We love another acronym, not! It is a handy memory jogger though, so let’s persevere with yet another one. Whenever you are in a situation where you need to get collaboration, support, funding or agreement, then the EAR formula is a very effective tool for presenters. It is simplicity itself in terms of understanding the formula. The delivery though is the key and this will make all the difference.
The Formula stands for E – Event, A – Action and R – Result. It is quite counterintuitive and therein lies a lot of its success. It is disarming and makes the presenter a small target for opposition to what they are recommending. Often, we have something we want and our first instinct is to just blurt it out. We have convinced ourselves that it is the best course of action, the most logical, high value approach and obviously the weight of all of these factors will automatically sway our listeners to adopt our recommendation.
What is the reaction to all of this blurting though? Immediately the audience hears what we have to say, we are suddenly facing a crowd of card carrying sceptics. We shouldn’t be surprised but we usually are. What have we done? We have offered the flimsiest tissue of an idea to the listeners and expected them to extrapolate what they have heard to encompass the full weight of our argument. Of course we are intending to now launch into the detail of the idea, the rationale, the evidence etc. This makes sense. We are taught at business school to get the executive summary to the top of the report and then go into labyrinthine detail on why this idea makes a lot sense. When it is in document form, the audience do read the detail and do pay attention to the proof of our idea.
Sadly, when we are live, they lose all senses and depart from the plan. They hear our raw unaided, unprotected, unabashed idea and they go into deafness. Their eyes are open but their mind has raced away to a distant place, where they are roiling through why this blurted idea makes little or no sense, or why it flies in the face of their experience or expectations, or a thousand other reasons why this simply won’t work. We have lost their attention.
Instead we apply the EAR formula and we take them to a place in their mind’s eye. There must be a reason why we believe what we think and that must have come from a limited number of sources – what we heard, read or experienced. The Event piece is to reconstruct that moment when we had our epiphany, our realisation our breakthrough on this idea. We want to transport them to the spot too, so that they can reconstruct the roots of this idea.
We don’t have unlimited time for this and we are telling a story, but it is a brief story. If we get tangled up in the intricacies of the story and are going on and on, then the listeners will become impatient and dissatisfied. If they are our bosses they will just tell us “to hurry up and get on with it”.
The secret is to put in the season – a snowy day, a hot summers day, a fall day, a spring day. We can all imagine what that would look like, because it corresponds to our own experience and we can visualise it. We now locate the moment – a dark wood panelled boardroom, a meeting room at the headquarters, a Zoom call, on the factory or shop floor etc. Again we paint the picture of the scene. Not just a factory, but which factory, what type of factory, how did it look. People they know should be introduced into the story where possible. These actors may be known to them and this adds credibility to the story and the point.
The bulk of the speaking time is given over to the telling of the background of how we got to this idea. An excellent outcome is upon hearing all of this background context, the listener is racing ahead of us and drawing their own conclusions on what needs to be done based on the evidence given. Given the same context, the chances are strong that they have reached the same conclusion we have, looking at the same evidence.
After we tell the story we lower the boom and hit them with our call to action. This is A- Action we want them to take component. The big mistake a lot of people make at this point is to just keep adding a series of actions, rather than singling out one central action we want executed. We cannot distract them or nudge them away from considering one decision only. Take action or not. This part of the puzzle is about 5-10 seconds long. This forces us to be crystal clear on what is the one thing we want them to do. For example, “So based on the research, I recommend we begin a prototype and test our assumptions”.
We cannot let that hang there alone. We need to back it up with one of the goodies that will come with it and we must settle on the most powerful “Result” we will enjoy if they take our advice. We do not keep adding benefits and dilute the core message. We go for the blockbuster benefit and that also only takes 5-10 seconds and then we shut up and wait for their response. We could say, “if the prototype works, we are looking at an immediate 30% lift in revenues just in the first year”.
The EAR formula is a jujitsu move, because we are navigating around their potential objections. They just cannot disagree with our context. Our conclusions yes, but not the background to that conclusion. They also have to hear the whole story first before they jump in with a rebuttal. This formula provides us with the means to be heard in a genuine and fair manner. We can keep doing things the hard way or we can use the EAR formula and make business a lot easier for ourselves.
