Think of some of the research and innovation reports you've read (or may have even written). There are usually hundreds of pages of tables, pie charts, numbers, quotes, pictures and commentary to wade through. I am willing to wager that in many cases, if someone put a gun to your head, you couldnt summarize the findings within the amount of time it takes to ride the elevator to your office.

Generating good research and developing good ideas is only half the battle (and arguably the easy part). If you want to be successful you need to develop a good, sticky story. This will enable you to sell the findings and ideas both vertically and horizontally. As you know, its imperative to sell the ideas to your management, your client and eventually to consumers.

A few years ago I read the book Made to Stick, and one thing really stuck (pun intended). Within the book, the authors relay a story of Nora Ephrons first day in journalism class. Nora is a screenwriter whose credits include Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle so she has some storytelling street-cred. The students all entered the class knowing that a journalist needs to get at the 5Ws (who, what, where, when and why). Sound familiar? If not, you have more problems as an innovator than storytelling. Anyway, the assignment was to write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher read the facts:

Kenneth L. Peters, the principle of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California Governor Edmund Pat Brown.

Before you read the rest of this blog, I want you to do two things:

1.Re-read the facts.

2.Jot down what you think the lead of this story is.

Done? Ok, read on.

According to Ephron, she and most the other students wrote leads that essentially regurgitated, reordered and condensed the facts into a single sentence: Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School Faculty in Sacramento on Thursdayblah, blah, blah. Does your lead read anything like this? Do any of the research reports you have read or written remind you of this?

The instructor paused and finally said, The lead to the story is There will be no school next Thursday. In this instant Ephron says she realized that every assignment had a secret to uncover a hidden point that the students had to uncover in order to tell a good story. The same holds true for research and innovation. You can gather all the facts in the world, but without digging deep and/or laddering up and going beyond just regurgitating the facts, all your work might lead nowhere. And if you are ever on the elevator with a crazed Chief Innovation Officer with a gun in his hand, getting the story right could save your life.