One consistent issue which often pops up within companies requesting our training is achieving persuasion power with colleagues, bosses and subordinates. Being unable to convince others to follow your requests, ideas and suggestions is highly frustrating. Often the issue is how the topic is approached. In this “time is money”, no patience, miniscule concentration span, twenty four/seven scramble, people drive you to get to your point. If you are giving a presentation the big boss might bark out “Story, get to the point”. We are taught at business school to start with the punchline and get that into the Executive Summary, right at the front of the document. That is fine except it is ineffectual when presenting in person.
The punchline may be an excellent idea – “let’s increase the marketing budget by $1 million to fund campaigns to coincide with the end of Covid”. The problem though is that the punchline is naked and has no protection attached. As soon as we offer a statement, we suddenly transform our neutral audience into a raving band of doubters, sceptics, naysayers and critics. Fair enough too, because we didn’t land the punchline properly. Comedians don’t start with the punchline. They set it up, they build the mental pictures for us so we can see the scene in our mind’s eye. They plug in plenty of context, add interesting characters, nominate a location and secure the build up in a temporal frame for us.
When the punchline is unveiled it is congruent with the set up, makes a lot of sense and we laugh. Why on earth serious, well educated business people would imagine they can just throw the punchline out there, with no context, background, proof, evidence, data and statistics is a bit of a mystery. But they do just that and then get cut to ribbons by the baying crowd of non-believers.
Our communication skills have to be good enough that briefly, we can build the basis for the punchline. If we do a good job, the members of the audience are all sitting there thinking “we should fund a campaign to coincide with the end of Covid”, before we say anything about it. The lead up has been so well constructed that given the background, the best way forward occurs to everyone as the most obvious thing needed.
We have to keep it brief though. Storytelling is a big part of this, but these are “short stories”, not War and Peace tome like equivalents. If we labour the point or go too long with the background, some grumpy attendees are bound to tell us “get to the point”. So we need to have enough context, supported with tons of evidence, which draws out the needed next step. When we explain what comes next, everyone feels they already thought of that answer by themselves. This is guaranteed to get agreement to the proposal.
The way we get to the structure of the talk is to start with the action we want everyone to agree to. Having isolated out the action we investigate why do we think this? What have we read, heard, seen, experienced something, which tells us this is the best solution. There must be a reason for what we are recommending. All we need to do is capture that information and add in the people they know, a place they can see in their mind, put it all in a time frame and definitely add in data, evidence and proof to back up what we are saying.
We start with the background and then we reveal the punchline but we don’t stop there. Recency is powerful, so we want to control what is the last thing our audience hears. We top it all off with stating the benefit of the action. The action/ benefit component must be very short. There needs to be one clear action, so that everyone can understand what we need to do. Also, while there may be many benefits, we only want to mention the most powerful one. If we keep piling on the benefits we begin to dilute their power with too much detail. Clarity must be the driving ambition here. If we put it into mathematical terms then 90% of the time we speak should be devoted to providing the richest context possible and 5% each for the action and benefit.
If we are doing a good job then by the time we blurt out the punchline the audience will be thinking “that is old hat, I knew that, that is obvious”. If we can engender that reaction then we have done our job well. Brief but powerful, clear and convincing - these should be our objectives.
Clients have some common problems with their Japanese leaders. I know this because the same requests keep coming up. This is across industries and companies and it is consistent. Usually Japanese presenters are excellent at assembling lots of data and information. They can really pack a lot into a few slides. When they present it is like a waterfall of wonderous content, just flowing forth, without much structure or clarity. Somehow the bosses have to work out the key points for themselves, because the staff’s job focuses on accumulating hoards of data and then putting it all up on screen. The presenter is almost invisible, has low energy, speaks in a quiet voice you can struggle to hear and blends well into the wall paper. This doesn’t work so well in international meetings and Japan looks weak and ineffectual to the rest of the far flung company world.
We are battling two giants here. One is the educational system and the other is Japanese culture. I earned my Masters Degree here in Tokyo, so I have seen up close and personal what a high school education prepares you for and what universities do with that raw clay. An argument could have been made, prior to the advent of the internet, that the ability to memorise vast quantities of information and regurgitate it on command was a serious capability. We can find any thing very quickly today thanks to search engines, so having to memorise gobs of stuff isn’t as important as it once may have been.
I see it in my son’s education when he was at international High School here. They were required to have laptops and everything was done online. His generations’ issue is there is too much information. How do you find the best and correct data, how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? Young people are digital natives, but they are all drinking from the firehose of all data every recorded, sitting just a few clicks away.
We teach our students to start at the end. Define in as short a sentence as possible, the most important key message you want to impart. This is not as easy as it sounds. You have to be brutal with yourself. You have to eliminate all the nice to have, all the interesting to have and refine it down to the must have. Just throwing up a lot of data on screen doesn’t require as much thinking, as refining the data into the gold nuggets for the audience. Discerning the key message then allows us to build the structure for the argument and to align the necessary evidence in order to be convincing to our audience.
The first words coming out of our mouth have a powerful role. Everyone seems easily distracted today, have miniscule concentration spans and are quickly bored. So we need to say something that really breaks through that wall of indifference and grab their attention. There is no point launching that blockbuster opening in a squeaky, unsure, timid little voice. People will be flying for their phones to escape you. No, we need a strong voice, standing or sitting tall if online, when we kick things off. We have to be oozing confidence.
“But Story san, my English is so poor, I have no confidence”. This is another trope we often hear. Here we have Japanese perfectionism, no defect, no errors and no mistake culture colliding with the Education Department’s failed efforts to teach the population English. Don’t accept that excuse. No one cares about linguistic perfection in business meetings, except the Japanese staff when they have to speak in English. Give them the “no grammar needed” escape jail card for the meetings, to give them permission to speak without fear and let the rest of us work out what it is they want to say. We are used to this and are all pretty good at it.
Just being able to isolate the key take away and deliver that in a confident manner will be a revolution to business meetings where Japanese have to present. Not having to wade through all the dross to understand the key point will be a relief. Having one idea per slide will be a life saver for everyone – make this the iron rule for Japanese presenters. This forces the selection of only the most important information to be shown. The result will be a much clearer messaging effort and greater clarity around what exactly is that message. Confidence sells the message, so the delivery has to be sold in that manner.
Rehearsal is critical for Japanese speakers and so is coaching. This applies to whatever language they are presenting in, because you can guarantee the issues will be present in both languages to a great extent. When giving feedback to anyone, only look at two elements and tell them what they are doing well and then tell them how they can do it even better. This will build confidence and create a momentum that will maximise capability. What does all of this cost? Nothing, so let’s get to it.
Once upon a time, we taught public speaking and presentation skills in a class room, with tons of people all seated together, right next to each other. We moved to teaching everything LIVE On Line since February 2020, so what has been the difference? Surprisingly, not as much as we expected. The one big difference is the lack of opportunity to employ full body emphasis when presenting, because everyone is mainly sitting in front of a screen. You can use a standing desk, but even so, the camera will cut you off at the thigh level, so we are not getting the full body power. There are a few tricky things about gestures when using fake backgrounds, which by the way seems to be standard now. What are the things that stand out most in the online presenting environment?
Smiling is definitely one which has disappeared, when people are on screen. I don’t know why that is the case. Perhaps we are more self conscious in front of a camera? Or is this now such a serious business world that smiling is out of fashion? Think of any online meeting you have attended recently and ask yourself was anyone smiling when they made their comments or gave their reports? I was teaching a class on presenting skills online recently and what a difference it made when people would smile during their talks. Not every subject lends itself to smiling of course but there are bound to be good news in there somewhere and that is the time to trot out that big smile of yours. It is congruent with the content of the talk, so it works. It is also such a connector with the audience, it really drives up the engagement factor with an audience.
We have all been doing these online meetings for 18 months now, yet most people still haven’t mastered the medium. I know it is difficult, because the camera lens is 10 centimetres above the faces on the screen. However, take a look at the eye line of the participants in the next meeting. How many are framed in the screen so that there is a half body showing and their head is at about two thirds height on camera? Many will still have their heads cut off and they are arranged at the very bottom of the screen, like they have been decapitated. Or they will have the camera lens angle shooting straight up their nostrils – not an attractive look that one.
When we get the camera lens at eye line and we speak while looking at the camera, we are now using the medium as it was designed. The camera can bring us into the world of the viewer and we can be speaking directly to them through the lens. When we are looking down at the faces on screen we have broken off eye contact and we seem like we are looking down on everyone. It is the equivalent of giving a face to face speech without ever looking at your audience, in fact you are speaking to the floor, the whole time. Now I have seen speakers actually do that, but it is totally ineffective. The same with the online world – talk to the people through the lens and you will get your message across much more impressively.
