Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations

Understanding the Dependencies

Mapping the dependencies can take minutes or hours. It really depends on how well structured your content already is. The goal is not to create a final and comprehensive plan, but to understand the steps necessary and name them. (Project managers understand this activity well, but you aren't planning a project; you're creating a story with well-designed visuals.) Many visual stories are created in organizations with project teams that will already have a project plan, but now need to work out how to communicate the change the plan describes. If this is your situation, it's likely you'll have brought the activities from your plan directly into this chapter.

For many people new to creating visual stories, it can seem like a lot of effort. In some cases, they are right, and in a few minutes, you might be able to get your information down on a page and be totally happy with it.

To test your content, try constructing a sentence like this:

We are going to do HOW to change WHAT because WHY.

Make these sentences for all the relevant combinations in your content to be sure you have enough detail to make sense of the relationships. In the Personal Trainer story you might read one of the combinations as:

“We are going to run a staff training program for staff to learn new sign in procedures as a part of providing professional problem resolution.”

On the opposite page you can see how Marina has developed her thinking for the Personal Trainer story. She has ...