We all know that first impressions are critical, but what happens if you blow it? There are a couple of typical ways we can hurt our credibility at the start. Trying a joke that bombs is a very common credibility and personal and professional brand destroyer. You think you are funny, when you aren’t. Or you think the joke is funny, but you are a crowd of one in agreement on that point. Think back to how many talks you have attended, where the speaker told a joke that made you laugh, rather than cringe? I doubt there will be many and probably you just observed the joke, laughed and then moved on, rather than analysing why that humour worked. This means you gained no insight into joke telling, but here you are the amateur comedian trying out your own untested material on this business audience.
What do you do when it bombs? You can just ignore the groans and move on or you can attempt a recovery. If it is obvious that joke wasn’t funny, you can say, “Too bad - that joke seemed to work much better in rehearsal with my subordinates”, or “that joke clearly indicates my intended career switch to comedy needs a re-evaluation”, or “Oh well, that joke seemed like a good idea at the time”, which will get people laughing, as you make fun of yourself. The key is to let it die a natural death and not keep referencing it after the initial recovery. You are hopefully going to provide things in your talk which will grab the audience’s interest and they will forget that as a comedian you are pretty ordinary.
Once upon a time, I was the MC for an event involving Paul Keating, then Australian Prime Minister. He was in the green room upstairs in the Hotel and the plan was as he entered the event hall, I would say in a deep baritone announcer voice, “please join me in welcoming the Prime Minister of Australia Paul Keating”. Pretty simple really except the logistics had a few flaws as we discovered. The timing had to be as he entered, I would start the welcome. He would come from the elevator and enter the room and this would require a signal to me on the dais, that he was about to enter the room. It was a relay system. One of the Japanese team was posted near the elevator to signal another colleague near the doorway, who would then signal me to get started.
The problem is that Prime Ministers travel with a large body officials and press entourage and the Japanese colleague near the elevator saw a bunch of Aussies coming out of the elevator and set off the smoke signal. I enthusiastically launched into my introduction, to rapidly discover no Prime Minister, as it was a false flag. It was pretty embarrassing and lonely up there on the dais. Somehow, I managed to eek out, “thank you everyone for the rehearsal, the Prime Minister will be here shortly” and covered the error with some humour. Unfortunately, my colleagues managed to send another false signal and the second time I had no witty comeback, just deep embarrassment. Third time lucky we got it right. My point is you can sometimes cover a mishap with some humour. I certainly wasn’t expecting that slip up and had not prepared for it, but after that event experience I vowed I would be ready if ever there was a next time.
Another common opening problem is the tech. Everything was working like a charm when you got there early and checked the equipment, but of course as soon as you start, the slides won’t come up or the computer stops working. An audience doesn’t like it when they have to sit there and watch you trying to reboot the computer or do some deep diagnostic dive to get things working properly. They feel their valuable time is being fritted away by you. Often audience members will shout out useful advice on what you need to be doing which makes it even worse, because you look even more incompetent. What do you do?
There are a couple of choices. If you have someone handy who can work on it to fix the issues in the background then certainly get them involved and you get straight into your talk, sans tech for a little while. This presumes you are prepared enough to give the talk without any slides and we should all be ready to give our talks without any visuals. This is a vital part of the planning stage and shouldn’t be overlooked, because according to Murphy’s Law, if something can go wrong it will and we need to be ready. Once the colleague or staff have resurrected the slide deck, you can just pick it up from there. Don’t go back and start again – you have already started, so keep moving forward.
The other alternative is to give up on slides altogether and use storytelling or word pictures to draw out the detail you want to communicate. You should be using both devices anyway, but you may need to ramp these up more than usual. When I was training to become a Dale Carnegie instructor my senior instructor played a trick on me, seconds before we were due to start the first tandem class together. He suddenly announced the slide deck wasn’t working and we would have to run the class without any visuals to test my reaction. I was well prepared and had given a lot of talks without slides, so I said “no problem”, I was ready to go anyway, which wasn’t what he was expecting. The point is, we should always be ready to go without slides every time.
Planning for a disaster is 99% of the solution. Our usual problem is we are taken by surprise and have no back up alternatives. There are only a limited number of things which will rob us of our acing the first impression, so let’s work up a Plan B for those occasions. They will certainly happen and usually at the worst possible time, so let’s be ready for them.
