Recently, I got to have a blast telling a story. We put together a story about our company’s two-year history and posted it to SlideShare. In fact, I had so much fun that I’m going to show it, and then get on with my post:

I hope you flipped through that, because I work with a great bunch of folks who have senses of humor similar to mine (which is pretty darn remarkable when you think about it).

But anyhow, on to my point: storytelling.

When I was working on the storyboard for the slideshare, I tweeted:

Seriously loving the storytelling aspect of marketing today. Anyone else enjoy that?

— Jenn Steele (@jennsteele) September 10, 2013

And it’s true – I had a blast with the storytelling part of marketing.  So I started mentally composing this post all about storytelling and marketing and yada yada yada.  Then I realized something: storytelling isn’t isolated to marketing. In fact, I may have done more storytelling in technology than I do now.

Think about it for a second. What are you doing when someone asks you what’s going on? Or what happened? Or why the $%^&* exchange server is going on?

You’re telling a story.

You may be telling the story of the heat in the server room that caused the hard drive in the SAN to degrade combined with the SAN being too full to replicate when you swapped the drive. (Not that I’ve ever told that story or anything. Nope, not me.) Maybe you’re telling the story of the bug that flipped all the bits and made your product choke for six hours while you fixed it. Or maybe you’re telling the story of a budget that’s stretched too thin for what you need to do.

Whatever it is, you’re storytelling.

And with all good stories, yours needs to have a beginning, middle, and end. It also needs to have a plot people can follow. Frankly, as geeks, we pretty much suck at this. We give too much detail, or we leave out the beginning or the end. Whatever we do too much of (or not enough of), we lose our audience. Or we fail to consider our audience. Or something like that.

We’re always telling stories. If we’re aware of that, our communication – especially to non-geeks – will likely get infinitely better.