We mainly use our voices when presenting online. Yet what about gestures? Gestures can support what we are saying by bringing more physical energy to the point. If you have framed yourself properly then you can use your hands on screen. There are a few best practices though. Firstly, don’t wave your hands around, because the fake backgrounds will disappear them at certain points. So, hold your hands at between shoulder and head height, so that they can be easily seen and hold the gesture rather than trying to move it too much. Also, if you want to show some item on screen, use your own body as the shield and show it in front of you. The fake background won’t be able to disappear it on you when you do it this way.
Most people I see online, are using the same speaking voice range they use all the time in the in-person world. When we are presenting we are no longer a part of the audience – we are on stage, be it in a venue or online. That means we need to bring a lot more energy to what we are saying, in order to attract the audience to our message. When we are online, we also need to compensate for the fact that the camera will sap 20% of our power and we will come across as having less energy that usual. You may have noticed that most people speaking online sound like they are on “downers”. We need to get that voice energy up and start directing at it a key words we want to emphasise in our sentences. Not every word in a sentence has the same value, so we need to pick out key words and phrases and make them hot, by hitting them harder.
Most online presenters have a long way to go with this medium. The experience gained over the last year or so, hasn’t improved them, actually. They are still making fundamental mistakes. These can be easily corrected and it just takes greater awareness and some practice to get it right. So let’s think again about what we are doing here and how we are doing it. Apply these ideas and you will immediately be in the top 1% of online presenters, simply because everyone else is clueless, hopeless and way underpowered.
“Naomi Osaka would have earned at least $200,000 dollars if she made the Top 16 in the French Tennis Open and would have had a $1.7million payday, if she won the tournament. Speaking to the media after each round, is why she gets paid the big bucks, so she should harden up and get to work”. Some other commentators have focused on her “bravery to talk about her mental depression and her decision to forego the money, to take care of her mental health”. I don’t fit neatly into either category really, because I get the “part of the job” responsibility in her chosen profession and I also salute her for talking about her mental health struggles, as a 23 year old young woman, facing a cynical, mercenary sports press. For me, although she may be a sportswoman, her issues also apply to the businessperson who faces the very same dilemmas. You are getting paid to represent the firm in the public arena, even if it is killing you.
I am not an expert on Naomi Osaka, but I do recall reading her comments about a year ago about her disinterest in becoming a skilled public speaker. At the time, I thought that was a curious idea for someone in her line of work. It is typical though isn’t it. We start working in our chosen career and then as we rise through the ranks, we are given greater responsibilities and that includes speaking in front of others. Did we sit down at a young age and survey our future career path and conclude that at some point in time, if we do well, we will have to give internal presentations, deal with the press, handle shareholders or represent the company by giving public business speeches. No! We just went to work every day and then one fateful day, the bell rang or the alarm went off and we had to make that first talk.
I doubt whether leading tennis academies allocate any time to instructing their future stars on how to deal with the press, sponsors or the public. It is the same in companies. No one ever thinks about investing in your future, by training you on how to handle speaking in public. In the same way that this inability or choice to not deal with the requirements to speak in public could be a career ending outcome for Naomi, it can also mean we are passed over at work, in favour of those silky smooth, confident, more professional speakers inside the firm.
Recently she wrote about withdrawing from the French Tennis Open, “I am not a natural public speaker and get waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media”. I read in the press that she is worth $77 million, from sponsorships etc. She has the money to get media training, presentation training and every other form of training needed to enable her to become a master of her environment and be able to deal with the gutter sports press. Are businesspeople investing in themselves to become masters of their environment? No. Like Naomi they are just suffering.
No one is born a natural public speaker. I know this to be true. For the first 30 years of my life, I was terrified of public speaking. Like a whipped dog, I hid in the shadows, praying I would not be called upon to speak in public. As I rose through the ranks in my career, there came that point, that day, when the bell rang and I had to get up and speak to an audience. Did I go and get training? No! It was some number of years before I took the plunge and got the training. When I had the training, what did I think about it? I immediately realised I was an idiot and I should have done this when I was much, much younger and at the start of my career. Now, over 500 public speeches later, I enjoy it.
What was different between the old me and the new me? My mindset changed and I stopped embracing my fears and inadequacies. I stopped running away from the inevitable. The training gave me skills and the coaching brought out my confidence. Repetition did the rest. But your mindset has to be right to be able to get the training and to access the repetition. Naomi Osaka is seven years younger than I was when I did my first talk. I hope someone looking after her gets her a good coach and she can slay this public speaking demon limiting her career. If you are in business and that same demon is confronting you, get the training and slay your career limiters too.
Video is tricky. However, it looks so simple. You just stand in front of the camera and give your talk. I don’t know why video saps twenty percent of our energy when it is actually broadcast, but that seems to be the accepted wisdom. That means that just speaking normally into camera will now look a lot less energetic. Getting the delivery to be fluent is also a challenge. Either we do it free style or we use a teleprompter. Both have their challenges. What do we do with our hands? This is an interesting one, because the camera lens seems to have some magic power to reduce our gesture self awareness to zero, until that is, when we see it played back in all its gory glory.
I broadcast three TV shows on YouTube every week, so I am doing a lot of video work. My first weekly TV show was kicked off nearly four years, so I have gained a few insights over that time. I am not from the media world or have any background in television. I am a typical businessman who got into this by accident and so it is all pretty much self taught through exposure, practice and repetition. Yes, I have the advantage of being a High Impact Presentations instructor for Dale Carnegie, but presenting to a live audience and doing it on video is totally different. Everyone has discovered this fact since we all moved home, to spend a lot of our time in Zoom meetings or their equivalent.
I also teach people how to present to the camera and I have noticed a few things. Invariably their energy is too low. They are transferring their usual speaking volume to this medium and it doesn’t work. They appear lifeless and boring. No problem, speak louder, right? That is what I thought too, but I noticed a lot of people find that daunting. For them speaking with 50% more energy feels like they are screaming. Remember we are subtracting 20% immediately to counter the camera lens energy deficit, but on top of that they need to bring even more energy to the talk. If I ask for 50% more energy, invariably I will get about a 10% increase. This is why having an instructor or coach is handy, because you can’t easily work this out by yourself.
Gestures seem to be another area of mystery. What do I do with my hands? The most common choice is to do nothing with them. This is a big missed opportunity to bring physical power to support your verbal message. I have found there is a 15 second window to hold the same gesture. More than that and it become weaker and weaker and more and more annoying. The gestures need to be coordinated with what we are saying, so that they are congruent. If what we are saying and the way we are saying it don’t align properly, then our audience gets distracted. Once upon a time, the distracted audience would be by focusing on our voice or our apparel. Now it is on their phone. For half body video composition, we need the gestures to be held between rib height and the head height, so that they can be easily seen. For some curious reason, a lot of people hold their gestures at low waist level and apart from being difficult to see, this bit usually gets cut off in the editing process.
What we are doing with our face also is important. Having one facial expression may be very energy efficient, but it looks wooden on video. Our face should be showing what we are talking about. If results are good, then look happy. If they are bad, then look concerned. If you ask a rhetorical question, then look puzzled. I think you get the idea. One thing the camera doesn't like is when we drop our chin down, while we are talking. It looks like we are talking down to our audience, we also look very constrained. So we need to keep that chin up the whole time. Try it for yourself and you will be amazed at the difference it makes, to how we come across to our audience.
If we are just speaking off the top of our head, then we had better be pretty good or the video will be butchered in the editing process, as we have to stitch all those corrected mistakes together. It becomes very jerky in the final version, which is super distracting from our message. Zooming in and zooming out at these edits makes it appear less choppy, but you still don’t want too many of these to have to contend with.
Teleprompters can fix this and a bit of adjusting for font size and speed is needed to find the right balance. The secret here is to only look at the left side of the screen as the words roll up. Otherwise, you will find yourself reading from left to right and on screen you will look like you are reading it. This rather defeats the purpose doesn’t it. Have a look at my shows on YouTube and see if you can tell I am reading it off a teleprompter? Remember, our peripheral eyesight is good enough to focus on the left side and still read the words which are on that same line off to the right.
Video is a different game and we need to make this medium a winner for us. Try these hints for yourself and your image and impact will be much improved.
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.
