Stories without a clear structure are difficult to understand. Use the SCQA structure* to tailor your story to your audience, and make it accessible, engaging, urgent and ’round’.
1. Start your storyline with something your audience can picture
In the Situation, describe things that are familiar to your audience – or: describe unfamiliar things in such a way that your audience can easily and immediately picture them.
Examples:X My presentation is about patient adherence to home-based physical therapy exercise programs, which are crucial for improving physical performance and function in patients recovering from an accident.
V As a physical therapist, you work with people recovering from an accident. Under your supervision, they may determinedly lift weights and do their balancing exercises. But to fully recover, they have to continue these physical exercises at home.
2. Define an urgent problem from your audience’s perspective
In the Complication, describe the core problem, and also, specify who or what ‘suffers’ from it. Repeatedly ask yourself: ‘So what?’, to formulate why this is such an urgent issue for your audience.
Examples:X Statistics suggest that exercise adherence is low, with about 70% of the patient population failing to complete their individual program. This decreases treatment efficacy and outcomes.
V As you know, about 70% of patients don’t do these crucial exercises at home. As a result, much of the progress they made under your care is undone, and for some, you need to develop an alternative program. Patients recover only slowly, and some not at all.
3. Show your audience what hurdles need to be overcome to solve the problem
Examples:X …V Patients report that, despite their pain or disability, they lack motivation to do their exercises. They find them monotonous or confusing. Or they feel the exercises don’t make any difference.
4. Show your audience how you solve the problem and what benefits that has
Describe how the problem can be solved (or how it was solved). Show how this solution removes the hurdles. Explain who or what benefits from your solution, and how.
Examples:X Gamification encourages patient adherence to home-based physical therapy exercise programs, and significantly increases patient-relevant outcomes.
V We created an exercise app that makes the exercise program easy to understand, and more entertaining. It also makes progress visible to the individual patient, even when that progress is subtle or slow. Research shows that patients who use the game do their exercises more faithfully and that most of them recover more quickly.
5. Connect bullet points and sentences by ‘stringing’ them together
Start each bullet point with a concept that you ended the last one with. In other words, ‘string’ your bullet points together. This will make it easier for your audience to follow your reasoning, and make your story more integrated.
Examples:X As you grow older, your working memory deteriorates. Brain circuits become less well connected due to problems with two so-called theta interactions.
V As you grow older, your working memory deteriorates. Such deterioration happens because certain brain circuits become less well connected. This decreased connectivity is the result of problems with two so-called theta interactions.
More explanations and tips for ‘stringing’ here.
* The SCQA format is inspired by Barbara Minto’s book The Pyramid Principle.