I took a really good course at Stanford Business School about public speaking.
One of the course textbooks was Resonate by Nancy Duarte, which offered a really interesting twist. The book talks about the classic "Hero's Journey" story template, but then flips it on its head: it suggests you consider your audience to be the people going on the journey, and it's your job to guide them through the different stages: the initial call to adventure, the trials along the way and the eventual return where they have been changed in some way (by their understanding of the topic you are talking about).
I used Campbell's "Hero's Journey" as a template for a work presentation to explain my team's research and product development work after a company wide re-organization. It worked surprisingly well to engage people. I ended up using Dan Harmon's circle w/ 8 stages, and threw in a couple gifs jokes as well.
The only downside is it took me about twice as long to develop the presentation: mostly getting all the important stuff in and covering the whole story circle in a balanced way. For situations where people already have context (internal team), it's probably better to just save people the time and not use the method, but when you need to make an impact, use the Hero's Journey!
One of the course textbooks was Resonate by Nancy Duarte, which offered a really interesting twist. The book talks about the classic "Hero's Journey" story template, but then flips it on its head: it suggests you consider your audience to be the people going on the journey, and it's your job to guide them through the different stages: the initial call to adventure, the trials along the way and the eventual return where they have been changed in some way (by their understanding of the topic you are talking about).
I thought that was really neat.