This is horrible. Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking? I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation’s finances and he is doing a woeful job of it. They have a dedicated Coms team, there are talented people in the leadership group, so I am asking myself how could this train wreck come to pass? I was also thinking, “you should have called me, I could have saved you a lot of wasted opportunity with your messaging”. Too late now, the video is out there for all to ignore. This is a classic case of people who don’t spend any time appreciating the importance of communication and presentation skills, suddenly going for the big ask and then falling flat on their face.
It was serious subject, a heavy subject and the background chosen for the video was given zero thought. When you are asking for a truckload of dough for a project, you want the background oozing with solid credibility. You need to look Presidential, capable, considered and trustworthy. That lightweight scene setting wasn’t given much thought but the talking head only occupies a small part of the screen. Having people moving around in the background distracts us from the key message. No one thought about that either. They should have told those people to buzz off for ten minutes, so the video could get done.
The camera saps twenty percent of our energy. If you are a low energy leader, you can come across as cadaverous. You need to ramp up the speaking power. If the message requires convincing people about spending more money, then you really need to amp it up, to come across as confident, considered and competent. The body language, gestures and voice modulation need to be on point. Hitting key words is a must, as are carefully thought through pauses. We need these to allow the audience to absorb what we have just said. Rolling thoughts over the top of each other leaves the viewers lost.
The camera is also unforgiving. If you can’t hold its gaze, then you look like a shifty Souk merchant trying to sell us some dodgy, dud stuff. You have to look straight into the camera barrel and keep looking at it the whole time. You don’t want to be sitting too close to the camera when you are doing this though. A massive close up of your dial isn’t going to work for most people, so better to back up a bit. It also allows for gestures to be used and more importantly, to be seen.
Looking away, looking down and looking at your notes are a no no. If it is an important occasion, a key topic, the big ask, then do what the world’s leaders have learnt – use the teleprompter. You need to refine the script and then read it, word perfect, while looking straight into the camera lens the whole time. This takes some practice, some effort in the preparation, rather than just pulling up a chair and free styling in front of the camera for a “once over lightly” approach to a serious subject.
I will never forget a gorgeous young American woman I saw on YouTube. She was the complete package. She was teaching people how to use the teleprompter. However her eyes were obviously reading across the screen left to right following the text. You don’t want that. You need to be able to zero in on the lens and read the text at the same time. That takes some time to get right. You also have to play around with the teleprompter speed setting as well, to find the right cadence for your talk.
There were no gripping stories to give us hope. Just a dry rendition of what he wanted to tell us. The visuals were not clever. Cherry picking the minimum damage case smacks of the carnival barker and snake oil salesman. Show us the real numbers, so there is more honesty about the proposition here for us to consider. He was trying to be too clever by half and failing miserably.
Our errant, non-persuading persuader really murdered the message. Once it is done, it is out there. His personal and professional brands both took a massive hit thanks to that video. His messaging missed the mark and I doubt people will be persuaded to join him on his programme.
I am not super opposed to his offering, I get it, but I am vaguely insulted by the lack of professionalism. If he can't get this right, how can I expect he can get anything else right. It is the remaining coffee stain on the pull down tray in the aircraft when you board, that gets you worrying about whether they can actually do a professional job on engine maintenance if they can’t get this simple thing right, why should I trust them with complex things?
There is no excuse for this exercise in bungled communications. In this day and age there is so much information available on presenting skills, it is staggering. For example, in my own case, I have broadcast over two hundred and twenty pieces on the subject, for free, over the last four years. Don’t allow yourself to become part of the casualty ward of failed suicidal persuaders and communicators inflicting mortal harm to their brand, through lack of awareness and preparation. Get the training now, so that when it is time to step up and be counted, you can carry it off with aplomb.
There are 13 common mistakes which prevent presenters from owning the room. Here they are - don't do these things!
Succeeding Shintaro Abe as Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga has now been thrust into the public arena in a new dimension. When he was the Cabinet spokesman, he made a valiant effort to say as little as possible at press briefings, be defensive and always treat journalists with complete disdain and disregard. He didn’t need to be appealing or a good speaker, because his job was to look down the whole time read from the prepared script in a monotone and obfuscate at all turns. Actually, he was the “black hole” of public speaking, drawing all of the press energy into the void and just extinguishing it. Maybe you will replace your boss one day and have to take over the role of representing the organization to the wider world. Can you do a better job than Suga?
Keiko Ishikawa, a public relations consultant, was quoted in the media noting Suga’s choice of vocabulary is “not that bad”. Rather it is “how he attempts to convey the words that is the problem”. The role of second fiddle mouthpiece for the Abe Cabinet and being the Prime Minister in your own right, require substantially different skills. Actually, there are few skilled public speakers in business, government and politics in Japan, so Suga blends in nicely with the ineptitude and many failings of his peers and colleagues. The problem is that being hopeless like everyone else does not help you to be persuasive.
Ishikawa noted, “As his facial expressions and words and phrasings almost never vary, there’s no strength in his eyes. We can’t understand what he wants to emphasis and where his heart is”. Robotic would be a good descriptor of his approach to public speaking. Yes, I appreciate that Japanese is a monotone language but that is no excuse, although many will volunteer it to justify their personal lack of ability. Even in Japanese, we can pull the twin levers of speed and strength to gain vocal variation and this is open to Suga too, but he chooses to drone on instead. We know he is bad, but how about you? If we recorded your talk, would it be a deadly monotone, driving everyone deep into slumberland?
Professor Mehrabian’s research in the 1960s flagged the issue of the way we speak not matching the content of the words being a problem. When we are not congruent, only 7% of our message is getting through to the audience. As a speaker, achieving only a 7% success rate of verbal message transmission should get you fired from your job! With Suga and many other leaders in Japan, facial expressions are wooden from start to finish. If it is bad news, then look worried and if it is good news, then look happy. Those reactions would be congruent. Suga is not doing that, so he is giving up a tremendous persuasion tool – his facial expressions. Our face is a million watts more powerful than any slide deck on screen.
Ishikawa also complained, “His articulation is bad and could be improved by practicing moving his mouth, speaking clearly and changing the tempo of his speech”. The fundamental issue here is there is no interest or will to be a clear communicator. He was the master of obfuscation in his former job and he has carried that like a badge of honour into his new role. The Liberal Democratic Party has a very comfortable majority and no real challenge from the opposition parties, so a sense of entitlement is strong in their ranks. “Who cares about being a good public speaker, because the punters are going to have to vote us back in anyway, so whats the problem?”.
The will to persuade listeners is a fundamental professional skill requirement. We see so many Japanese business executives, just like Suga, pathetically going through the motions reading their speeches, with no passion for their talk. In some cases, they may want to do a better job, but they worry if they slip out of lockstep with the rest of their hopeless colleagues and do a professional job, they will draw negative comments. I was coaching a new President to give his first key speech to the company’s stakeholders. The content was terrible. Dry, boring and devoid of any life or interest. He rejected the proposed changes to improve it, because he didn’t think his audience would accept a professional version of his talk. He was limiting himself in order to blend in with everyone’s zero level expectations of a professional speech. In Japan, this becomes a self-perpetuating nightmare, where the entire country’s leadership remain duds when it comes to public speaking.
There may be hope with the next generation. The much younger Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi was not very good at public speaking at the start of his political career. The difference was he became serious about his communication skills. He studied rakugo (traditional storytelling) and listened to recordings of his own talk and speeches. He made an effort to improve his presentations. Today he is a million times better than his boss and is talked of as a future Prime Minister.
Japan’s politicians, bureaucrats and business executives are not your role models. The lesson is that in the Kingdom of the Blind, the one eyed man is King. When you see everyone is aping Suga and his ilk, when it comes to professional presentation skills, run a mile in the opposite direction. Rather, become professional, persuasive, gain self confidence and have presence when you speak. How do you do that? Like the rest of us, get trained!.
It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain. As someone wise once noted, “if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with who you told what”. Presenting is something similar. Maintaining a fiction in front of an audience takes a lot of skill. In fact, if you have that much skill, why worry about faking it in the first place? Well, there is a place for fakery when presenting, but we need to know when is appropriate.
We know that the way we think about things influences how we well we do. Imposter syndrome is a common state of mind though amongst people, across a broad range of situations. You might write a blog and put it up on your website, or waffle away on Clubhouse or pontificate to an audience, live or online. But who are you to talk about this subject? Are you saying anything worthwhile or just regurgitating what far cleverer people have already said? Do you really know this subject? Is your experience valuable or even relevant to others? Are you really qualified to give advice to people running far bigger organisations that your own?
