SPAR® is a communications methodology, created by Dunlop Media, that helps individuals and organizations turn their messages into an easy-to-tell verbal story.
It has a wide range of applications - from news media interviews, to presentations, to crisis response, to making a case to internal or external audiences for a particular course of action, to helping organizations align diverse viewpoints to act on a pressing issue.
Dunlop Media founder Steve Dunlop explaining the SPAR® methodology.
Although SPAR® is proprietary, it is not “the next big thing.” It draws on universal principles of narrative that have been with humankind for thousands of years. That connection helps make it instantly familiar, intuitive, and easy to learn.
The methodology is straightforward, systematic, and powerfully simple. As Steve Dunlop says, SPAR® helps organizations "strip away the Victorian ornamentations of their own stories and take them down to the studs.” They can then see not just how those stories are supported, but how to deliver them live, whether in detail, or in a compact form well suited to the digital age.
SPAR® works because since the dawn of history, no device for the conveying of information has surpassed the power of a well-told story. From the time our ancestors began to communicate, storytelling skill - whether verbal, or visual, as in the prehistoric Lascaux caves in southern France - has “evolved" along with humans. Our brains, it turns out, have a built–in cognitive bias to the acquisition of information in narrative form.
It’s no secret that the explosion of information available online has made organizational storytelling more critical than ever. But while so much has been said about that growing importance, what’s been missing is effective instruction on how to construct a concise, compelling narrative - and then deliver it in real time. This is precisely the void that SPAR® instruction seeks to fill – creating more effective, confident and powerful communicators in the process.