Too smooth politicians, silky salespeople, urbane company thrusters all set off alarm bells.  We can meet impressive people and we can meet impressive looking people.  Over time we have learnt how to plumb the difference.  The world of presenting is made up of the top 1% who know what they are doing and the 99% who have no real clue.  The 99% group are often card carrying sceptics, who have finely tuned radar for anything that looks different to what they know.  Also, by definition this clueless 99% are our audience when we present.  Are we in danger of turning them off if we come across as too professional?

This is certainly the case in Japan.  Standing out and being outstanding are not welcomed here.  The most insightful cultural norm in Japan is captured in the traditional wisdom of “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down”.  Owning the auditorium, dominating the podium, being a powerful stage presence are all “nail sticking out” issues.  Looking supremely confident, being Mr. or Ms. Smooth, operating at a high level, are all viewed with suspicion.  We have a similar idea in the West. When we meet a “smooth talking salesperson” we get worried about them taking our money.

Japanese culture appreciates humility, harmony, group consensus, not putting yourself forward and modesty.  Hello to all of our American fans out there.  This Japanese viewpoint is absolutely the formula for not getting ahead in aggressive, competitive societies.  Interestingly enough, as an Aussie, I think this Japanese approach is close to our cultural norms too.  In Australian parlance, someone who “big notes” themselves is a self aggrandising, big talker and they won’t get very far Down Under.  A Donald Trump telling everyone how rich he is, how smart he is, would be impossible for an Australian politician to replicate.  As presenters, we operate within the bounds of our cultural rules and limits.

So how do we do a professional job of presenting in Japan, when the whole ethos is against the display of high levels of professionalism?  There is a difference between being very professionally prepared and being a boring oaf on stage.  Talking about yourself, except in terms of self-degradation, is out.  That means we frame what we say about ourselves from a more humble lens.  We do design a blockbuster opening though, to capture audience attention.  We do set up the flow of the talk, so that the navigation is simple and easy to follow.  We do provide evidence to back up any assertions we make.  We do prepare two closes, one for before and one for after Q&A.  We do rehearse numerous times to perfect the content, polish the cadence and make sure we are on time. In other words, we are a total professional in the way we prepare the presentation.

The friction points arise by the way we carry ourselves.  I have lived here for 36 years and I have never seen a Japanese presenter stride confidently to the podium or the microphone.  They walk slowly and hesitantly to the stage centre, stooping, wearing the greyest of the grey clothing, so they can be as boring as possible.  They open up immediately with a series of apologies, to establish that they are not superior to anyone in the audience, even if they are. 

I can’t see me doing any of that when I am presenting.  I will be a little more conservative in my dress, only because I don’t want a pocket chief or tie or shirt ,to compete with my message.  I won’t be bounding up on to the stage like a panther ready to devour my audience.  I will walk tall, with subdued confidence and go straight into my opening, without any time wasted on getting the tech right.  There will be no microphone thumping because I will have tested it all before the event started.  I won’t be fiddling around to get my slide deck up, because I will have someone else doing that for me, while I use those first few vital seconds to engage my audience.

I won’t be making any faux apologies for my poor preparation or poor public speaking ability, because I will be moving straight into explaining the value the talk will bring to the listeners.  I won’t be making flamboyant gestures or utilising any thespian artifices.  I will be business like and focused on helping people through the messages I am delivering.  The way I deliver the talk will be congruent with the content.  It won’t feel slick, but it will feel competent and that is what I want, in order to have my messages accepted.  I won’t attempt to be sardonic, cynical, use any idioms or try to be an amateur stand up comic.  By Western standards, I will come across, as an understated expert in my topic.  By Japanese standards, I will come across as a confident, but business like person, dedicated to their message for the audience.  I will have threaded the needle between the two extremes and that will be a good result.

English versus mathematics?  Easy choice for budding engineers at High School and for when they get to University.  Science is logical, knowable, understandable.  Presenting seems to have little in the way of science and more art involved, so best avoided.  Actually they do a pretty good job of avoiding it, until a certain stage in their careers.  These days clients want to talk to the engineers, so they have to front up and visit the buyer with the salesperson.  If the counterparty is another engineer, then the code is in place and everyone is fine.  Line managers, decision makers, CFOs are different beasts and more difficult.  Even more annoying is the client conducts beauty parades to decide which company’s engineers they are going to select.

This is where the skilled engineer who can present in a skilled way eats everyone’s lunch.  One engineer mumbles, rambles, doesn’t look confident and is struggling with basic coherence.  The other is clear, concise, in command of the material and making the key points like a legend.  Well, the choice for the buyer is made pretty easy.