Looking over that list, it can be enough to scare you off emerging from the deep depths of your comfy comfort zone ever again. So, we have to create a positive mindset that “yes”, we have every right to address this subject area, even if we feel a fake when compared to other more famous or clever people. The funny thing is they suffer the same imposter syndrome too, relative to their illustrious peers. Academics, for example, are generally a put upon group, because they have to publish their research to get ahead in their careers. When they publish it, they are now exposing the weaknesses of their intellectual process, their inadequate research ability or their dubious writing skills, to the entire expert community in their area of defined speciality.
Confidence warrants confidence. If we sound and look confident, most people are likely to ignore the emperor has no clothes and is not perfect. They will be carried away with our enthusiasm for our subject, with our passionate belief in our findings and our commitment to share the knowledge. The problems crop up when we become nervous speaking in front of others. Normally, we are quite even keeled and confident, but with all of those beady sets of eyes drilling holes into us, we start to wobble. Suddenly, our imposter syndrome fears come flooding forth and soon our usual cool, calm, collected façade is torn to shreds, as we are exposed as a self doubting, insecure, fake.
Now how would the audience know we are a fake? Well, we very helpfully tell them, by saying daft things like, “I am rather nervous today”. Or “I am not very good at presenting”. Or “I didn’t have much time to put this presentation together and I am afraid it won’t be very good” and any other of the motley collection of dubious, sympathy seeking, self-serving, cop out proclamations. Do us all a favour and keep all of this imposter syndrome stuff to yourself. Here is a secret - we all want you to succeed.
If you are nervous presenting then fake it, such that you appear at least “normal”, rather than being reduced to a quivering tower of jelly on stage. If your knees are knocking from the nerves, then stand behind the podium until you feel more comfortable to walk around. If your hands are shaking and you have to hold a microphone, use both hands and draw it on to your chest, so that your body secures the erratically jiggling instrument. If your throat is parched, then have warm, room temperature rather than iced water, close by and drink it when you need it. The iced water constricts your throat and you don’t want that, so forgo the usual venue offered beverage and request the no ice alternative. If you begin to speak and instead of a mellifluent note, out pops a constrained, awkward, embarrassing squeak, then clear your throat and try again. If you stumble on the pronunciation of a word, try again. If you get the speech points order mixed up or miss one, then fake it and keep going, offering not a hint of anything untoward occurring.
If you act enthusiastically, you will become enthusiastic. If you act confidently, you will become confident. Yes you might be nervous, but as Winston Churchill said, “if you are going through hell, keep going”. That is the point. No matter what happens, the show must go on and that means you must keep going. If it is a disaster, then dust yourself off and climb back in saddle. As the Japanese saying goes, nana korobi ya oki (七転び八起き) - “fall down seven times, get up eight times”.
I was watching an “expert” giving a series of video instruction modules on leading dispersed teams, now that many of us are working from home. I thought this will be useful and maybe I can pick up a few ideas for myself. It was a rather pedestrian affair I have to say and in one part, dangerously incorrect. The instructor claims to have a Ph.D., so presumably has done some major original research to warrant that degree. Shoveling misinterpretations of research done by other academics into the public domain about first impressions is quite shocking. It is even more jarring when that instructional course commands a payment of our hard won cash.
We have many opportunities to create a first impression. Meeting someone for the first time at a networking event is a mini-presentation of your personal and professional brand. Talking to people at the venue, before you go up to the podium to give your talk after the luncheon is another example. Appearing on audio or video live stream and in recorded content are also in that same category. Obviously presenting on stage or virtually are the arenas given the most attention for building first impressions. Let’s take a look at all of these in turn and also put our “expert’s” fake news to the sword.
Meeting someone in a crowded noisy networking environment is a tough one. Fortunately in Japan, we exchange our meishi or business cards, so that we have the name and details about what they do. Counterintuitively, in these situations we should say little. Many thrusters imagine they need to dominate the air, hog the conversation and talk continuously about themselves. To build a solid first impression, start with a smile when you meet the person as you shake hands or bow and keep smiling as you hand over the meishi. Smiling implies warmth, friendliness and confidence. We like all of those in strangers.
Next ask them about what they do, why they do it, how long they have done it, where are they from etc. Why? We want to hear about them. In this process they feel good to talk about themselves and to respond to our questions about their glorious past, present or future. As they speak, we can often find commonalities that make it easier for us to connect as strangers. Also, as we learn more about them, we are in a better position to appreciate who they are.
When it is our turn, we should be brief and try to draw out our shared experiences if we have found any. We should also get back to getting them to talk about themselves as soon as possible. Their first impression about us will be someone who is considerate, polite, interested in them and a “good conversationalist”.
When we are on Clubhouse we are live, so there can be no Take Two. This is a one shot chance to speak to the whole world during that session. Again, smile when you are speaking. The audience cannot see the smile, but they can feel it. Don’t go on Clubhouse without a plan. Talking about the first thing that pops into your head is why most of the conversation on Clubhouse is rubbish. Have a small number of bullet points you will discuss so that you can navigate the audience through your content. Rehearse the points beforehand so you eliminate ums and ahs, hesitations, monotone delivery and a thousand other horrible deviations from a good talk. Start with confidence and speak more loudly than normal to overcome the limitations of the platform. Get a timer and set it to three minutes maximum, so you are forced to be clear and concise.
Live in person requires us to carefully choreograph the first few minutes of the talk. Get there early and check all of the tech. Have someone else load your slide deck or fire it up for you at the start of the talk. You want to be standing in the middle of the stage away from the laptop, engaging your audience from the beginning of your impressive introduction by the MC. Start with a teaser opening. Some comment which will break into the already packed minds and attention spans of the audience and have them sit up and listen carefully to what you have to say. Next, introduce yourself and thank the organisers, before you get into the speech proper.
Recorded podcasts and videos can be edited, so our first impression sins can be washed away in the editing suite. Live streaming though is a different story. The start of these live video sessions is always a nightmare. When you are doing it all solo, it is very hard to time the start properly and so it is easy to appear awkward and clunky. Some systems are live as soon as you hit the record button and others have a brief count down until they start. Having you all set up ready to go by having someone else hit the start button is best. With Zoom calls etc., you can keep the audience in the waiting room until you are ready to go, so that is more easily controlled.
The fake news of the instructor mentioned earlier is that our first impression is formed 55% from dress, 38% from voice tone and 7% from what we say. You may have heard these dubious numbers bandied about before. Professor Albert Mehrabian, who published this research in the 1960s, added an important caveat to those numbers. This important qualification was entirely missing from the content the supposed “expert” was touting. Mehrabian said these numbers apply only when what we say is incongruent with how we say it. Our facial expression and body language have to match up with the content of what we are saying. If it doesn’t, our audience gets distracted and do not focus on the message anymore. They are more consumed by how we dress and how we sound.
First impressions in any context should be planned rather than left to random happenstance. This is your personal and professional brand we are talking about here and they are much too important to treat lightly or be compromised. Beware of non-expert “experts”. The barrier to entry for offering online learning coursesis zero and often that is the value of the content too.
When I read this quote from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon from 1971 that “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention” I thought about its ramifications for presenters. Today, we are firmly swimming against a King tide of information overload, so Simon’s dystopian prophecy has come to fruition. This is the Age of Distraction for audiences. They are gold medal winning poor listeners and yet we have to present to them. We know that storytelling is one sure fire way to snaffle their attention and yet that path is littered with landmines.
Very few business presenters tell stories at all in their talks. They are enamoured with their high quality content. Which usually means the results of surveys, research or data collation. Data is rarely strong enough to linger long in our memories. This is because usually there is a ton of data, each morsel, each three decimal tidbit vanquishing the one before and so on and so on, until we recall nothing, as Simon predicted.
Business presenters imagining their data is enough are fooling themselves, because their messages are not breaking through that wall of distraction and that poverty of attention. For the few who do tell stories they are freelancing, going free style with no structure. They just relate what happened. What is the point of the story? Is the delivery getting the key messages in front of the audience in a way that they will remember it? Are the listeners seeing any relevance for themselves in this story?
Where do we start with the story? Do we get straight to the point, do we go to the key take away? “Hey, get to the point”. We often hear this from bosses and we mistakenly follow that direction with our storytelling. Why is it a mistake? We have to grasp the fundamental difference between writing a report, where we start with the conclusion we have reached from our analysis, otherwise known as the “Executive Summary” and giving an oral presentation. When we launch forth with our recommendation, we open up the flood gates of rampant critique.
