Using The Power Of Stories To Transform Conference General Sessions

Joe stories

We are a story driven world.

We are each a story wrapped in a skin says Dr. Leonard Sweet. When we begin to share our journeys, our stories intersect.

Our conferences need to create more story people. We need to transition from speakers talking at audiences and experts telling their stories. We need to move from storytelling to story sharing each passing our stories and narraphors to each other like we pass food around the table.

Framing General Sessions With Important Stories

Here is the slide deck from my joint closing session with Sarah Michel at Corporate Event Marketing Association (CEMA) Summit 2015 in San Diego, CA. What you’re not seeing in this deck are the interactive questions and activities that we did with this audience to hook the importance of narraphors, frames and story sharing.

What is one challenge that meeting and event professionals face when trying to frame a narraphor for their event? What is one of your successful framing of a conference narraphors?

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2 comments
  1. Robert Hendrickson says:

    Jeff,
    Just wondering… why would you leave out the most important components supporting your point of the story? “What you’re not seeing…” is the help we need to understand. Let’s see it.

    1. Jeff Hurt says:

      ‘@Robert
      Thanks for reading and for the great question.

      First, I would posit that what you called the most important part of the post is not the most important part of the post. Too often we (myself included) are looking for the quick tip, the hints and the takeways to implement without understanding the issue underneath those tips. And when we mimic what someone else did without understanding the why, we fail at implementation. We have difficulty putting it into our own context.

      Second, this was not a post on the how. It was a post on sharing the why and the slide deck. The CEMA closing questions and activities were about increasing retention and application of what attendees learned at their conference, not other conferences. So even if we posted them, without a lot of the context and understanding of their industry, it wouldn’t make sense.

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