25. Session with Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

Source:simplyamazingtraining.co.uk

On 19^th of October 2019, the students of School of Communications and Reputations got the opportunity to interact with Shashidhar Nanjudaiah. Shashidhar Nanjundaiah is the Chief Storytelling Officer at Enzen Global Solutions and has an experience of more than two decades. The session was one of our first sessions on storytelling and was greatly insightful in many ways.

Shashidhar Nanjudaiah began his session by stressing on the fact that times have changed since the first Industrial Revolution. In the 18^th century, Man was considered as an economic being and was synonymous with a machine. Nanjudaiah cited the example of Frankenstein’s monster to discuss the bleak situation of medieval times. Today, we are in the age of Industry 4.0, where human beings are considered as valuable assets that cannot be replaced by machines. We are shifting to a humanistic form of industry. We live in the age of communication and in some ways, in the age of hyper-communication.

In the 21^st century, the Chief Content Officer is playing an important role in every organization. These Content officers are content creators and storytellers. However, Nanjudaiah also points out that although storytelling and content can be mixed each other, all content is not storytelling. Every PR professional should have good content skills, because in this age, content is written for an audience who you may never see. In a way, you are writing content for everyone except YOU! PR firms need to better understand the values that its clients stands for.

According to Shashidhar Nanjudaiah, storytelling is all about external, persuasive form of communication. A story needs to be persuasive. An important point raised here was the difference between expression and storytelling. Stories needs to be persuasive, expressions may not be. Storytelling is also not a sales strategy. Stories are all around us and constructing a story is the result of finding one.

We live in the age of visuals, and storytelling helps one to visualize. A story is a way people internalize someone else’s experience and carry it forward. Here, Shashidhar talks about his definition of storytelling, which goes by, “Storytelling is a transport of audiences to help them make meanings”. In this way, storytelling is not the channel, it is a process. The process involves the sender and the receiver, the journey of the message to become a meaning.

Shashidhar Nanjudaiah briefly talks about the contours of corporate storytelling, which can be divided as:

·       Persuasive Message

·       Non-fictional

·       Aligns with organization

·       Has outcomes

In storytelling, framing is important, and this should be considered as the first step. The second step to storytelling is utilizing the STAR technique, which stands for Situation, Task, Action and Result. There are various tools of storytelling: Allegories, Metaphors, Symbols, Irony and Drama, and utilizing these tools can help to gain the audience’s attention. Below I list the five tool process of storytelling:

Audience:  The target audience which will relate to the story

Message: In one sentence

Relatability: How the story relates to the audience

Intrigue: Everything and anything that catches a person’s attention

Takeaway: The meaning that the audience is attributing to the story

These five steps are known as AMRIT.

Shashidhar Nanjudaiah concludes by pointing out that stories are often ordinary, which are made to look extraordinary. Stories need not be extraordinary, ordinary stories can be extraordinary too!