Unleash The Power Of Your Theories And Data When Presenting
It has been a while since I attended a business school presentation. From time to time the prominent foreign business schools fly in one of their big gun professors to rustle up some business in Japan by delivering a lecture on a topical subject. They are always good because the professors are either proving insights from their own research or are curating the best of what other specialists have to say on the subject. I was at one the other day on the subject of leadership. We all need help in the leadership arena so I was all ears for some pearls of insight and wisdom.
Being a business school, we had theoretical constructs, lots of groovy diagrams and a mountain of data. The presenter was very well spoken and well presented. He looked and sounded the part. I was sitting there thinking that something was missing. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the sense of incompleteness was strong. I moved on and went back to work and got back into it. Later it dawned on me what was the missing piece on the business school presentation puzzle. It was devoid of life.
The talk took place in a mental “clean room” like you see on television when they show how high tech memory chips are made, hermetically sealed off from any polluting elements. The expectation of a presentation from a business school should be that there will theory aspects aplenty and there were. There was no “dirt” though. By that I mean no stories from the coal face about how things got very messy or failed. No tales of woe, despair or desperation. No leadership meltdowns that destroyed the business. No lessons to the wise about what not to do.
This is the danger of giving “lectures” when we are presenting. We might have tremendous expert knowledge and experience. We are easily led into pontificating about how things should be done. We can provide sufficient data to sink a small island, we can back it all up with well researched theories explaining the rationale. The content though sort of hangs in the air. It starts to resemble hydroponic plant cultivation. Lot of nutrients and water going into the development stage, but no solid connection to the ground. The tomatoes are juicy and red, but the taste is a bit shallow and disappointing.
We should go high and have theories and constructs but we also need to provide context and this is where the blood and the mud of the stories comes into it. There is no doubt that the good professors presenting this content didn’t just dream it up together over a couple of beers down at the academic’s dining hall. They visited companies, talked with real people, collected the data, captured stories of what actually happened and then weaved their theory out of the detail.
Giving the audience a glimpse into that chaotic world in those companies researched, where things didn’t go so well and where the mistakes were coming fast and furious, would be an exciting whirlwind ride for the audience. Significantly, I will guarantee that we won’t remember the inner construct of the theory, but we will remember the meltdown at the headquarters of that company before they crashed and burned.
The lesson for the rest of us is to always make sure we are populating our presentations with stories from the front line, telling the tales of the survivors and adding plenty of graphic colour, when describing the corporate gore. When you are doing your planning and get to a point of importance in your talk make a note “inject story here” in the text or in the slide deck. This will be a good reminder to ground your potential frothy excesses in fact and reality from the front line. These stories will linger long on the memory banks of the audience, much longer than their recall of your data, theory or you.
The secret is to keep asking yourself, “how do I know this to be true”. Invariably we know this to be true because of something which has happened and that is the story we need to tell, in a short form version, during our talk. Go back to the source of data or theory. Also, tell stories involving yourself. If you screwed it up, then tell us about it. We will love you for it and feel a stronger bond with you as a person, rather than as a distant and remote “presenter”. I am a very private person, so it took me a long time to get over sharing my experiences with others, particularly the failures. What I found was a strong positive reaction to me and an increase in my credibility with my audience. So inject your stories into your talks and you will find the audience will go for it and do so every time.
How To Persuade When You Are the One Presenting
Being persuasive is not down to luck or accident, it is the result of good planning and execution. This is the problem. The vast majority of speakers do not prepare properly. The slide deck gets all the attention, the data gets lots of love, the logistics are thoroughly checked. The planning component? Not enough going into that effort unfortunately. How can we become more persuasive? There is a formula for this, in fact a magic formula
This formula is simple but pure genius. It has four steps : Step 1. We open with the incident: who, what, where, when. We believe something to be true. Why is that? We have come to that conclusion through something that has become known to us. There is a back story there somewhere driving our conclusion. We tell part of that backstory. In Step 2, we get into the evidenceto provide context to support our recommendation. This is woven into the incident we are relating. In Step 3, we suggest the action needed and make our recommendation
In the final step, Step 4, we focus on the benefits, telling our audience why our recommendation will help them
Before we present anything,we need to analyse our audience so that we hit the right note with them – not too complex and not too simple. We need to consider a few angles for the talk. This is a vital precaution very few speakers ever take and then get themselves into trouble and wonder why. How much does my audience know about my topic. What will be the benefit to this audience. What would be some skeptical or negative attitudes toward what I am going to say? How much resistance can I anticipate. How can I overcome that resistance?
