Suzanne worked in Health and Safety for a large food manufacturer. She regularly had to give H&S presentations to staff and found it difficult to get their attention and keep their engagement. She decided to attend a storytelling training workshop with me in the hope of finding something which could help. I worked with Suzanne for around half a day before we came to the point where I asked her to look for stories related to business which may help her, beginning with any H&S presentations which she had seen and had found useful. She then told me the story of how she probably saved the lives of eleven people. I suggested that may be a useful story.

This is what she told me. She had been on a skiing trip with several friends and family and on their first day of skiing, before they went up the slopes, they had to attend a safety presentation. Nearly everyone in the room didn’t want to the be there and wanted it over and done with so they could get up the slopes. Suzanne, out of professional curiosity, decided to give it her full attention to see if there were any tips she could take from it. After a dull twenty minutes of talk and slides, which took all her effort to focus on, everyone left the building to begin their day of skiing. It was when her group reached the point where they were going to ski down did her ‘spidersense’, as Suzanne put it, kicked in. There was something about the ridge above them she didn’t like. And there were the ‘whumpfing’ sounds coming from the snow around.

Along with regular cracks in the deep snow where they were about to ski, she was confident with what she had learned from the safety lecture, to know something bad was about to happen. Taking responsibility, she shouted out to her group to make their way to the tree line at the side. To begin with, people were a little reluctant to follow her orders. Years of giving presentations though had helped Suzanne develop a loud enough voice to let everyone know she was not playing games.

This, along with the use of the word ‘avalanche’ was enough to get everyone to the tree line where they all, in single file, made their way down to safety. Fifteen minutes after everyone was at a safe distance, the avalanche was triggered. She had been right. Suzanne now uses this story to begin every presentation she has to give to new employees and, as she noted, everyone is attentive and the information retained by her audience has sky-rocketed.