Storytelling in business is an open field. In most facets of commerce, the field is crowded, established foes are entrenched behind high protective walls and as far as you can see it is all red ocean. Presenting however is all blue ocean because most business leaders hardly even get their toes wet. They dismiss being able to present in a professional manner as fluff, smoke and mirrors, all show and no substance, inconsequential. Their approach to speaking in public is that the audience are only there for the data, statistics, the latest information and the delivery is irrelevant. If possible, they prefer to avoid the whole affair because it is painful for them. Being persuasive however has never gone out of style in business and that is a universal and timeless truth.
Being persuasive has many aspects, such as understanding who is going to be in the audience and determining what is the purpose of your talk. Are you there to inform, inspire, convince or entertain? Research teams and underlings are good at digging out different data points and the temptation is to throw these logs on the fire to heat up the audience. Nothing wrong with that except all of this data struggles to remain in the memory and it makes the whole talk crusty and dry, like week old bread left outside.
When we can wrap the information in a story we start to really motor with our audience. This delivery technique is tremendously impactful because it makes the information easy to remember and makes the message clear and attractive. Many business leaders however are never exposed to how to tell a story, so they have little idea where to start. I cannot tell a joke to save my life, but I can tell a story because I know structures, which make this process easy for me.
There are a number of steps.
It could be Covid or the war in Ukraine. It might be a technological breakthrough that destroys established players as Nokia found with the launch of the iPhone. We need to place the conflict inside the context we have described and make it clear how high the stakes are here, because that degree of tension is gripping. There has been no shortage of drama for my industry, the training industry, since Covid started. Probably none of us will have any trouble finding conflicts or opportunities to describe to the audience and we intertwine the main characters to make it real for the listeners.
Everyone of us has amazing business stories inside us already. If we don’t have enough, relax, the universe will just keep minting them going forward. If you don’t have enough of your own, just start reading the business news and there you have a cornucopia of content to work with.
Remembering Ex-PM Shinzo Abe As A Communicator
Like everyone, I was so shocked that Japan has lost such a prominent, global representative of the country to assassination. I wrote this original article back in 2016 and I thought to rework it and release it again in memory of Shinzo Abe. Over many years I have seen him improve as a public speaker and that always encourages me to think that other prominent Japanese leaders can also break out of their self-imposed restrictions and do a professional job too.
October 2016
Japanese politicians have to do a lot of public speaking, but they are rarely engaging. They are generally speaking at their audiences rather than to them. I attended the Japan Summit at the Okura Hotel Ball Room run by the Economist. Sitting there listening to three leading Japanese politicians, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Shigeru Ishiba (then Minister for National Strategic Zones) and Akira Amari (then Minister for Economic and Fiscal Policy), I was struck by the lack of picture painting and storytelling in their presentations.
By the way, if you have seen Prime Minister Abe of late, he has improved quite a lot. Previously, his presentations were terribly wooden, lacking animation and any attempt at connection with his audience. In this sense, he was firmly situated in the mainstream, because these are the typical attributes of business and political leaders when speaking in public in Japan.
I sometimes get pushback from some Japanese class participants that this is okay, because this is the “Japanese way” of giving presentations. Total nonsense. Being effective as a presenter or public speaker has some universal elements which cannot be neglected. One aspect is as a successful speaker or presenter you have to push yourself forward. Yes, it is true that this is not usually seen as a cultural positive in Japan.
Being low key, humble, even subdued and apologetic is preferred in normal social and business life here. This doesn’t apply though when we are speaking in public. We now have an entirely different role and we have to be more loud, more animated, more confident, more engaging and more enthusiastic in this particular role. When we coach softly spoken people to increase their volume when speaking, they often say they feel like they are screaming. When we ask the audience listening during the class if they feel that is the case, the answer is always “no”. Instead, the speaker comes across as more confident, capable and credible. We have to understand the role is different and we have to adjust to suit that role.
Those who are failed presenters embrace the excuse of the “Japanese way” as an escape route from professional accountability, but it doesn’t work. Good is good and we can see the difference when people speak in pubic. They either engage us or they don’t and there is not a “Japanese way” of public speaking which can avoid that necessity.