As businesspeople, we don’t get that many chances to face a public audience and give an actual talk. The majority of the time, we are giving internal weekly reports on projects or revenues. We feel constrained to deliver in the same way everyone else is delivering – monotone, lifeless, dull accounting of the progress or non-progress of our section. We fear if we start ramping up we will be disparaged as an idiot, so we keep the lid on what we are doing. Going full Hamlet on the project update will certainly draw some negative criticism from our bosses, who will quickly tell us to stop clowning around and get back to the usual methodology. Are we doomed to stay in first gear as presenters for eternity?
Probably. Work reporting has a certain format and level of expectation which is it should be hum drum and ordinary, not melodramatic or dynamic. What can we do though within that frame to work on our skills? Firstly, we need to re-set our habits. We need to develop a work rhythm presentation which won’t get us called in to the boss’s office for a dressing down, but which also allows us to work on some of the basic skills.
Planning the report needs a makeover. Usually the planning component is pretty marginal. Instead let’s think about what is the key insight from the numbers or the project progress or lack thereof. What is the message we want to convey? Once we determine that, then we start to build the framework for the delivery. Usually we are one of a number of people presenting and the rest of the troops will be doing a sterling job to put everyone to sleep with their efforts. That means we need to plan our opening of our report in a way which will grab attention but without being too over the top. If we start with the equivalent of “the sky is falling” that will get flagged immediately by the boss as negativity, seeding panic and will warrant a powerful scolding about our negative impact on the team spirit.
So we are looking for a start which is less powerful, but powerful enough. For example, we could say, “We had some surprises this week”. Those surprises could be positive or negative, but that simple statement will get everyone wondering, “Oh, yeah – what surprises?” and we will have achieved our aim to grab everyone’s attention. We are basically practicing the dark art of creating newspaper headlines. The start should be short, sharp and attention grabbing. We are trying to work a pattern interrupt into our headline, to break though the mental barriers in the room.
When we get into the main report it is a good idea to frame the key points. We could say, “We had some surprises this week. Let me go through the three things which were unexpected”. Now we have set up a simple navigation process to allow our audience to follow our report. We could have said, “We had some surprises this week. I will go through the macro and micro factors behind these”. Now we have framed two chapters of the report, making it easy to follow. Another approach could be using time. “We had some surprises this week. Let me go through the lead up, where we are now and what we can expect next”. We can now cover the past, the present and the future in three chapters and this is simple to follow.
Our final message needs to be clear. It may just be a simple summary of the key points, a call to action, a recommendation, a warning, or a rallying call for support from other teams. Our report may be only five to ten minutes long, but it gives enough scope to apply these frames to the talk and mimics exactly what we do in a forty minute public speech. We get to apply the formula we need, even if only on a smaller scale. We need to be using our voice to highlight key words and phrases, our gestures to accent data or insights and our eye power to connect with everyone in the room. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be doing this every time because this is what makes for effective communication.
If we do draw some negative comments take a long hard look at the perpetrator. Are they skilled in communication and presenting? If they aren’t, then just ignore them. What if it is the boss? We should always keep a professional tone, no going over the top, but keep going, because often the boss cannot present to save their own life and are no model for us. Just tell them you are taking these weekly reporting opportunities to develop your communication abilities. If you are not leeching into thespian antics, then there should no basis to be reining you in.
Another area where we can excel is in using our slide information. I say this because everyone else will be making all the usual mistakes of cramming everything on to one slide, having too many fonts and too much data which simply cannot be read. If we are using spreadsheets, then distributing copies to everyone beforehand is a better idea than putting up columns of numbers no one can understand. If we are paperless, we can still show the spreadsheet. Usually there are only a few numbers to highlight, so we should concentrate on those. The spreadsheet becomes wallpaper and we use animated popups to highlight a specific number in very large font. We can then talk to that number. We keep repeating this process for the specific numbers we need to talk about and there usually aren’t too many of those in a short report.
Graphs are a good way to show numbers. We need to recall the golden rule of a slide has to be fully understood within two seconds of it going up. The key is to avoid having more than one graph per slide if possible or a maximum of two slides, if a comparison is required. Line graphs are good to show trends and pie charts are great to show proportions. Try to keep the animation to a minimum, because it just distracts from the key message.