Many who are listening start thinking that we are wrong, have misfired with our analytical findings and have failed to account for important alternate considerations. Why do they react like that? We have put forth our main point completely naked and unprotected, so that is all they have to go on. In the sequence, our explanation of how we came to this conclusion follows next. Critically, the critics are not really listening now because they are consumed by what they think is wrong with it, so the justification portion gets lost for them.
We should instead begin with our context, the background which has informed our conclusion, based on the data and experiences we analysed. We need to populate this context with people they know, places they can see in their mind’s eye and lodge it in a temporal frame which the audience can process.
The genius of this approach is that while sitting there listening to us warble on, the audience are racing ahead and reaching their own conclusions about the insights to be gained from this context. Given a certain set of circumstances, there are a limited number of conclusions to be drawn and the chances are very high, that they will have reached the same one you did. When you announce it, the listeners mentally say to themselves “that’s right”. Bingo!
Now instead of facing an audience of doubters, one uppers and thrusters, you are dealing with fans of your work. The key is to make the insight download very concise. When we teach this formula, invariably people want to jumble a number of insights together and run through them. Each additional insight dilutes the power of the one before it and so on. It is critical to select the strongest, best insight and only pull the velvet curtain back to reveal that one.
The final step is to take the context and the insight and then package it up and place it on a silver tray for the audience to take home with them, when we outline the relevance to them. Although we have produced an insight, it is an inert outcome. What does that insight do for us, how can we use it, where will this be valuable for us, when can we apply it? When we receive the insight wisdom with that relevancy formula attached, it makes sense. We feel attending the speaker’s presentation today was time well spent. We got something worthwhile which will help us navigate the future that little bit better and more easily. Again, this has to be done very concisely, for the same reasons discussed about explaining the insight.
So the formula is context, insight and then explain the relevance. If we mix it up we are making things hard for ourselves, so resist any calls to get to the point, by being forced to put up the insight like a sacrificial lamb about to be slaughtered. Hold it in reserve until the scene has been set. Sherlock Holmes and Poirot, great fictional detectives always revealed the baddie’s name after giving the background of the crime. It is a well tested, tried and true formula for storytelling, so try it.
The largest meeting venue in the office complex was big enough to handle hundreds of people and it was packed. This presentation involved all the senior heads of the Department going through their strategies for the coming year. One after another, we took to the stage and spoke about our areas of responsibility. I was one of the five who spoke. My turn came after a particular colleague who was a numbers wiz, a brainy technical expert. He didn't like the way I presented. He went around telling other colleagues I was all style and no substance. I just laughed when I heard that flat earth comment.
Over the years. I have heard versions of the same idea. These comments weren't necessarily being directed at me as a put down by a sharp elbowed thrusting colleague, but toward the activity of presenting in general. There's a fundamental misunderstanding of presenting in play here. Of course, the material has to be high quality, valuable, and insightful. That is a given. If you don't have that basic requirement covered then what on earth are you doing presenting at all? Instead, you should be sitting in the audience, listening to people who know what they're talking about and be kept away from the dais.
My evil colleague at the all team presentation was reacting to the flagrant contrast of his pathetic presentation skills on stage with mine. There was nothing wrong with my content, my substance, because I was representing the Department and so the materials were reflecting the results gained and the plans for the next year. What he didn't like was being upstaged by someone who could command the room, engage the audience and deliver clear messages in a professional way. Nothing he could ever be accused of, so he went for the personal down to assuage his own inadequacies and perceived loss of face.
As we climb the ladder of our career growth, we will be placed in situations where we have to represent our team or company and make professional presentations. It is almost inescapable. If we cannot even grasp the importance of mastering the nitoryu（二刀流） or two sword method of going into business battle with both high quality content and high quality delivery, then we wouldn't be moving very far up the totem pole within our organizations.
I was coaching a senior executive in a multi-national organization. Recently when I asked for the three most important things to be gained from the one-on-one training, the first mentioned was quality content. Uh oh! I had an alarm bell go off in my head because quality content has to be a given. I asked to see the slides to be used for the presentation to the big boss. Uh oh! On the first slide there was lots of content. In fact, a veritable forest of content hiding all the key messages. The other slides were all the same, overwhelming amounts of visual stimulation diluting the points which we were meant to absorb.
I suggested that each of these slides be broken up and the same information be spread over three slides. If there was a need to show, a build or a contrast, then only show the left slide of the slide at first. Then grey that information out and bring up the middle of the slide and so forth and so on. In this way, we funnel our audiences’ attention to just the section we want to highlight and cut down the distraction. This executive was open to the advice and actually told me what I was looking at was the “slimmed down version of the deck.” My mind boggled, wondering what the original looked like.
While my mind was under assault from this revelation, another bomb was dropped. Today, all of their presentations are being done online. Okay, fine, however, this executive’s colleagues, who are also senior leaders in this massive organization, do not switch on their own cameras when they present. That little morsel just stopped me in my tracks. What?
I get it. Because you are presenting slides, the platform relegates you to a tiny box on screen and does the same to your audience. Does that mean though, as a leader in the organization, you lead by turning off the camera? Getting people who are working at home engaged during business calls is tough enough, without fostering a no camera culture of hiding. There is a slippery slope here to the wondrous joys of multi-tasking in the background of calls and no longer paying attention to what is being said or shown during the session.
Yes, we are trapped in a tiny box, but we have to do our best with what we have. We need to look at that camera lens, get the lens right up to eye height and use 20% more energy than normal to work in this visual medium. These are absolute basics. And beyond that, we need to be using gestures and even more energy to engage the audience.
Let's master nitoryu presenting and be strong on content and delivery quality. No matter the limitations of the medium we are employing. If we are leaders, we have to set the pace and the standards. There are no excuses.
Clubhouse is a new app that enables audio discussions with people who share a similar interest, coming together from around the world. The conversations are not retained and the content disappears each day. There is no distribution of the content either, because of that removal function. Unlike say a written blog which can sit on your website continually adding value to your brand. Also, there is no repurposing capability, because there is only one format and that is not transportable. Your written blog can become a podcast or the script for a video. Nevertheless, you are live, unfiltered and global all at the same time. We are putting our personal and professional brands out there for all to calibrate, evaluate and conclude about. Because it is new, we may be blind to the position we have inadvertently put ourselves in.
What is biggest problem with Clubhouse? It is what people are saying and how they are saying it. Because it is an open mic situation, some people reveal they are babblers. Maybe the isolation factor of so many people working at home is driving this need to just talk, talk, talk. For the listener though, the impression is this person is not smart, clear, concise or considered. Would you want to connect further with them or do business with them? Probably not.
Being highly articulate and thinking on your feet while live is a bigger ask than giving a prepared talk. There is no opportunity to rehearse the content and the delivery. Being a live platform, Clubhouse precludes that facility. When you write something, you may be very credible and authoritative, but in a live environment you don’t have anywhere to hide. If you can’t get to the point or your point is a bit pointless or mundane, then judgments kick in and your personal brand can take a hit.
There is also no visual aspect to support what you are talking about. In formal presentations you can show things on stage or refer to slides on screen, to help drive the key information you want to get across. Now we are down to just voice, so how expert are you at painting word pictures. Most speakers are scanty in accessing the word picture opportunity when presenting.
Clubhouse also needs storytelling skills. These have to be concise, because otherwise you become too long winded and hog the limelight. Nobody is going to appreciate that and your reputation suffers accordingly. High interest gripping stories packed with vivid word pictures, filled to the gunnels with value would be the way to go. Using the variety in your voice options, including modulation, pauses, and word highlighting, add to the ease of following what you are saying.
How many people with all of these skills have you heard on Clubhouse so far? Hiding amongst or blending in with equally hopeless speakers on Clubhouse isn’t the answer. What should we be doing? Make sure your Clubhouse profile is done well. Get a good photo of yourself so the people can see what you look like. Make it a professional look in business battle dress if you're a professional. Or something groovy if you're a pony-tail, black Armani, t-shirt creative.
You have a lot of space to write about yourself. So when people check you out, you want to come across as an expert or authority in your field. We want to connect with experts and winners, not wannabes. Make sure the first three lines are really powerful, concise triumphs of marketing, because that is what appears in the feed.when your name comes up on screen.
Be very cautious about which rooms you participate in. Find your topic of interest, and then see if there are regular gatherings of other folk with a similar proclivity. Listen to the quality of the contributions first and decide if this one is a keeper or not. You might have to spend some time sorting through the dross, but there is no shortcut available as yet. If you can find a group of like-minded people who have something worth listening to, then keep attending.