In other cases, the engineers get promoted and have to represent their section to the senior leaders in the company.  This is often when we get a call.  “Can you help us please.  We have a great engineer leading the team but his communication skills and presentation skills are dismal and the senior leadership have tasked HR to fix the problem, by finding a training company who can help”. 

This sounds good but it is often a difficult task.  The major issue tends to be a lack of awareness around the importance and value of presenting.  These skills are soft skills rather than the hard skills, which their profession demands. They can see them as a bit “fluffy”.  Presentation skills are very much in the eye of the beholder too, so opinions can vary regarding what is a good presentation.  This lack of agreed, concrete measurable aspects can be an anathema to engineers.

Fluffy or otherwise, persuasion power is a real thing.  This requires good skills in the design of the talk, the gathering of evidence and in the delivery.  Design here means does the talk flow logically resulting in a clear conclusion, that is credible, because of the evidence assembled to support the main argument. 

Ace engineer or not, if we start the presentation with a lot of fiddling around with the tech, there is a strong chance our audience is distracted and reaching for their phones to find something more interesting to do.  We have to know that this is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism and attention spans are functioning at microscopic levels.  No matter how brilliant our evidence is, we will have lost many in our audience in those first few vital seconds, as we establish that first impression between speaker and listener.  Online is even worse because now everyone is granted a free license to multi-task in the background and ignore the speaker.

Our opening has to be a gripper, such that the audience want to hear more, they want to know where you are going with this presentation.  We must speak clearly and confidently.  Easier said than done for laconic engineers, who are not prone to speaking a lot.  Also, not doing a lot of presentations or probably, avoiding to do presentations, has left a confidence vacuum that is filled with nervousness.  Sounding confident to an audience when you are not requires a level of thespian ability, which is usually beyond the grasp of hard skill trained engineers.

Rehearsal is the saviour here and lots of it is required.  We don’t want to spend all of our time building the slide deck.  The delivery is what sells the message and that relates straight back to the fact we have to buy what we are saying first and then communicate that belief to the audience.  If we don’t understand the power of persuasion, we are likely to fluff off the rehearsal component of making the speech professional.

I have never been able to trace this supposed Japanese saying but it does sound good, “more sweat in training, less blood in battle”.  Let’s make our mistakes in practice, get the talk timing right, work on the cadence, the order and the delivery.  If we have the right mindset, then good things will happen and all of these other pieces of the puzzle will fit into place nicely.

Everyone is getting very swish with the tech these days, as we spend more and more hours in online meetings.  Consequently, we are more and more likely to find ourselves in a breakout room to discuss a topic.  When we first started doing this March 2020, as we ran our first LIVE On Line training, we discovered some disconcerting things about the medium.  In many cases they were disparate individuals from different companies and also sometimes disparate individuals from different sections of the same firm.  Initially, we found sending people who didn’t already know each other into breakout rooms perplexed them. For the breakout room captives, there was no hierarchy, no psychological safety and no trust.  Many times, three people in a breakout room would just sit there for three minutes and say absolutely nothing to each other. 

We learnt we had to set up some social order and ground rules for them.  We needed to tell them that a certain person will be in charge of the reporting for the group. That person will keep a record of the points raised and we also nominated another person to lead the discussion to create the points. This left everyone else to be a contributor, with the expectation they would do just that and respond to the leader’s request for their opinion.

We also found that groups were unclear about the exact point they were discussing.  We may have believed we explained it perfectly well, but often they were not sure what to talk about.  Part of the reason was that when they heard they were going into a breakout room with strangers, their minds stopped listening to the instructions.  Now they were focused on who would be in the group, how would they be perceived by strangers and how would they be judged for what they said in a public arena.  With all of this front and center in their minds, the details of the question had receded into the background.

So we asked for a green check or a show of hands, around who understood what was happening.  We would then call on some of those people to tell us the protocol for the breakout room and repeat back the question or issue they were going to discuss.

The third thing we found was that we had to enter each room and just check that there were no questions.  If there were none, then we would leave them to it and move to the next room to check.  Surprisingly, even with all of this formatting going on, we would still enter a room to hear stone cold silence, with no one playing their designated leader role.  If this was the case, we would become the leader and get the conversation going amongst the participants.

I thought this was just Japan, but lately I have joined a study programme run by a global online education organisation.  We were sent off to breakout rooms and it became obvious that most of the people participating from all around the world, really hadn’t a clue how to interact in that situation.  Part of it is language, as English was not the mother tongue FOR some of the participants.  However, many of the factors which applied in Japan were also in evidence around shyness, lack of hierarchy, being judged and trust.