Where possible we should be trying to tailor the talk to the needs of the audience.
We need to look atthe audience point of view regarding how their current situation is relevant to the topic. What are the challenges they are facing. What do they consider to beimportant or unimportant concerning my topic? How could they benefit by taking the action I’m recommending?
After understanding where your audience is, you can use the magic formula to
capture attention, build credibility, eliminate nervousness, call others to action and get results.
We must apply good discipline such that we don’t start rambling on about some long winded story of how we came to our epiphany. We need to be sharp about getting to the point or we risk losing our audience. Ninety percent of the time should be devoted to telling the incident but we do it concisely.
We relive a vivid, personal experience relevant to the topic. When did it happen, who was there, where was it, what happened (establish who, what, when, where, why)?
Include animation and vocal variety. We next draw out the evidence. As part of the storytelling, we include the context behind the incident, as a way of backing up what we are saying. Audiences can disagree with our analysis of the ramifications of the incident but they cannot disagree with the incident itself.
At this point we make our recommendation. We specify what action we want our listeners to take. This component of the process represents only five percent of the time allocation.
The next five percent is when we provide the benefit of taking our recommended action. The whole piece is tight and compelling. Hearing the background forces the audience to come to their own conclusions about what they think should be done. Probably they will have come to the same conclusion we came to. This is an ideal outcome.
Here are some key pointsto remember in the magic formula
So think about an opportunity coming up where you can apply the magic formula to persuade others? Think about why you are making this recommendation to the audience. There is bound to be some context or a background reason why. Can you create a story which captures that context, so that the client can easily agree?
The ability to persuade people is one of the most critical business abilities but it is possessed by very few. Use these ideas and become one of the top 0.1% in business in Nippon.
Your War Stories In Your Presentation Are Boring
Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important. We often do this by telling our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully. When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing our audience. They are like lightening when it comes to escaping to the internet, to go find things they feel are more relevant.
We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and skeptics. We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying. The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our experiences. A great way to do this is telling our war stories. The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past. In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won’t they.
Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities. When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point. As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings. I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his adventures. He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something that happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo?
A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions. These are questions for which we don’t require an actual answer, but the audience don’t know that. This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise. Because of the question, they have to mentally go there themselves. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there.
Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences. In this case, the speaker’s example is just a prompt for them to identify with the situation being unveiled. This is better because they are relating the issue to their own reality. They can take the speaker’s example and either agree with it or disagree with it. Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts rather than opinion. We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting. Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do? Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”. We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client.
Talking about ourselves is fun but it is dangerous. How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to includE our war stories. If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us. If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end. This doesn’t happen by itself. We have to carefully implant it when designing the talk. It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal. Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience. Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all. Doubt that statistic? How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk? Case closed!
In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can go early. We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech. We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that’s right”. We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue. This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before. There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness about our talk too. It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration.
Successful Presentations Need Good Structure
It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time. It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees. After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign. The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him. He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years. He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic. So what went wrong?
Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue? When a speech doesn’t flow well, the audience has to work hard. Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you. This was one of those cases.
If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well. In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation. He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow. That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics. The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well. This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow.
We design our talks from the idea spark. In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience. This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity. We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming.
The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in. Think of the sections like chapters in a book. The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow. They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows. To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true? The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences. We need to get these down and then get them in order.
It might be a simple structure like “ this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future”. We could use a macro-micro split. This is the big picture and here are the details of the components. It could be advantage-disadvantage. We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing. It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right.
The key is in the sequencing. What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next? We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point. We can’t just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves. We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it.
Visuals on screen do assist in this process. It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience. When we don’t have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures.
So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction. What is the point you want to make? What are the reasons for that and turn them into chapter headings. Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow. Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention. If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience. Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.