Most project or research result reports go like this:

• Objective: what were you trying to do?

• Approach: how did you do it?

• Results: what is the data you got?

• Conclusion: what did you find?

This is almost a chronological recording of your work. Logical, organized, exhaustive. Your peer scientist, boss,, teacher, will approve, you did the work thoroughly and got to some interesting findings.

It is not the most exciting structure though. Most novels or movies do not follow a chronological timeline. To make things more interesting, you need to take your audience through a story, which might mean breaking the logical flow a bit.

• Conclusion: what did you find?

• Objective: why was this so special, why was it never found before?

• Results: what is the (tiny) subset of all your data that proves your point?

• Approach: why was this so tricky to achieve, what hurdles did you overcome to get there?

The key to story writing in business is to pick off the questions your audience is likely to have next. The biggest one first (often surprisingly: “what are we talking about?”), which leads to the next big one (“Isn’t Google doing this already?”), which leads to the next one, (“That does not sound like a big deal to me?”), etc. etc.. The sequence of questions are different for each situation, depending on your topic and your audience.

The results upfront approach works well in business: leaving your audience guessing will just distract them. When it comes to movies, you might want to leave the plot reveal to the very end…

Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash