The pssst… formula: Storytelling is not rocket science, is it?

Photo by Bradley Dunn on Unsplash

On May 19, 2015, the auditorium V27.01 of the University of Stuttgart was filled to capacity. Spontaneously, a live broadcast into a parallel lecture hall was organized. Ernst Messerschmid, member of the Challenger Mission D1 of 1985, and Ulf Merbold, member of the Spacelab Mission 1983, Discovery Mission 1992 and crew member of the Mir space station 1994, sat in the front row. The prospective aerospace engineers in the lecture hall, together with the German astronauts of the first hour, Messerschmid and Merbold, waited for the man who had just returned from space, Alexander Gerst.

Dr. Alexander Gerst was a crew member of the International Space Station ISS together with the Russian Maxim Surajew and the US American Reid Wiseman. The one hundred and sixty-six days in space were of course the main topic of interest to the scientists in Lecture Room V27.01, and Gerst, the geophysicist from Künzelsau/Germany, brought with him not only his inexhaustible knowledge of the flight of the Soyuz TMA-13M and the six-month ISS expeditions 40 and 41, on which he had served as flight engineer, but also a selection of breathtaking images and a speech that made sixty minutes seem like they were in flight. Most listeners had expected a scientific lecture. This was also how Professor Dr. Stefanos Fasoulas, Head of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Stuttgart, had announced the lecture.

But instead of a presentation, the audience got to hear a series of stories. They learned why it is crucial for an astronaut to know the size of his underwear, why you should always have shaving foam with you in space, why it is helpful to know Michael Ende’s “The Neverending Story”, and even astronauts use Google Earth to find the city of Cologne when looking out of the ISS window. Above all, they learned why the most complicated machine ever built by humans should not be abandoned.

Feel like taking a trip to the ISS? Than let Dr. Alexander Gerst take you (and practice your German). His lecture at the University of Stuttgart can be found on YouTube.

Gerst, who keeps his fans up to date as @Astro_Alex via Twitter, is not only an outstanding scientist but also a fantastic speaker and he uses a number of techniques that enable him to convey countless details without overburdening his audience. We are not talking about rocket science. We talk about Storytelling.

Shh… an open secret

A large part of our everyday conversation consists of stories. Everyone tells stories. But when we consciously want to use this communication technique in front of a large audience, with employees or customers it suddenly becomes incredibly difficult. Why is this so?

Part of the explanation is we do not know the rules of the game. What we intuitively apply among friends, at the bar and at a party, we must apply with intent in a professional environment. However, many people are not familiar with the basics of good storytelling. But they are not that difficult. To keep an overview, here are the five crucial aspects — the formula for a good story, which you can easily remember with “pssst”:

• p for passion
• s for story
• s for structure
• s for sensual
• t for technical

Let´s start with the first “p”:

p for passion

Alexander Gerst loves his job. Who can blame him. Astronaut is one of the everlasting dream jobs, at least for children. Gerst has made this dream come true for himself. But even though there are many engineers who share this dream sitting in the lecture hall of the University of Stuttgart this afternoon, Gerst is still trying to rekindle his passion for space travel. He does this with a picture. The first photo he shows at the beginning of his lecture is an image from the Cassini mission showing the Cassini space probe on its flight to Saturn and its moons before the orbiter finally burns up in the planet’s atmosphere.

In the upper part of the picture, the rings of Saturn are visible in huge size, and just below, shining far away in the distance, a tiny blue dot. 1,600 million kilometres away: Earth.

This dot gave the mission, which Alexander Gerst was part of, its name: The Blue Dot Mission. And it is this name which symbolizes the significance of Gersts space adventure, and the duty of all space flights: Earth which seems so big to us looks infinitely small when viewed from space. There is still so much to discover out there, but we should do everything possible not to lose sight of one thing: our own world. For we have only this one.

pssst… In his lecture, Alexander Gerst gives an insight into his very personal motivation for this mission, and in doing so he succeeds in taking his audience along and looking at the world with different eyes. What is your passion and how do you pass it on to your audience?

s for story

Communication expert Margreth Lünenborg identified three different types of information journalism delivers: informative, narrative and performative information. Informatively, a journalist addresses the interested reader as an informer. At the same time, he also works with narratives and stories and sees himself as a narrator for the audience. Finally, in the performative mode, the journalist sees himself as an exhibitor. This mode is clearly visible in tabloid journalism, which likes to illuminate the private lives of celebrities. But even serious news has a “performative” component, since news are exhibited, presented and put “on display”. To Lünenborg a good journalist in being able to serve all three aspects — information, narration and exhibition — simultaneously.

What is valid for good journalism is ultimately also true for speech and presentation. Alexander Gerst, for example, actually takes on all three roles in his Stuttgart lecture: He is an informer, narrator and exhibitor.

As an informant, Gerst succeeds in making factual information clear by cleverly weaving in numerous anecdotes and making the Blue Dot Mission strikingly clear to each of his listeners. Many of his photos help him to do this, but most stories manage without pictures — he kicks of a movie in viewers mind. Almost casually, Gerst follows one of the most important laws of storytelling: good stories don’t show an ideal world in which the expected is fulfilled according to plan. Good stories show life as it really is, with all its rough edges, its mistakes and problems, its troubles and difficulties. For it is precisely the shortcomings and challenges that make stories interesting.

