Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Are You Telling Stories or Just Reciting Facts? Part 2: What’s a Good Story?


What’s a Good Story?

 

“You need a search capability, we provide that capability with a range of filters, enabling you to find the information you need.” Boring, insufficient, and this “pain, features, value” structure is definitely not a story that will be remembered.

 

There needs to be more to make it a compelling, resonating story that gets remembered and retold.

 

Chip and Dan Heath in their seminal work on storytelling, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, identified five key attributes to make a story successfully sticky:

 

Simple Message:         The concept or message needs to be clear and easy to understand

Real Experience:         It must be believable and perceived as being true 

Element of Surprise:   An unexpected twist, event or outcome generates interest and tension

Evokes Emotion:          The best stories are those that generate an emotional response 

Relevant:                     Good stories relate directly to the subject or key point

 

The “pain, features, value” structure may satisfy three of these five, but ignores two. 

 

Is there an element of surprise? Nope. Does that structure evoke an emotional response? Hardly. And these two missing elements provide much of the drive that makes a story memorable.

 

Triggering our emotions is what makes a story great and unforgettable. For example:

 

-       Empathy: “I’ve also been in this position!”

-       Shock: “OMG – that’s terrible!”

-       Surprise: “Oh no! What happened next?”

-       Humorous: “Well, that’s sad, but also very funny!”

-       Cleverness: “Oh wow, that’s a really elegant solution!”

 

Evaluate the stories you currently use: How many of these five attributes do they trigger?

 

Intrigued? See the full article on our website here! 

https://greatdemo.com/effective-storytelling-in-discovery-demos-and-more-a-never-stop-learning-article/ 

 

You’ll find 35 delightful examples to draw from in “Suspending Disbelief”:

https://tinyurl.com/yc7rsrmy 

 

And see “Storytelling” in “Great Demo!” for more on this important practice here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/

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