Storytelling best practices for architects: use Bizzdesign Coach to build better stories
Mar 2, 2022
Architects are typically professional at creating designs, analyses and plans that set their audiences in motion. However, to captivate your audiences, it’s important to create appealing visuals to convey a key message successfully. Yet, if your visuals are not presented with adequate context and structure, the impact of your message is limited at best.
Storytelling has been a buzzword in business for over a decade. Many methods and tools are available to tell impactful stories in business with data. The aim is to set an audience into motion. What does this mean? Because of the information you share, people change their minds and possibly their actions.
With our enterprise architecture platform, Bizzdesign Horizzon, architects can create great content or simple and fun stories. To provide better support for this, we’ve created a new version of the Bizzdesign Coach view which is also interactive (clickable) in Bizzdesign Horizzon.
Bizzdesign Coach is a specific view available in ArchiMate® models to promote standardized working and reporting, aiming to improve communication of high-impact content and collaboration between various stakeholders. Users are guided through content in Bizzdesign Horizzon, which makes the platform an enterprise architecture methodology tool, and a storytelling tool for reporting diagrams.
Create flow in your stories
Bizzdesign Coach helps you craft your story to achieve a good ‘flow’ of the information you’re presenting. This means that your story follows a clear pattern that invites the reader to continue following the storyline, eager to learn more.
One of my favorite storytelling patterns is Freytag’s Pyramid – it helps you set up a compelling five-stage storyline. Whatever your favorite approach or method of storytelling is, the Bizzdesign Coach provides you with the flexibility you need to create the perfect story.
Improve collaboration
Do you have a compelling story that resonates with your target audience? Do you need to scale the story to a larger audience? The BiZZdesign Coach connects different stakeholders to a single story, and makes the story accessible, always up to date, and consumable.
A published Coach in Bizzdesign Horizzon acts as a ‘story map’ that users can follow your storyline. They can navigate stories in their own time and at their own pace. Simply set up a Site in Bizzdesign Horizzon (make sure your target users and/or groups have been invited to it) and publish your story while using the BiZZdesign Coach. A great tip is to use a clear sequence and titles for every part of your story to maximize clarity and impact. This ensures understanding and provides the foundation for close collaboration.
Want to know more about storytelling best practices for architects? Follow Bizzdesign on LinkedIn and if you’re an existing customer you can request to join the Bizzdesign Online Community.