For example, it is not only a humorous episode for the audience when Gerst tells that one of his colleagues on this space mission stated that the ready-made size of his underwear was too small and therefore had to work for six months in underpants that were too tight. The little anecdote also shows that even in such a well-planned project as a space mission, things can go wrong. Or Gerst’s story about the broken bolt that broke off during the assembly of an experiment: Gerst wants to correct his mistake and simply saw the piece of metal again, but weightlessness prohibits this quick solution because metal shavings could get into the life-support system and block it. The suggestion that Gerst makes to his ground crew shows that even in space perfection is not the only thing that counts, improvisation is also required. He proposed to foam the metal piece with his shaving foam to prevent the metal shavings from flying. The ground crew tests the suggestion for two weeks — and gave green light.

pssst… With which anecdotes and stories will you become an informer, a narrator and an exhibitor in your next presentation?

s for structure

Storytelling has very different faces. On the one hand, storytelling is the insertion of small anecdotes into a lecture. Like Gerst’s admission that he had desperately searched for the city of Cologne every time he circumnavigated the globe from the window of the ISS. From the very top, he wanted to look down on his colleagues at DLR, the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR is based in Cologne), where he had received a summer grant in 2006 — right at the beginning of his astronaut career.

As Gerst was not able to locate Cologne from ISS he turned on the board computer and and compared the picture on Google Earth with his view out of the window. He had searched for Cologne in Switzerland — well, space scale is different.

Storytelling is telling anecdotes, however, it also refers to the structure and composition of a speech, the red thread you spin for an audience. In Gerst’s speech, the lecture proceeds chronologically. Gerst begins with the entry into the Soyuz capsule, then moves on to the launch and flight of the rocket, explains the docking manoeuvre and the arrival at the ISS. He talks about the first days of settling in and the routines of everyday life on the space station. At the end, the rocket returns to the space capsule, uncouples and flighs back, land and get home.

In addition to this logical and obvious structure, Gerst also provides in his speech a framework — a plot, and circular argument. The photo of the Cassini mission that Gerst shows at the beginning gets a counterpart at the end of the lecture: The countershot from the Blue Dot. While in his first image, the huge rings of Saturn can be seen at the top left and a single bright dot, Earth in his last picture the wings of the ISS space station can be seen at the bottom and in the centre an infinitely shining sea of dots: the Milky Way. Gerst begins with the “here” and ends with the “there” — linked with the appeal to look further and to continue searching.

pssst.. What structure will you give your next presentation and what story will be the central theme of your presentation?

s for sensual

When Alexander Gerst talks, everything is on fire. It rumbles and stinks. Space suits pinch, and 4.5 G-forces cut off your air. The noise during the launch of a rocket is so deafening that you can hardly stand it, and yet inside the space capsule it is as quiet as if you were sitting in a bus. Gerst’s language is bold, powerful and rich in images. The listeners are offered stories to hear, see, feel and even taste. All senses are served. Gerst manages to tell stories as if we were actually on board. He uses everyday language that never gets boring. And yet he never loses his expert status. Gerst doesn’t need specialist terminology to make his mark. And where he can’t get anywhere with paraphrases, he uses pictorial analogies and metaphors, tailored to his audience. The assignment protocol becomes a timetable in a student flat share, where everyone has to go and clean the toilet. A six-hour docking maneuver becomes an endless parking aid. Knowledge is absorbed like trying to drink from a hose.

pssst… How do you make your next lecture a sensual experience linguistically?

t for technical

What can frighten a person who walked 400 kilometres above earth out the door into space? This person is certainly not afraid to appear in front of 800 people, speak into a microphone and look into a camera. And he is certainly not afraid of a projector and all this other technical stuff involved in a presentation, right? Well, for Dr. Alexander Gest at his the lecture in room V27.01 of the University of Stuttgart all is easy. He doesn’t have to bother. Not for the laptop and not for the projector. That’s what Mrs. Götz, the university’s assistant, is there fore. As a famous astronaut you don’t have to worry about such things.

But Gerst is responsible for his own appearance and the materials used around his lecture. Don’t worry, you don’t have to get yourself one of those overalls that Gerst wears at his performances. But the way you move on stage, how you act with the microphone and how you stand in front of the camera… Gerst can tell you that.

pssst… find a way to present yourself and feel comfortable at the same time, that´s the decisive factor in the search for the right presentation technique.

Even if you have never flown at 28,000 km/h and have never circumnavigated the earth 2,566 times, and have far less fascinating topics to talk about than an astronaut, it is still worth to get to know Storytelling as an great rhetoric technique — easy to be learned:

1. become personal: make your speech your own personal affair and show your passion
2. rely on the power of the story, because a story has so much more to offer than pure facts and figures. You don’t have to become a fairy tale uncle or a fairy tale aunt, because there is a whole range of authentic anecdotes you can use.
3. pay attention to the structure of your speech, and take your audience on a journey without losing them in between.
4. sensuality is the key to a memorable speech. Information alone is not enough to reach an audience. The presentation must become an experience — with all senses.
5. immerse instead of rushing by: Use the right techniques to get attention right from the start, keep the interest and finally leave a lasting impression — this applies to the actual technology used, such as projector, microphone or light. But this also applies to the technical aids of your presentation such as PowerPoint, use of images and whatever you take with you on stage.

And hey, with this you will enjoy being on stage. Who would have thought that?

By the way: On June 8, 2018 Gerst docked with the Soyuz space capsule again at the ISS. At 5.17 pm the boarding hatch opened, and this time Gerst entered the space station with a new mission: In October 2018, Alexander Gerst was appointed commander of the station. His second mission lasted 196 days. In December, he landed safely in the Kazakh steppe — loaded with lots of new stories.