So, if you are sent off to virtual oblivion in a breakout room, here are some tips on how to get the most out of the situation.  Seize that initial shy silence and be the one to introduce yourself and say where you are from.  Next, talk about how much you are looking forward to learning from the other members of the group.  “ I am not an expert in this area and so please give me feedback, if what I am saying makes no sense. Also, let’s all take full advantage of this chance to help each other grow.  So, who would like to get us going and give a comment on the question?”.  That takes about thirty seconds to explain.  If nobody feels sufficiently comfortable yet to kick things off, then you lead with your prepared comment.  I say “prepared comment”, because before this session you have gathered your ideas into a series of bullet points, which you can easily to talk to.  You are not trying to wing it and make stuff up on the fly.  Being prepared is much better than trying to be a spontaneous genius.  And the rest of us can tell the difference.

By being active and asking questions of others in the group, people start to feel more comfortable and free to express their ideas.  It is a good idea to praise people’s contributions, by saying, “Great insight there, referring to XYZ.  Could you go a bit deeper on that point please, I am keen to hear more”.

When you speak, be concise, clear and please don’t try to hog the airwaves.  Say your piece and then ask others for their ideas and comments.  In this way, your reputation as a person of value goes up and your humility is noted and appreciated.  No one enjoys the blowhard who wants to spend the majority of the time making sure everyone else has to listen to their voice.

“That has to come out”.  “Why?”.  “It might offend women in the audience”.  “But this example is totally in context with what I am saying”.  And so it went on.  This was my first bruising encounter with cancel culture.  Living in Japan this third time since 1992, I have been outside the cancel culture debates sweeping America.  Until now.  The speech I was going to give would be videoed and go global, including to America.  Perplexed, confused, insulted – these were the emotions I was confronting upon hearing I had to make that specific change to my speech.  It got me wondering about our ability as presenters to present our thoughts in public.  What does this mean for the future of public speaking?

Living in Japan, I had vaguely heard of cancel culture.  I understood it to be mainly centered on Universities where students were confronting their Professor’s ideas and comments they disagreed with.  I had read in the media about youthful tweets and social media postings coming back to haunt the authors many years later.  I cannot say I ever expected to be cancelled. 

The offending item was an image objectifying women in Japan.  A photo of a maid café young lady done up in a frilly miniskirt in fact.  At her request, I took my anime besotted teenage daughter to visit a maid café in Akihabara when she was visiting from Australia a number of years ago.  The image in the photo corresponded with the outfits I saw being worn by the staff, so the image in question was congruent with the maid café experience.  That is to say it reflected a reality, a truth, we can see any day of the week in Akihabara.  Apparently, such a confronting picture would be too much for women located outside Japan and in particular those living in the USA.

The speech topic was on Diversity and Inclusion in Japan.  The main issue here is gender inequality, although sexual orientation has become more prominent lately.  The context of this speech was that the comment by ex- Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori about women on boards talking too much, can be traced back to the Confucian idea of a woman’s place in society being there to serve men, throughout all stages of their lives.  The maid café photograph was an example of how these women are being objectified to serve male fantasies in the modern era and therefore, there is still a long way to go for women in business to achieve gender equity here in Japan.  The photograph was totally in context with the text and was not supporting the objectification of women, in fact the precise opposite.

So, being told it had to be removed was incomprehensible to me.  I argued about the photograph being in the context of the text and that the central argument I was making made it all congruent.  This next pushback  was the snapper for me:  “Women seeing the photo alone would be offended.  There was the danger they would not pick up on what you were saying in the video and may misinterpret your meaning”. 

“Wait a moment.  You are saying they are not smart enough, intelligent enough to discern the context of what I am saying and therefore the photograph and that paragraph have to be cut?”.  That struck me as being totally chauvinistic and condescending to women.  By now you will have worked out I was having this conversation with another man.  He reported back to me that he had discussed it with some female leaders in that organisation and the consensus was that I couldn’t include it.

Here is the dilemma we are going to face – do we agree with this cancel culture putsch or do we stand our ground.  I felt this was a matter of free speech, free expression and I really struggled with whether I should buckle under this request for removal pressure or should I fight. 

If I remove it unintelligent people win.  If I refuse to go ahead and recuse myself on the basis of the principle of free speech, unintelligent people win.  If I fight, then I create powerful enemies and get bogged down in the cancel culture wars.  Where is the line regarding what is acceptable and what is not?  Who is the arbiter of the line location?  How do we deal with committees making these decisions?  Are they representative of the masses or are they wannabe oligarchs calling the shots?