Eventually the host will invite you to elevate to speaker status. Part of that decision is based on your profile and your regular interest in the content. When you get asked to speak, start strong with a confident voice, be polite and thank the host and the other participants for this chance to talk. Being complimentary of comments from some of the other prior speakers is also a good idea. This shows community, humility, and consideration.
Having mapped out in front of you the key bullet points you want to cover, also set a timer in front of you for three minutes. This makes your contribution punchy, valuable and concise. It will be evaluated highly because of the “please, no fluff “ rule. If you find yourself suddenly waffling, then stop speaking and give someone else a chance to contribute. You usually get more than one chance to speak, but don't overdo it. No one wants to listen to some thrusting blowhard, who loves the sound of their own voice. Go into Clubhouse with a plan just as you would with any presentation.
The difference with this medium is you can crash and burn globally, rather than just in front of a limited room of 50 people face to face. It is still your personal and professional brand out there at risk though. So take steps to eliminate or reduce that risk factor.
This pandemic will blow over soon and we can all get back to normal. What will that “normal” look like though in the presenting world. CFOs have pulled their green eye shades down and sharpened their pencils and realised the company can save a truck load of dough by attending business and industry conferences virtually, rather than in person. I am on the Board of the International Dale Carnegie Franchisee Association. Normally (that word again!) we would travel to our Owner’s Meeting in some pleasant locale and gather the faithful from around the world in June. We had to do it virtually last year and had the biggest turnout of participants ever and saved a fleet of truckloads of money for the Association and the Franchisees.
Will we do them virtually now? That is a good question and like a lot of organisations, is a hot topic under discussion. Companies won’t be so keen to spend big money on internal meetings anymore, because the economics is unassailable. Face to face won’t necessarily go to zero and the perfidious online platforms will continue to plague our lives into the future. The term “hybrid” is getting tossed around with expansive abandon, as we explore constructs such as some people online and some in the room arrangements.
How do we present in these situations? There are people in front of us and people beaming in from their homes, workspaces, cafes, the beach or wherever takes their fancy. As the presenter are you in the room or online? Are there multiple presenters, so there is a mix of presenter locations underway? The complex business of presenting is only going to get even more complex.
This is really the Age of Distraction and those beaming into the sessions are completely free to escape from us with no compunction, shame, accountability, or grace. Bosses worried about leading people without line of sight, once the great diaspora to our homes took place. They should be more worried about company meetings being held online and how much engagement is going on with the troops. The bottom line is it is not only not going away, it is about to become more diabolical. Technology will evolve, but the burden on the presenter just escalates exponentially.
After a year of everyone being on Zoom, Teams, WebEx or whatever, do I see people mastering the medium? Sadly, I don't. I still see people who are still placing their laptops on the desk in front of them, rather than raising the height of the camera to eye line. I found the box set of the Harry Potter movies I bought many years ago for my son is the perfect height for elevating the camera and elevating my ability to release audiences from peering up my nostrils.
Do I see people engaging with the camera? Or with the faces arranged about five to 10 centimeters below the camera on the main screen? Everyone is looking at the faces on the screen when they are talking, rather than talking to the camera. Yes, it is perplexing to have that gap. Yes, it is a flaw in the tech, because your brain automatically directs you to the faces rather than to the lens. It means though that when we are in the presenter role, we have to override our brain and keep telling ourselves, keep looking at the lens, keep looking at the lens, keep looking at the lens.
True, we can't see the reactions, but that is not so different to presenting when the stage is flooded with lights and the audience are in a deep pool of darkness in the distance and you can't see anyone's face.
The other basic thing still missing, even after everyone has become a veteran of online meetings, is energy in the presenters. The screen mediums rob us of about 20% of our on-screen presence. So, we have to at least ramp things up by that factor, to just tread water. Given people are easily prone to multitask in the background, we need to lift our energy even further to engage them. Do I see people doing this after 12 months of experience? No, they babble on in a flat dull voice, with no presence and little energy. The presenting role is set to become even more fraught. If we haven't even mastered the basics, how are we going to handle substantially greater complexity? Time is short. “Tech waits for no man”. We have to shift our mindset and shift it right now.
As presenters we want to inform, persuade, entertain or motivate our audiences. Most B2B business presentations fall into the “inform” category, because the organisers don’t take too kindly to presenters “selling from their platform”. They want us to get up there and bring some value to their audience by providing data, experience and insights. Grabbing the mic to flog your widget will see you blacklisted as a presenter for that organisation and through word of mouth, probably many others, as you are considered an idiot sans common sense.
Telling people useful stuff is fine, as far as it goes. However, there is always too much information for the size of the time we have, so we are constantly chopping bits out to make it all fit into forty minutes. The danger here is that we become captured by the elegance of the data, the rarity, the precision or the raw value. Why are we telling the audience this information in the first place? This basic concept starts to erode in our consciousness as we start building slide after slide, packing them to the gunnels with useful information.
Storytelling is a powerful way to convert data into memory and impression. Our listeners will remember data bound up in stories much more easily than a trail of disparate numbers. Stories also help persuade audiences of what we are saying. Also, they tend to recall us as someone they would welcome listening to again. Stories alone won’t take us as far as we want to go.
If we want to really reverberate with our audience, we need to get them going much deeper than they would left to their own devices. People enter the venue at a low ebb. They are sitting there passively waiting for the performance to begin. As the speaker we have to lift their energy stocks right up and get them involved in our talk. Audience passivity has to be replaced with engagement. We have the usual toolkit for that. We can get people to voice their agreement with ayes or nays. We can have them raise their hands to signal their opinion to the question. Or we can give them handheld bats with “Yes” on one side and “No” on the other and have them wave these about in response to our question.
Rhetorical questions are good to get people thinking about what they believe and why they believe it. We can switch it from rhetorical to real, by calling on individuals in the crowd whom we know, to speak up. “I see Suzuki san sitting there, who I know is a real expert in this area and we have enjoyed some great debates in the past. So Suzuki san, how do you see this playing out from your perspective?”.
There is always a tension in the air when a question is posed. Are we supposed to answer this or is the speaker going to take care of that.? Not knowing which keeps audiences concentrated on what we are saying, which is precisely what we all want.
We can also add pertinent questions after supplying some rich data and key information. Most business talks are laden with apple pie is good and motherhood is admirable statements. We state the unremarkable in our advice and everyone listening just forgets it immediately. If we want to have impact, we have to push the audience further in their thinking. We need to make what we are saying as relevant as possible to that audience.
If we say something bromide like, such as, “culture is very closely linked to team performance” then the audience will be absorbing this and nodding in agreement and forgetting it straight afterward. It is much better to challenge the audience. So, we say the same thing and then we add the bear trap, “Can you say you are fully satisfied that the current culture in your organisation is producing the highest possible levels of team performance?”.
Now we have exposed the gap between the actual and ideal situations. We all sign on for the ideal situation of course and agree that it is ideal, but so what? We need to go after the audience members further and push them to action by challenging that big gap we have exposed. We can rub salt into the wound and say, “If you are not completely confident in the current culture delivering out performance, what are the three things you can do today to start fixing that issue?”.
We allow a very pregnant pause to engage the audience in self-reflection and deep thought about available solutions. By emphasising three items, it makes the whole process much more concrete. The stage is now set for us to be the 5th Cavalry, coming over the sand dune to the rescue and tell them what we found worked best for us. If we had just given them our three things straight up, the impact would have been negligible. Now they are all ears, because the three things they came up with on their own were all pretty lame.
How we package stories makes all the difference in being considered valuable and memorable as a speaker. Challenging audiences in the right way is also a real skill and it needs careful planning. Time for all of us to get planning.
Year Two of the pandemic puts a lot of stress on organisations. I was watching a television news report last night on an Inn that is closing. This particular Inn is well known in Japan, because it featured in the hit comedy movie series “Otoko wa tsurai yo!” – “It is hard being a man”. This “Otoko wa tsurai yo!” series reached 46 movie releases, so it is a legendary franchise here in Japan. The Inn has been running for 231 years and the owner is the 8th generation of his family to run the Inn. The pandemic has finished them off and all the staff are out of a job, through no fault of their own. My wife was crying watching this news report because in Japan longevity, continuity, loyalty, predictability are highly respected. I am sure many people shed a tear to see 231 years of history end. There will be many working in other companies who are also worried whether their firm will suffer a similar fate. This is the time to have that Town Hall to assure everyone the firm will make it out the other side of Covid-19 and there is a plan.
