With rare exception, the greatest leaders throughout history were great storytellers. They include a young carpenter from Nazareth and a self-described “country bumpkin” born in Kentucky and raised in Illinois.

Here is a recent post by Shawn Callahan at anecdote.com. Since 2004, this website has helped leaders create and communicate strategic clarity by turning their business strategy into a story that can be told and understood by everyone, both within and beyond the company.

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We avoid PowerPoint presentations and focus people on actually learning and telling the story in their own words, supported by their own anecdotes.

Each telling is an individual expression of the strategy with a common plot and highlights so no one is left confused to what they should focus on. And the strategic story is just the start of changing behaviours to align with your strategic direction…

With so much talk about business storytelling you’d think business people were telling more stories.

Sadly we see lots of people talking about stories but very few telling them. And quite frankly, you just don’t get the benefits of storytelling unless you are telling a story.

Part of the problem is that business people lack a simple story framework to help them spot stories so they can tell the difference between a story and just a tag line, or an assertion, a viewpoint or just an out of context, unemotional, barely understandable dot point.

So here’s an infographic you can pin to your wall or save to your smart phone that gives you some simple guideposts to help you spot stories.

And once armed with this knowledge you’ll no longer be lulled into accepting any old brand story, product story, strategic story or even a strategic narrative (which of course is a type of story) unless it’s really a story.

Oral storytelling

We designed this simple story framework with oral storytelling in mind. I guess that’s because most of our work involves helping leaders tell their stories, off the cuff and without PowerPoint.

A big part of being able to tell stories is your ability to find good ones to tell. If you don’t have the ability to spot a story it’s like stamp collecting without knowing what a stamp looks like. When you rock up to the stamp show and display your collection of beer coasters you look a little foolish.

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Shawn Callahan is one of the world’s leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft, and Danone.