I removed it.  But I have been feeling very uneasy about that decision ever since.  I have so many thoughts flying around in my brain about this cancel culture issue and I cannot get them to fly in formation as yet.  This was an eye opener for me.  I often make the point that we speakers and presenters live in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.  It would appear we are also living in the Epoch of Cancel Culture.  What do we do?  Pick our fights?  Assemble the barricades on principle on every occasion?  Fight or fold?  I folded, but I regretted it. 

What about you?  When the cancel culture brown shirts turn up, what is your plan?  “What is that you say, no plan”.  Time for all of us who speak and present to make a plan, I would suggest.  If you have any bright ideas on resolving this enigma, please let me know!

Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world’s biggest corporations.  The topic was on building your personal brand. It was a good crowd.  Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded.  The talk was on how to project your brand “within” this gargantuan monster. How to climb their thousand foot greasy pole.  Before we started, I had “worked the room” pretty thoroughly, combing the ranks of the assembled professionals for any potential clients.  None of them worked for this type of colossus, so the speaker’s sage advice missed the mark entirely.  How could that be, I thought to myself?

Who Is In The Room?

One of the big mistakes for a presenter is not understanding who is going to be in the room.  At what level should you pitch your content?  Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes?  At the least, ask the organisers for the attendees company name and their positions. If our speaker had done that, it could have become more relevant to those who took the trouble to attend. 

Our Purpose Is?

We need to make a decision about what is the purpose of our talk.  Are we here to inform, entertain, inspire or persuade?  The hosts give us the overall theme. We now analyse our audience, so that we know what angle we should select.  In this previous case, it would have been to “inform” and in that sense the speaker got it right.  An inspire speech will be totally different to a persuade or entertain speech.  Think back to the presentations you have attended. What was the speaker’s approach? Was it just a jumble, a catch all effort?  I am putting my money on “jumble”.

First Three Seconds

We have three seconds to grab our audiences’ attention and create a positive first impression. It has to be powerful enough that they don’t seize their phones and escape from us to the siren calls of the internet.  Why three seconds?  Over the last five years I have been asking class participants, how long does it take you to form a first impression of someone new.  The answers used to range from five minutes to thirty minutes.  Today, they tell me three seconds, five seconds, fifteen seconds.  It is shocking how little time we actually have, so our opening has to be well planned or we will have lost the room.

The Age of Distraction and The Era of Cynicism. 

Audiences are quick to judge, slow to trust and fast to flee from our presentation. We need to have a blockbuster opening. Something that will stop them in their tracks. However, what do we see presenters doing with those first few vital moments?  They are not actively engaging their audience because they are head down, hunched over their laptop, fumbling with their slide deck to get it up on screen. At the next presentation you attend, count the number of first impression killers the presenter is exhibiting.  Have they managed to capture your total attention from the very first few seconds or are you reaching for your phone?

How To Begin

Rehearsal is such an obvious point, but it almost never happens with business presenters.  This one thing will change everything about how the talk is received and how you will be perceived.  Get there early and check all the equipment. Also have someone else load your slide deck for you, if it can’t be primed ready to go.  We need to be 100% present with our audience, so reduce all friction impeding that result. 

Begin by picking out someone in your audience half way back and around the middle of the venue.  Make direct eye contact with that person and for the next six seconds speak to them, as if you were the only two people in the room.  Then at random, move to the next person and just keep repeating this six second process for the entire presentation.  Why six seconds?  Anything less and it doesn’t give you enough time to engage that person one on one.  However, continuously staring at someone burns into their retina and becomes too intrusive.  We want to directly engage as many people as possible in the time we have, so our engagement time split is important.

Wrap Your Information In Stories

We want our message to be fondly recalled, savoured like a fine wine and fully imbibed by our audience.  Many speakers, particularly technical presenters, have deluded themselves into thinking the data is all. They believe they get a free pass on needing to be a proficient and professional presenter, because the quality of their information trumps everything else.  Not true. The audience will remember two things – you and the stories you told.  Sadly none of that cool data you have cavalierly tossed up on screen is retained. 

They will remember you as someone they would like to hear from again or not.  The data wrapped up in stories is the way to make sure your key points are heard and remembered.  Even if they are enjoying your talk, some in the audience have no shame about brandishing their phones to do some multi-tasking and surfing the internet.  Stories stop them in their tracks and they will switch back to us.  Here is the snapper though, how many speakers have you heard use stories well or at all?  If it is so effective, why are speakers just droning on about the details?  They just don’t know and it shows.

The good news is that the speaker proficiency bar is so low, we can easily shine by just avoiding some of these simple mistakes.  We make it hard for ourselves unnecessarily. We want to be a gold medal winner, but finish up being a prize dud.   The choice is yours, so which will you choose for your next presentation?  Why not go for being a winner, a presentations Olympian, every time you speak.