May 2015 - Lisa Kagan, Story Coach

Objective versus impact. Don’t get ’em twisted

Posted on May 19, 2015

Every protagonist needs an objective that is to scale. I recently worked with a fabulous university communications team that ran into a very common problem with storytelling. They started their stories with wonderful protagonists (often faculty or students doing impressive work) but by the time they drafted the objectives of those stories (what the protagonist could humanly achieve) they were thinking too big for the story. They were conflating the objective with impact. Objective and impact are different. If you…

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Story and history are not the same (for my lawyer friends)

Posted on May 12, 2015

A friend of mine, a county prosecutor, invited me to do a presentation with him about storytelling to an audience of attorneys. I learned a lot about the attorney frame of mind from him as we prepared. My big takeaway was that while they can be more skeptical than my usual nonprofit audiences, many attorneys face the same challenge—that good ol’, “I gotta tell ’em everything right from the beginning or they won’t get it!” myth. Comprehensive = Cluttered Telling…