Our thinking changes to “I am giving a five minute or ten minute segment of a forty minute speech and I will prepare accordingly”. This way our frame of reference is always the full professional presentation rather than the sad excuse which most people deliver. In this way, we are able to practice our skills within the realm of weekly reporting reality.
There are some fundamental mechanics of the presentation delivery. I would call these hygiene factors for presenting. Eye contact, facial expression, voice modulation, gesture usage, pause insertion and posture are the basics. Unfortunately, in my observation, most business presenters have not mastered these core skills. This despite all of the training available, all of the free information being plastered all over the internet. “Content Marketing” experts are establishing their credibility by providing phenomenal information for free. What an age we live in, yet we still have presentation train wrecks.
Let’s presume some have mastered the basics, so what comes next? Here are three elements we need to be working on.
When we ask our presentation class participants what are some of the attributes they want to achieve when speaking in public, “being clear” is always prominent. However, what is required to be clear? The audience has to be able to navigate the talk and follow the direction the speaker is taking everyone. I attended a talk by the President of a huge global organisation here in Tokyo and he “wandered like a cloud” all over the place. It was a navigation nightmare. Let’s not make our audience work hard to keep up.
The chapters of the talk should be clear, the flow logical and the points quite apparent. The delivery needs the right pacing, with sufficient pauses to allow the messages to sink in. We need a pattern interrupt every five minutes of the talk, to keep the interest of the listeners. We will ensure there are highs and lows in the delivery, so that it is not all delivered at the same pace. This is a very common mistake amongst business speakers – they have only one speed setting from start to finish. We need to mimic classical music with its ebbs and highs, it lulls and crescendos. Certain critical key words are culled from the herd and given special attention and treatment to make the message clearer. We might hit them with a stentorian outburst of raw energy or we might drop it all down to a cupped hand, conspiratorial whisper, for which the audience has to mentally lean in to hear.
If your core message is mundane, boring and unremarkable, it will be hard to excite the assembled masses about what you are saying. Storytelling in business is one of the dark arts. It is rarely mastered, poorly understood and infrequent in its application. Presenting statistics for example, can be boring, but wrapping them up in the drama of the story can be gripping. Reveal who were the heroes who forensically excavated these numbers and their herculean efforts to dig into the data to find the gems.
Delve into what are the ramifications of their findings. Extrapolate into the future to paint a picture of hope or despair with these numbers presented as early warning indicators. Capture which careers are about to be shredded or heralded? When storytelling, we need to take the listener to a place, in a season, at a time of the day, with people they know and all of this located in their mind’s eye. We take the audience with us to the precise moment it all happened and draw out the hard lessons we have won as a consequence.
Talking in a monotone, matched with a wooden face devoid of expression, quickly becomes a funereal distraction for the audience. Removing all the physical energy from the talk sets it adrift from the listeners. They feel no connection and no interest, because the speaker themselves doesn’t seem interested in what they are saying.
Enthusiasm is contagious and we hunger for a speaker with fire in the belly. Instead we usually get the legions of the walking dead of business speakers – those armies of the grey, gaunt, forgettable and dull. We are not simply advocating high energy, almost crazed hysteria here, but considered belief and real commitment to the message, one which the audience will definitely buy.
Your energy sets up a vibration. it transports your passion and commitment to what you are saying directly to us and infects and envelops the whole room. When we speak, we employ our “ki” (気), our intrinsic energy and we push that energy out all the way to the back wall, as a conscious effort to fill the room with our presence. I am sure you have had the experience of when someone enters a room, they literally fill it with their presence. That is precisely what we want to achieve as presenters – to dominate that meeting room space with our power and “ki”. The first step is to have that mindset to want to do that and then direct our energy outward, rather than bottling it up, restraining it.
