most powerful attorneys, without knowing a single additional fact about them.“

That’s compelling - Gladwell has given us a mystery and promises to unravel it for us.

6. He multiplies the story

One story or anecdote doesn’t prove anything. Gladwell muliplies the impact of his first story by delving into the lives of Flom’s cohorts -  Alexander Bickel, Mort Janklow, Ted Friedman.

And then comes the research study. He tells the story of a sociology student, Louise Farkar, who’s investigated the family trees of Jewish immigrants. Family tree after family tree shows that the parents of Jewish doctors and lawyers born in the 1930s were all in the garment trade:

Farkas’s Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.

This strategy might be familiar to you from the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath and from their blog. They call it the Micro-Macro approach. And that’s what Gladwell has done - he’s started with the story of a single person and then gradually zoomed out and shown that hundreds of people share the same story.

7. The clincher

Gladwell could have stopped there. But he adds a powerful finale to prove his point that success “arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities”. He takes a great New York law firm (”generally regarded as the finest in the world”) and one by one goes through the law firm’s founding partners to show that they all share the characteristics that have enabled them to be so successful.

This analysis has looked only at Chapter Five of Outliers. But every chapter is constructed in a similar way. Start with an individual story and then zoom out to show how the lessons from the story apply to hundreds or even thousands of others. Every story paints word-pictures, adds detail and dialogue. Gladwell’s storytelling had me turning the pages late into the night. Use the same techniques in your presentation and you’ll have the audience on the edge of their seats.

Go well with your next presentation. If you found this post useful, subscribe to my RSS feed.

The PowerPoint Revolution hasn’t gone far enough

We’re in the midst of a PowerPoint revolution as more and more people take on the ideas of Cliff Atkinson and Garr Reynolds. That’s great - countless people are being saved from death by bullet-point.

But many presenters still see PowerPoint as a visual aid, as an adjunct to their presentation. A take-it or leave-it enhancement.

Here’s my proposition - PowerPoint is your equal partner in your presentation.

The evidence

My support for this proposition comes from the theory of Dual-coding. This theory was proposed by Allan Paivio. He proposed that we have two ways of processing information - a visual channnel and a verbal channel:

Paivio’s theory is supported by many research studies which show that when both visual and verbal representations are used, people both process and remember the information more effectively.

The design of e-learning applications has close parallels to the design of presentations. They’re both about transferring information from one person to another. E-learning design principles include Paivio’s dual-coding theory. We should take it into account in our presentations too.

What does this mean?

If you decide not to use PowerPoint (or any other visual aid) in your presentation, you are potentially missing out on the learning power of the visual channel. It’s like you’re driving a Porsche at 50 Kms an hour. You’re missing out.

How to use PowerPoint to exploit the visual channel?

Check out this post on application of visual-thinking to presentations inspired by Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin.   

Other ways of exploiting the visual channel

It doesn’t always have to be PowerPoint. Here are some other ways that I’ve posted about in the past:

1. Word-pictures

You can paint word-pictures on the minds of your audience. Imagined visual images are also powerful. Research shows that imagined images also contributes to enhanced recall. So don’t forget the word-pictures.

2. The flipchart

The flipchart has been eclipsed by PowerPoint. In this post I compare presenting the same information - via PowerPoint or via the flipchart and explore the difference in impact.

Go well with your next presentation. If you found this post useful, subscribe to my RSS feed.

Don’t forget the word-pictures

Many of my previous posts have been about adding a visual element to your presentations. But you don’t have to do this literally - you can also do it by triggering images in the minds of your audience.

I first learnt this about 15 years ago when I was presenting with an overhead projector. I was telling a story about elephants. It was about how a baby elephant is trained by chaining it to a post that it can’t pull out. It strains against the post but to no avail. Eventually the baby elephant resigns itself to being chained to the post. As it grows older, it develops the strength to pull out the post - but it has the limiting belief that it can’t pull it out - so it never tries.

Half-way through the story I put a cute line-drawing of a baby elephant on the overhead. An audience-member came up to me at the end and told me that the picture of the baby elephant had spoiled it for her - because up till then she had had a picture of a real elephant in her head.

You could object that I used a line-drawing rather than a real photo and that’s why it didn’t work. And yes, that might have been part of the reason. But consider the fantastic scenes that you visualize in your head when you’re reading a great book - then you go and see the movie of the book and it’s not nearly as good.

So the lesson is you don’t need to show a slide, if you can paint pictures on the canvas of the minds of your audience. Just like you visualised the elephant.

Go well with your next presentation. If you found this post useful, subscribe to my RSS feed.