Storytelling for Mindshare
Peter Tertzakian is a legend in Calgary’s finance and energy communities, partly due to his creative platforms, the ARC Energy Ideas podcast and his personal project, the Energyphile.
As a scholar, scientist, businessman and an immensely talented storyteller, his life is a stepping stone of compounded learning culminating into who he is today. Tertzakian spent the better part of a decade in school learning about computer science, geoscience, economics and business.
Terzakian’s creative bug first began with film and photography. The manual film splicing and darkroom photo development gave Tertzakian a firm rooting in narrative and composition. However, his interests in science and technology rivalled storytelling, and his creative skillset would be relegated until his 40s.
“Without getting too technical, I started realizing this important concept I started to pursue,” says Tertzakian. “From that point forward was the importance of cross-pollinating your knowledge.”
With each degree came a new dimensionality to how problems can be approached. Tertzakian uses his knowledge as a staging platform for which complex problem-solving takes on a two or three-dimensional approach.
Like an out-of-focus lens, experiences through work and academia slowly began to focus into a clear vision. A final degree at the Sloan School at M.I.T. with a technology-focused M.B.A. put a lasso around all of his knowledge, says Tertzackian.
Tertzakian’s scholastic endeavours were trying to answer his self-reflective question: “How does one differentiate oneself in a commoditized world where there are many smart people?” It wasn’t until his creative brain re-awoke that the puzzle pieces fell into place.
Tertzakian is in the knowledge business, operating on a value chain of data, where he massages value from information, converting it to knowledge, which is then interpreted as opinion. What does it all mean in a world full of technical jargon, data and conjecture?
With an additive storyline, charts and graphs become relatively meaningful. Tertzakian delivers information in the context of a story arc, drawing on historical anecdotes and using photographs for engagement.
Stories are the vehicles that help connect the information to the brain. Depending on your delivery format — photography, video, audio, textual — different areas of the brain are engaged to aid memory.
Knowing this, Tertzakian began using pictures to grasp the audience’s attention and support with text and spoken stories during presentations.
The success of his tri-modal methodology resulted in his Energyphile project, which showcases historical vignettes about energy, the environment, innovation, and geopolitics.
Using “mindshare,” thought leadership differentiates Tertzakian from your average executive. The great differentiator between his knowledge and others is the ability to contextualise information through history and storytelling.
Historical events inform our thinking about the future; history repeats itself, and with those tools, Tertzakian arms people with the proper knowledge to confidently make big decisions.
Enjoy the podcast on YouTube, and let us know what you think!