Waffle. This is the enemy of speakers and presenters. Ums and Ahs are obvious fillers. We all recognise them when we hear them and we know we have to do a better job to eliminate them. The more insidious waffle sneaks into our talks wholly uninvited and assassin like. The impact on the audience is immediate. They are lunging for phones to escape from you to a better place. Waffle camouflages our key message. It hides it like those fleshy vines you see in documentaries, which have engulfed and overwhelmed an ancient city, deep in the jungle. Yet we are oblivious to it.
We teach the Magic Formula for persuasion success. It requires the discipline to get your key action recommendation and the benefit flowing from that, down to five seconds each. Five seconds is a pretty unambiguous number, with zero wiggle room. Yet in the role play practice sessions we hear fifteen and twenty seconds action calls. Why is that? The direction was get the key point you want us to act on down to five seconds. Waffle is the human tendency. We are draw like suicidal moths to the flame of unnecessary elaboration.
Why do we limit the action and benefit statements down to just five seconds? Why not make them ten or fifteen seconds? The five second goals is a force of nature, that pushes you to become more succinct and much clearer. We are all babblers and just keep talking and talking. Usually, long after anyone continued listening and beyond making any intelligible crucial point. You have to winnow your words, to filter out the non-essential, to drive to the heart of the matter.
This is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so that people are now jointly poised to stop listening to you and to stop believing what you say. It is getting harder and harder to hold an audience’s attention, so we must get to the point quickly and in a way which is credible. Does that mean we should start with our action and benefit from the get go? It is a really great idea if you love to debate with your listeners and you enjoy the cut and thrust of fencing with critics.
The modern brain is deadly. Combined with our Darwinian education system of promoting winners and vanquishing losers, audiences have become demonic. As soon as you unfurl your conclusion, you will now be facing an army of arm chair confounders, discombobulaters and critics. They become totally deaf to the many and good reasons backing up your recommendation and their brains are on fire with the million reasons why this is a lousy idea. They may be rivals within the firm, flaky colleagues, bosses, picky clients or just smarty pants types who love to demonstrate how much smarter they are than everyone else in the room.
The genius part of the Magic Formula is that you don’t have to serve your own head up on a platter, to the raucous, uncouth and great unwashed mass of disparagers. Before you tell them your recommendation, you spice things up with context, background, evidence, testimonials and experience. I can disagree with your conclusions drawn from the context, but I cannot easily disagree with the context itself. This is very handy, because it forces everyone to get the background, before they run off half-cocked dissing your idea. The key is not to waffle on and on in the context explanation.
The background needs to be tight, to the point, rich in evidence and perspective. If not, those business school types who confuse written communication with oral offerings, will go after you saying “get to the point”. True, an executive summary comes at the start of the written document. Just don’t re-produce this B-school model in your presentations. That is a guarantee of disaster.
Give them the background first, tight, taut, and terrific. Then tell them what they should do next and why it is good for them. This disarms critics. When you are telling the context, these overactive thrusters will be racing ahead to their own conclusion from the evidence. This is when you ambush them with your call to action. Most likely it will be the exact same conclusion they came to, based on the same context, background and evidence. What a sweet feeling to take the wind out of the sails of enemies, wannabes, nasty bosses and picky buyers.