Get them altogether, if you can, with social distancing or do it online if you can’t, but do it. Now busy bosses may be inclined to not put in the time preparing for this presentation, thinking it will be okay if they just wing it. If you are a staff member watching the presentation and you feel your President couldn’t be bothered to prepare properly and is just winging it, how are you going to feel about the stability of the company or the quality of the plan?
We have a long way to go with this pandemic and there are many tough months ahead. This is the time to assure everyone it is going to be okay, that we can come out the other side of this mess. Why are we going to be okay? That would have to be the central question. It is on that basis of making it clear that the whole presentation should be designed. We need to take this conclusion and prepare two closes, one for the initial end of the presentation and another for the end of the Q&A.
Now that we have the central thesis fixed, what is the evidence that it is true. We need to assemble the data, facts, evidence and proof that we will survive Covid-19. There will be various elements of the business that will drive the outcome so we need to talk about those. We also need to play the Devil’s Advocate and explain how we are going to deal with the problems that may arise. We need to present a strong Plan B ready to go.
Finally, we need a powerful opening for the talk. We won’t have a problem with getting people’s attention, as we may do with a public talk to an unknown audience. The team are all ears to find out what their future holds. What comes out of our mouth has to be reassuring, positive, credible and convincing. This needs very careful design because this is where we grab or lose our audience. If we don’t get this right then what follows may be ignored, discounted or silently mocked.
Having done all of this design work we are now ready for the next stage. Now we start assembling the visuals to support our contention, that we are going to be okay. We have to choose only the most powerful pieces of proof, because we have limited time to be able to maintain everyone’s full attention. Make sure the visuals are zen like in their clarity and simplicity. Resist the temptation to pile everything on to one slide.
We need to think through what are some of the likely questions which will be asked, to make sure we are ready to handle those well. Trying to think of an answer to a tough question on the fly is not recommended. We can pretty much guess what people will ask and be ready with our answers. We are going to listen to the question, apply a cushion – a short statement that says I heard you, without agreeing or disagreeing with the question. We are buying valuable thinking time now, so that what comes out of our mouth next is considered and articulate, rather than a bumbling series of ums and ahs, as we struggle to compose an answer.
Once we have pulled our talk and the Q&A answers together, we need to allocate the time to rehearse it. We need to know how it sounds when we explain it and how the elements link together to bolster our arguments. We need to measure how long it will take to get through it, to make sure we are keeping on time. We need to practice handling some of those hot questions before we get them for real.
This is probably the most important talk anyone of us will give in our careers and this is why the professional basics for giving presentations are so important. If you are fumbling, if you are struggling, then that is your fault. You should have already completed proper presentation training. The best time for this was yesterday and the second best time is today. When the stakes are high, you have to be able to rise to the occasion. Preparation is everything.
I listen to some podcasts on writing, trying to better educate myself on the craft. I was hopeless at English at school, so the rest of my life has been a remedial fix in that department. Fundamentally, these podcast authors are aimed at fiction writers, rather than non-fiction scribblers like me. A lot of what we do in business on our dog down days may seem like we are living a fiction, when the numbers are not there or the results are dragging their sorry backside along the ground. Despite these self-recriminations about our situation, we are in the non-fiction storytelling business for business purposes, not for winning literatary or public oratory awards. What are some of the elements we need to consider when deciding, “right, time to get a bit more serious about storytelling in my presentations”.
Welcome to the one percent club of presenters, who actually incorporate stories into their business presentations. Usually getting into the top one percent in any professional field is diabolically difficult, but here we have an open field in front of us, devoid of worthy competitors. They have all stayed at home. That is the type of field I like play in.
Now are we going to tell a deadly boring or basically dull story? Are we going to lose our audience’s attention? Are we driving them to their phones for escape to the internet, to get away from us. Have we forced them to search for something more interesting, better suited to while away their time?
What would make for an interesting business story? We need personalities to come to life in this story, preferably people the audience already knows. These might be executives in the company or people from the rank and file. Something happened and they were involved. We need to describe them in such a way that the listener can visualise that person in their mind’s eye, even if they don’t know them. We need a location for our central characters in this story. Where are we? Which country, which city, which building? We don’t need a riveting recounting for the fans of Architectural Monthly, describing the building in deadly detail, but we need some remarks to set the scene. Are we in a massive skyscraper, are we downtown, are we in a restaurant? What season are we in? Is it blazing summer now or deep snowy winter? Just when are we experiencing this incident? How long ago was it?
We need drama. Yes, I know there is a lot of drama in business and we are up to our armpits in drama on a daily basis, but that is what makes it so appealing. People know about their own dramas well enough, but they are superbly curious about yours. Maybe yours is worse and that puts their regular meltdowns in perspective. Maybe your drama is a dawdle, compared to what they are being served up every day, “you were luuucky” they think. Check out Monty Python’s Four Yorkshireman skit, for a humorous masterclass on great one upping someone else’s problems.
Something bad is going to happen, unless something else happens instead. This is the fare we get fed from television and movie action dramas all of the time, so we know the format. The damage will be great to the firm, an individual’s career, the survival of the business, etc. Even if you have some great news to relate, set it up from some bad news dramatic context. No one really relates to perfect people. We can’t identify with those who are blessed with great everything and glide through business, untouched by any blood and gore. We want to hear about the struggles and eventual success. We need a tale of hope, a saga of eventual success, an overcome all odds story of ultimate triumph.
At the end we want a punchline that teaches us something. Give us some guidance on what we should do, genius ideas on what we could do, hints on the possible. The climax has to be soaring, elevating, buoying us up, encouraging us to bear the pain of the present. We all want hope for the future in these grim times. Obviously, the delivery has to match and we need a crescendo call to action at the end, something to have people leaping out of their chairs and punching the air, ready to run through fire. Okay, I got a bit carried away there. I have never seen that happen to date in any business presentation. But we do need a finish that becomes a start for the rest of us, a trigger to go forward, bursting with a lot of heart.
Let’s tell our business story so well, that everyone remembers the point we were making and they remember us, as someone they would enjoy to hear from again.
Presentations have become tediously monochrome. The speaker speaks, the audience sit there passively taking it all in. After the speaker’s peroration, they get to offer up a few questions for about 10 to 15 minutes or so and then that is the end of it. With the pivot to online presentations, the fabric of the presentation methodology hasn’t changed much. We sit there peering at the little boxes on screen, hearing a monotone voice droning on. We listen to enquiries from others submitted beforehand or we may actually get an open mic opportunity to ask our questions directly, although that has been rather rare. We may be directed to the chat to make our question known to the organisers. The formula is basically the same and has been the same since our antediluvian origins.
Why can’t speakers vary their presentations to sometimes include more interaction? Why does it always have to be the same format? Obviously, we have to pick our moment to go off piste. The audience composition, the topic of the talk and the organiser’s latitude for doing something different, will be factors for consideration. One of the tricky aspects of asking questions of your audience is getting people to contribute and to do so in a way that they can be heard by everyone. The obvious answer is to have a team of your people armed with handheld mics, which they can ferry at warp speed to the individual asking the question. Here is a word to the wise. You should choose who you want to question, but also allow some free styling as well. Events where the guests are seated at round tables are great for this and long rows of schoolroom type seating are not.
We are not switching the presentation to a continuous dialogue with the audience – that is a different type of presentation altogether. I am talking about livening up a standard presentation with more interaction with the audience. The reason you select the people is because it allows you to control the affair more closely. It is also more surgical. You know who is in the room and there may be some people who are very well informed, articulate and confident. That type of individual would be a prime target.
We have five arrows in our question quiver. If we want a yes or no answer then the Closed Question is ideal. It might be regarding a fairly macro question, that would have relevancy for everyone in the audience. “Should Tokyo continue to pursue the holding of the Olympic Games this year?”, would be an example. In this case, we can ask the entire audience the question. We can ask for a show of hands as to whether they agree with the point or not? I have been to some events where two sided paddles have been distributed to each seat beforehand, with one side saying “Yes” and the other “No”. A simpler method is just ask those who agree to raise their hands, then after that, ask those who disagree to raise theirs. Everyone can clearly see the survey results immediately in real time.
The Open Question cannot be answered by a “Yes” or a “No” and requires an actual answer. “What do you think about ….”, “How do you feel about …?”. This is why selecting your interlocutor is a good idea. If you select one of the punters at random, you may be putting someone on the spot. Next thing they are spluttering away lost and wholly embarrassed. They will hate you for it forever.
If only you are selecting the people, then there is the suspicion you are using sakura or stooges in the audience, whom you have cunningly planted beforehand. So it is also wise to open the floor up as well to those brave and informed enough to offer their opinion. Don’t worry if no one goes for it, you have at least demonstrated your embrace of true democratic ideals of free speech.