We specifically want to engage that entire audience and connect with them all. We use our eye contact power to make that connection. We should focus our gaze on a single point, so select one of the eyes of each audience member. We look so deeply into their eye we feel we can delve into their soul. Well delve for only about six seconds however, because with that intensity, it soon becomes intrusive. The impact of that one-on-one engagement is enormous. They feel they are the only one in the room and we are talking directly to them. That connection triggers tremendous continued support for our personal and professional brands
The basics platform allows us to take our presentations to the highest levels. We must work hard on amplifying the connection between our message and the audience. Therefore, we are the rare ones who can break through all the communication dissonance. Others simply fall by the white noise wayside. Being a presenter has never been tougher or more demanding. In our Age of Distraction and this Era of Cynicism, we have to stand tall as highly capable, skilled communicators, showing everyone the way forward.
There are some levels of presenter and so where do you fit in? The scaredy-cat like I used to be, avoiding all opportunities to present. The novice presenter trying to work it out by yourself through trial and error? The student of presenting who has worked out the connection between persuasive ability and career and business success. The semi-pro who holds down a full time job which does provide a number of chances a year to keep working on advancing your presentation skills? I don’t include the professional presenter because that has become their livelihood and is out of scope for 99.99% of people in business.
For those in denial, I know, I get it. I was so terrified of embarrassing myself I decided the best course of action was to escape all chances to present. As we advance in our careers though, the room to hide starts to disappear and we have to face the reality – if you can’t present you cannot advance in your career or business. Here is some clear advice – don’t struggle along. Become proactive and go and get the training. Find a class where there is a psychologically safe space where you can learn with positive encouragement. Our ego is already fragile about presenting and the last thing we need is someone criticising us. Look for trainers who follow the good/better school of feedback. That means they tell you what you are doing well and encourage you to keep doing that and explain how you can make it even better.
If your colleagues are not paid up members of this school of feedback and all you get from them is critique, just be polite and thank them and move on. They are clueless about developing people so just blank them out and keep up your training and study. As you advance you will actually become a problem for other presenters. Some of them will try to pull you back down to their level, because they are aware they are hopeless and prefer everyone to be the same, so that they don’t stand out. A cutting comment from a work colleague is seared into my mind, “Greg is all style and no substance” after my presentation to the whole company. Ouch! Fortunately, I knew why he made this stupid comment and just ignored it. If you bump into these people, just ignore them and keep working on your skills.
For those who have started on the path, the trick is to keep going. I remember reading one of Tony Robbins’s books where he realised most business speakers only get a few chances a year to talk in public and that he could get the equivalent of years of experience in a few months, if he got enough chances to speak in public. I followed that same idea myself and looked for every opportunity to speak and I still hold to that strategy. Event organisers are always looking for free industry speakers. I am sure Tony Robbins had to give a lot of unpaid talks before he become good enough to get paid. Anyway, we are not in it for the money, we are trying to get a professional capability and we need an audience to work with. As you build up a resume of speeches given, more chances will flow to you. It has been a long drought of opportunities thanks to Covid, but in 2023 we should start to see the reappearance of in person events and the chances to speak at them.
This will be good for the semi-pro who may have gotten a bit rusty having had no spots for the last three years to keep advancing their art. It would be a very good idea to go back to the basics to make sure we have not forgotten any of the professionalism we had previously developed. It might also be an idea to proactively reach out to organisations who are slowly emerging for the shadows and starting to host in-person events again and let them know you would be happy to give your talk. The audience size may be considerably smaller and some of them will probably be watching you online, which is not as good as having them all in the room, but better than nothing.
Review how you went and analyse what needs to change to make your presentation better. Simple things you did before may have evaporated and will need to be re-introduced into the mix. Eye contact will definitely be one of them for a lot of people. We don’t just look at our audience en masse. We single out people and use our eye contact to engage them during our talk. Too much is too much though, so around six seconds each is the formula we need.
I have only seen a couple of speakers live in the last few months and they were pretty rusty I thought. My guess is they just carried on from where they left off, except they are not at that previous level anymore and need to rebuild their skills. When we get back to basics, we plug any holes which have appeared or we make sure everything that should be happening is in fact working for us. This won’t happen by itself, so we need to work at it. The beauty is if we do this and everyone else just carries on as if there hasn’t been a three year break, then we will instantly stand out as an excellent presenter.
Our personal and professional brands are invaluable and we have to invest in them and presenting is the one time when all is revealed publicly. We have to make those chances winners and build our reputation and take it even higher.