I was utterly forgettable
Nobody cares about your infrastructure opinions or experience without interesting stories.
Six or seven years into my career, I was invited to present a project I managed about the design, spacing, and control of driveways on a busy road in Virginia. There were probably 15 speakers and an audience of a hundred planners and engineers. I was by no means an expert on access management, so I figured several hours preparing a 20-minute slideshow for this conference was a given.
I enjoy public speaking, so the thought of being at the podium with a microphone was exciting. But I was acutely aware of my lack of experience in the industry.
My strategy was to give a clear explanation of the project: the client’s request for proposals, my team’s approach, the results of our analysis, and our recommendations. My slides would include large photos, simple graphics, and fonts that could be read from the back of a room.
After the conference session was over, a few people made a point to thank me for the presentation and commented on the slide design. That felt good, and helped me forget I couldn’t possibly have anything to offer the experts.
Later that month, I gave the exact same presentation to my office-mates as a lunch-and-learn. Only a few of us in the room worked in transportation. During the Q&A, someone asked me a question that made me feel like I belonged at the kiddie table. “At the conference, what was the point of your presentation?” I just gave this polished slideshow, and someone who doesn’t even work in transportation is wondering why my peers should care?!
I gave some sort of answer about company brand recognition and making the client look good. I don’t know how long I took to answer, but I probably used too many words and lost the point of the question.
Days later I was talking with a mentor about more conference opportunities. He asked what I hoped to accomplish by attending. When I clarified that I wanted to participate by speaking, he pressed again. “What do you hope to accomplish by speaking?”
He wasn’t judging me or challenging my speaking abilities. It was a basic business decision: if your employer sends you to speak, what is the return on their investment?
And the memory of the access management presentation came rushing back. I had given a presentation with confidence, quality material, and it was utterly forgettable. Why should anyone remember my “successful” planning study for an important client? They shouldn’t. I gave a technical presentation that could be filed alongside thousands of other similar presentations.
You work in a technical and complex industry, and there’s no reason your neighbor, mate, or even potential client should care about it.
Tom Cruise’s character in Mission: Impossible 3 hid in plain sight as a traffic engineer for the Virginia Department of Transportation. Even in his faked excitement during a dinner party, nobody wanted to hear about highway congestion and travel patterns.
When you’re honest about your project pipeline, what’s keeping your company in business? Is it because your work is no worse than the competition? Is it because you’re one of the handful of companies local clients rotate through? Is it because you submit so many proposals that the numbers game suggests you’ll win eventually?
We boring industry types don’t have to just get by. It’s possible to be so memorable that clients and teaming partners clamor to work with you. The challenge is making an industry impact requires selling, a skill most of us were taught to leave to others.
Consumer product brands understand the need to sell without sounding salesy. Consumers want to buy products, services, and information, but they want to trust the seller has the best product or service for the price.
The same principle is true for professional services like architecture, engineering, and planning.
Planners are more than map-makers and code writers. They sell great community design.
Engineers are more than implementers of asphalt templates. They sell streets that accommodate strollers, pedalers, and drivers.
Architects are more than dreamers of magnificent skylines. They sell places that curate and display art, where merchants sell groceries, and where people gather to worship.
Anyone working in a boring industry needs to share stories that relate with our audiences to build trust and prove expertise without sounding elite or condescending.
Get the right story in the right format to the right audience, and business will blossom.
Decades ago, you didn’t have to worry about this because your company employed a business development team. Now you work under a “seller-doer” model. You are both specialist and storyteller.
I have some encouraging news after teaching thousands of people like you in dozens of courses, workshops, and webinars. Few people in your industry are putting storytelling into practice. You may feel like you’re the last to learn a new skill, but you can make an immediate impression. Clients will turn away from the piles of industry mediocrity and fix their gaze on you.
Here’s a quick lesson to jumpstart your storytelling efforts.
If you remember one thing, let it be three things: hero, conflict, and resolution. Those are the three elements of a story.
The hero is a sympathetic focal point. It’s the person we hope succeeds, or the project we hope is approved and built. If “hero” is too dramatic for you, use “subject” instead. Please don't get wrapped up in these terms. I'm using the word hero because I think it's helpful. But if that makes you roll your eyes, then go ahead and insert the word subject.
Consider one of my favorite people in the world - the bike share operator. Perhaps you’re writing a blog post about challenges facing bike share in your county. You want readers to think positively about the operator. Make her relatable. Make her sympathetic. Relate to the car owner who wants the freedom to use sturdy bicycles for short trips.
Conflict is how the hero gets into trouble. And please, get in trouble. If nothing happens to your sympathetic focal point, then no one's really going to care about the story. Describe the trouble. If something can go wrong, it will. This is the bulk of your story. No matter how long or short your story is, the conflict is going to take up the most space.
Maybe the new bike share operation is losing business. Ridership is down and they can’t find local sponsors. Your narrative might include a policy debate about helmet laws, street conditions, and bike share station locations. Obstacles are real - spend time articulating each of them, raising the stakes for your hero.
Things get better in the end. There will be exceptions to this resolution, but if you’re selling professional services, most of your stories should end with a clear improvement. If you're documenting something that already happened and it has a happy ending, great. If not, then what would make the situation improve? How could the project or policy be changed to better serve the public interest?
In the bike share example, maybe the mandatory helmet law is overturned, and momentum builds for a robust bicycling network. The county shifts its budget priorities to align with its safe streets policy statements.
Storytelling is the key to your proposals, interview presentations, webinars, website material, and whatever else you’re churning out. The key to storytelling is hero, conflict, and resolution.