If the opportunity presents itself, we can ask a Follow-Up Question to take the discussion down a few more layers for deeper insight. Often people will give a high level answer and it is more interesting to get them to go further with their thinking, experience or detail. We have to be careful this doesn’t become a dialogue though between some person in the audience and the presenter. The danger is everyone else is sitting there bored out of their minds and feeling excluded. Probably one of those follow-up questions per talk is about the right distribution.
From within these dialogues, we can take a person’s viewpoint and Floodlight it to the entire audience. We can ask those who have had a similar experience to raise their hands. Now we have switched from the micro discussion between two people to a macro level of involvement of the whole audience. This is a good way of overcoming the feeling of exclusion by those listening.
We can also go the other way and Spotlight a question. Someone made a point and we can then call out someone else in the audience for their experiences. We have to be careful we don’t ignite a war of words between the members of the audience. Rather than call for their opinion or views or evaluation of the previous speaker’s comment, we should ask what has been their experience. This will keep the potential fireworks contained for the most part.
One thing to note is when we ask people for their comment please have patience. Once we ask the question, don’t expect an immediate answer. People process these issues at different speeds and so if there is a silence, let it hang there for at least 15 seconds. Don’t jump in unless you have to, in order to allow that person to gather their thoughts and respond. If they are obviously lost, then rescue them and give them a question which they can easily answer to save face. We need to select people carefully and if it is not the best selection, then we have to have a Plan B.
Questions have potential to engage with our audience and create more interaction. We must plan it carefully though, because it could lurch into a train wreck. Planning and good preparation are the keys.
Many people break the rules of presenting, usually unknowingly. They have Johari Window style blind spots, where others know they are making mistakes, but they themselves are oblivious and just don’t know. This is extremely dangerous, because when you don’t know, you keep hardening the arteries of your habit formation. It is diabolically difficult to break out of those habit patterns once formed because you become comfortable with sub-standard performance. On the other hand, breaking them for effect, is very powerful and can be a tremendous differentiator in a world of mainly tedious presentations.
There is an old saying that “to break the rules, you need to know the rules”. Presenting is the same. Breaking them unwittingly or in ignorance is not the same thing as a conscious, well informed, professional choice. Let’s take some rules and break them on purpose.
The “berserker stage fiend” is the presenter who wears a furrow in the stage as they pound across from left to right, over and over again throughout the presentation. This is normally derived through a combination of heightened nerves and low self-awareness. They are not tuned into how much all of this pointless striding backwards and forwards, is diminishing the power of their message. Moving with purpose is fine, but incognisant hyperactivity is not.
We can however, for effect, suddenly explore dynamic activity on stage to drive home a point. For example, if we were to relate the story of the leadership teams’ panic over the nail biting 90% drop in revenues, thanks to lockdowns caused by Covid-19, we could suddenly start pacing furiously across the stage. We mimic and then exaggerate the emotions of that moment. We move on stage in this way with the intention to demonstrate the sheer scale of the dilemma and the psychological impact it was having on the leaders. We wouldn’t be doing this throughout the whole speech. That would engender an audience meltdown. For a minute or two, it is a dramatic re-enactment of the fear, frustration and sense of doom’s arrival, that everyone was feeling. Together we bring forth a dialogue of distress, fusing it with the frantic on stage pacing movements.
The “galactic black hole” presenter sucks all of the energy out of the room. They completely break contact with their audience. This time the desired effect is one of total despair, all hope lost, no solutions available and facing massive unforgiving defeat. The speaker drops all eye contact, stares at the floor about a meter in front of them and drops their chin onto their throat, so that they are looking downward at an accentuated sharp angle. The shoulders hunch over and the body energy is reduced to a minus number. The voice is frail, catching, weak, whispering but still audible. You definitely need a microphone to pull this one off. With this “in character” rendition of the replay of the horrific experience, we exaggerate for effect. This is not something we should sustain for too long or do too often. It works best as a single, short duration, audience undermine effort.
The “whoop and holler “presenter goes way over the top. Sometimes you will see comedians use this device. They employ the micro psycho rant, at top volume, to drive home the point. This energy rocket differentiates the point being made from all that has gone before. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism holding audience attention has become a zero sum game between the presenter and the punters’ hand held phones. Either we keep them with us or they slip into the magnetic field embrace of internet access. For these reasons in telling the story, we might want to imitate on stage, an explosion which took place back at the executive suite. Or it might be the re-enactment of a big client meltdown of epic proportions. We become overly dramatic for dramatic effect.
Yelling at your audience isn’t normal behaviour. We have to set it up and then move into character to pull it off. It has to be a crescendo. It peaks then subsides back to normality. But for those few seconds, we are going all out to flag the key message we want to bring to everyone’s attention. Voice, gestures and body language are combiningg for the big combust.
Pacing like a frantic madman, ignoring completely or totally yelling at our audience are radical ideas in presenting. These pivots break the rules, but when required, may help us to break through to our audience. It will depend on the context of the topic, the audience and the event, as to whether these big guns would be employed. At least we need to have them in our armoury should we want to call on them. Choosing them with purpose and doing them without intelligence are divergent universes. We know the rules perfectly, but we choose to break them, on our terms and at our pleasure. When fully congruent with the points we are making, they work for us in ways others presenters cannot match in the major messaging stakes.
Bonseki is a Japanese art creating miniature landscapes, on a black tray using white sand, pebbles and small rocks. They are exquisite but temporary. The bonseki can’t be preserved and are an original, throw away art form. Speaking to audiences is like that, temporary. Once we down tools and go home, that is the end of it. Our reach can be transient like the bonseki art piece, that gets tossed away upon completed admiration, the lightest of touches that doesn’t linger long. Of course we hope that our sparkling witticisms, deeply pondered points and clear messages stay with the audience forever. We want to move them to action, making changes, altering lifetime habits and generally changing their world. In the case of a business audience, we are usually talking to a small group of individuals, so our scope of influence is rather minute. How can we extend the reach of our message?
Video is an obvious technology that allows us to capture our speech live and ourselves in full flight. How often though, do you see speakers videoing their talks? It is not like people are constantly giving public speeches in business. Apart from myself, I don’t recall seeing anyone else doing it. You need to tell the audience this is for your own purposes and they will not be in the shot, otherwise you have to get everyone to give you their written permission to be filmed. You may get criticism about being a narcistic lunatic for wanting to capture yourself on video, but the only people who make that type of comment are idiots, so ignore them.
With video, instead of a standard business audience of under fifty people, you can broadcast your message to thousands. The video is also an evergreen capture which allows you to keep using the content for many years. Video has the added benefit that you can cut it up and create snippets to take the content even further. You can have ten videos sprung from the original. This again extends the ways in which you can use the medium. People have different appetites for information, so some may want to feast on the whole speech, whereas others want the digest or just the part on a particular topic of most interest.
Video has two tracks – the video and audio components and these can be separated out. Very easily you can produce the audio record of the talk. Everyone is a firm multi-tasker these days. I sometimes hear people pontificating that you cannot multi-task, blah, blah, blah. What nonsense. Walking, exercising, shopping and listening to audio content are typical multitasking activities. Busy people love audio because it saves them time and allows two things to be done at once. Now your audio content can be accessed by even more people.
Did you know that in August 2019 Google announced that in addition to text search they were employing AI to enable voice search too. This will take a while to roll out but this is the future and audio books have recently overtaken e-book sales. The audio track can become a podcast episode and be on any of the major podcast platforms. Also we can produce a transcript of the talk. There are transcribing technologies that are very good today which can reduce the cost and time of this exercise. Now we have a text version, we can project the value of the content further. It may go out as an email, a social media post or be reworked into a magazine article, or it may become a blog on your website.
Repurposing of content is the name of the game. The video and or the snippets can be sent out to your email list, put up on social media and always sit there on YouTube. The same can be done with the audio track. Now what was a simple, ephemeral interlude in a room of fifty punters, has developed a life of its own and is being pushed out far and wide. The same message and messenger, but a vastly different impact and duration. If our object is to influence, then we need to make sure we are supporting the effort to give the speech with the tools available to maximise the results.
This requires some planning and some expense. But as I mentioned, we are not leaping to our feet every month giving a public speech to a business audience. This is something we would be lucky to do two or three times a year. When you take that into account and consider how much we can leverage what we are doing, we get a lot more bang for our buck. We are going to give the talk anyway, so all the preparation is the same, yet the influence factor can be so much grander.