Effective Storytelling: Bottom Line Up Front Explained

In recent months, the team at Sense & Respond Learning has been teaching a new course called Storytelling Superpowers for Great Presentations. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I gave my TEDx talk about storytelling and write about it regularly here. This week I wanted to share one of the superpowers we teach in this course. It’s going to seem obvious and simple. That’s because it is. However, I want you to ask yourselves when the last time you actually saw this tactic in action in a meeting or presentation. The trick is called Bottom Line Up Front and it’s exactly as it sounds. 

Bottom line up front

The storytelling framework known as Bottom Line Up Front (or BLUF for short) is a technique born out of the military’s need for precise, concise and timely communication. It is designed to get the point across as quickly as possible with the goal of reducing decision-making time and increasing accuracy. As the name suggests you start with 2-3 clear sentences up front that detail the situation, complication and proposed solution. In other words, you put the most critical information first. Seems obvious now? And yet, how often does that happen in a presentation, meeting kickoff or conference presentation? 

You can then expand a bit further with more detailed information to build out the story you’re telling. As the presentation goes on you dig into deeper details of your story however if you’re facing an audience that is time poor, your opening slide or two should tell them everything they need to know up front. 

Here’s an example of BLUF put into practice to tell a story in a business context:

Nearly 80% of customer service requests are about password retrieval and require an identical response. We currently spend $7.25MM answering these questions annually. We can solve this with a simple AI chat bot. 

Password retrieval requests take up 24.7% of our CS reps’ time keeping them from handling more complex and difficult customer issues. This is causing customer satisfaction scores to go down 5.6% annually and resolution times to skyrocket by nearly 11%. 

This can literally be your opening slide. Everything your audience needs to know is here. What’s the current situation? Identical customer service requests take up 80% of our team’s time. What’s the complication? This costs us over $7MM for a simple issue that can likely be cleared up without human intervention. How might we solve it? Chat bot (and, if I’m being honest, better UX). 

It’s all there. In some situations this may be the entire story you tell and if you do it as concisely, precisely and clearly as possible everyone benefits. 

Specificity for short attention spans

The BLUF storytelling technique caters to short attention spans. That’s not to say that this only works for millennials and Gen Z audiences who grew up on TikTok. Busy executives, teams in critical situations and individuals with high stress jobs all benefit from getting the bottom line up front. The other thing they benefit from is specificity in your short story. Not only are you going to get to the point right away, you’re going to give them data in that same blast of information. Notice in our example above that we didn’t just state the situation, complication and solution on their own. We made it clear why this is a problem and why we care about it with data. 

It’s one to say “people are mostly asking for password reset help when they call the call center.” it’s quite another to say that 80% of calls to the center are about password reset requests. This created clarity around the issue and urgency to resolve it. When translated into financial impact your story suddenly grabs everyone’s attention. We could save over $7MM dollars? Tell me how! 

Be concise, be precise and nail your next presentation

Every single interaction in your professional life is a storytelling opportunity. Not all of them will provide the luxury of time to paint a broad picture. The Bottom Line Up Front technique is an excellent way to get your story across to a busy audience. Combine it with data and you supercharge this tactic to where it truly becomes a storytelling super power. To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean there is no more to your story. Instead, you can gauge your audience and decide which of the content you prepared to go to next. Their reaction to the bottom line up front will tell you everything you need to know. 

Interested in supercharging your team’s storytelling capabilities? We’d love to help. Reach out to me and I’ll share more details about this new course.