On this episode of The Smart IT Podcast, I welcomed Katherine R. Dollar, Lead Storyteller and Content Strategist @ Moxie Blue Media, to the show.

We talked about improving communicating with others by using stories. Effectively communicating across different teams is a vital skill in today’s fast-paced and highly connected groups of teams. To get things done, you must develop greater relationships with other internal and external teammates. That requires being good at getting our ideas, thoughts, and insights across to other people in a way that they understand your meaning or intent. For IT, we have been known to communicate in such technical manners that normal users at times don’t understand us. We discussed several insightful areas, including:

• The power of a story is the ability to let one explore and relate to other people' lives and conditions that are not our own. 
• From the standpoint of vendors and solution providers, stories have the power to help companies to better position the value prop of their technology solutions to IT teams. 
• It is important to understand the mindset of your audience and what they care about to better align how to convey your message. 
• Katherine offered us the approach of defining a goal, a problem, and a plan of action to use in our communications patterns. 
• The ability to craft stories is a powerful skill we should all strive to gain and improve upon in our careers. 
• Better communication has the power to decrease the time to value for our organizations by getting things done faster. 
• In addition to story, we can make use of analogy and metaphors to get your messages across. It allows us to make our ideas relatable using something the audience already knows. 

We have an opportunity to practice with family members at home to get better at the critical skill of effectively communication ideas that are technical.

LINKS:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinedollar/

Moxie Blue Media: https://moxiebluemedia.com/

Not So Science Fiction: https://notsosciencefiction.com/

#story #storytellying #communication