We love networking and stay connected with executives in different industries. It was an honor to share a moment with Marcos Xalabarder and talk about Agile Storytelling and techniques to deliver better presentations.
We have an article about Storytelling in Business and a podcast episode with our CEO, Pablo Povarchik, sharing insights about it.
Marcos Xalabarder is a well-known Prezi Expert from Spain who specializes in visual thinking and agile storytelling.
He does storytelling mentoring for major companies, especially in Spain and Europe, and evolved from being a Prezi Expert to become a “Story Angel.”
We had the chance to exchange ideas and ask him a couple of questions about how to structure presentations for Agile Storytelling, and he shared three structures you could use to tell your story.
Solar System Structure
Before creating a Prezi presentation, you need to organize your thoughts to find the best way to tell your story. Marcos suggests three effective ways to structure your presentation, and the first one is the “Solar System.”
As you may know, every planet in our solar system spins around the sun. Marcos teaches that a great way to organize your thoughts is to place a central idea as the sun, which will be the main topic of your presentations, and all the other ideas will spin around it.
If you are hesitating and don’t know where to start with your presentation, contact our team, we will be happy to support you.
So, once you have your sun (main-topic), you will need to organize the other topics around it, as planets spinning around the sun. These planets will be secondary topics or sub-topics, and you can even have sub-sub-topics around the planets as moons or satellites.
The solar system structure is very hierarchical and practical for your audience to understand your main idea and its relation.
Marcos Xalabarder suggests to challenge yourself and think outside the box. You could use a small idea in your presentation and make it the main topic to see your whole story from a different perspective.
Two Scenarios
The “two scenarios structure” is a very well-known business structure. In most cases is used to present two ideas and develop a comparison between them.
Marcos mentioned that most companies use this structure to present business plans and strategies. And to show where the company is today and the future milestones.
We designed several presentations with the two scenarios structure; you can visit our portfolio with the Prezi presentations, and if you have any questions, contact us.
A comparison structure is an excellent asset if you are a visual thinker since you can present a departure and an arrival scenario with the transition in between.
3-Act Structure
Marcos affirms that dividing your story into three steps is more memorable for your audience.
The Three-Act structure consists of telling your story’s context, then the development or the growth part, as is called in storytelling, and finally the desirable outcome of your story.
A great example of the 3-Act Structure could be the Prezi presentation that we designed for Carmine Gallo, a famous speaker, business coach, and storyteller. He Prezi in one of his videos to explain the three types of business stories. You can check his video and the Prezi here.
Furthermore, Marcos developed a new concept working with storytelling, called the “Narrative Kung-Fu.” He explains that this technique is convenient when you start organizing your ideas and linking them to create your presentation.
The Narrative Kung-Fu is the ability to train yourself to tell your story in either way. So instead of taking the usual path, you could start from the end and take your audience on a journey until where you are today. It is a perfect exercise to stay nimble and adapt your presentation depending on your prospect’s interests.
We deliver storytelling consulting and presentation design; contact our team.
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