Whether it was some coaching before the successful Olympic bid or thereafter, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is much better. More animated, using bigger gestures, more eye contact, using those see through teleprompters to help engage the audience, rather than looking down at a page of notes. He had humour, pauses for clarity and some voice modulation. Hey corporate Japan, take note, it is possible to become better at public speaking!
Everyone, please take note – don’t bore us with your data. Tell us a story, pleeease! Bring the points being made to life by connecting them to some people and events you have encountered. Our minds are well trained to absorb stories, because they are the first educational structure we encounter as young children. The story should start with taking us to the place of the story, the location, the room, nominate the day, month or the season and introduce the people there, preferably people we already know, to make it real for us.
By getting straight into the story we can draw our audience in. We can now intertwine the context behind the point we want our audience to agree with. By providing the background logic, cloaked in a story which is vivid, we can see it in our mind’s eye. We will have more success convincing others to follow us. Having set the scene, we finish by outlining our proposition or proposal and tie the ribbon on top, by pin pointing the major benefit of doing what we suggest. This is elegant and powerful.
In business, we should use storytelling appropriately but powerfully. Less is more, but none is particularly bad. Unite our disparate audience from multiple backgrounds by wrapping our key message in a story and if you do, what you say will be remembered, unlike almost all messages from Japanese politicians. Let the story create your context, evidence and sizzle for your key message
Action Steps
Vale Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest serving Prime Minister
Imagine an experienced, senior executive from a name brand major company giving a one minute introduction of the company, while holding a piece of paper, reading the introduction to the audience. What would be your impression of that executive and by extension the professionalism of that company? I am sure it would be highly negative. If a senior person can’t manage a one minute talk without reading it, we will be wondering what sort of people are working there?
The problem today is we are awash in high levels of professionalism around presenting from the professionals. Netflix, Disney, Hulu, HBO etc., are pumping huge budgets into streaming content with unbelievably high production values and oozing with high levels of script quality and professional actor delivery. We become accustomed to these images of professional presenters and then a lame amateur turns up, holding their piece of A4 paper and just destroys their reputation on the spot.
Business seems to be the last refuge of scoundrels who cannot present in a professional way, but that is not an acceptable situation. The audience today are heavily armed with mobile phones which can connect them to the internet in seconds. The delights of social media can quickly outweigh the appeal of the speaker and their topic, if the delivery isn’t professional. Even when the content is good and the delivery is okay, it doesn’t hold the audience’s attention as it once did.
I was at a presentation recently and the speaker was doing an okay job – not great but not horrendous either. That didn’t stop the gentlemen sitting next to me at my table from getting out his phone, then his iPad and later his laptop during the presentation. He was checking and answering emails, scrolling around social media and generally “multi-tasking”. This is the nadir for the speaker – to be reduced to competing for audience attention when they are half listening and are simultaneously busy doing something else.
The paper reading speaker I mentioned earlier puzzled me, so I approached him and asked him why he had to read a one minute speech. He told me he was afraid of his English ability. This was an interesting comment, because we were famously chatting away in English for about five minutes before we go to this gritty subject. I said to him that was a surprising comment given his English was absolutely fine.
Actually he didn’t need the piece of paper, but his fear of linguistic imperfection was driving his behaviour. He had been focused on the wrong thing. Perfection is not required in communication. I know this because my Japanese is certainly not “perfect” but I can communicate freely in Japanese and listeners can follow what I am saying.
This is the same for English, a language mainly spoken by non-native speakers in fact, if you add up the population numbers. That means that a good portion of the time, native speakers are listening to a variety of accents in English with some exciting departures from grammatical norms. No problem though, because we can connect the dots and work out what it is they are trying to say and without missing a beat, give them a response which matches the flow of the conversation.
Fear was his impediment, but a false fear, a self-induced and self-limiting fear. This happens in our presentation classes too. The participants start totally consumed by their concerns and worries and are relatively oblivious to the audience, because they are totally focused on themselves. After a few hours of practice with coaching, they, without knowing it, have now switched their focus from themselves to trying to engage with their audience.
If our speaker had thrown away the A4 paper and instead used his minute to engage his audience, he would have rescued the brand. If he had done all of that and spoken with great energy and enthusiasm he would have actually accentuated the brand. If he had a few grammatical errors or pronunciation slip ups, no one would have cared, because they would have been tuned into his communication, not to the actual degree of linguistic perfection of his delivery.
Interestingly, he was not Japanese and yet the majority of the audience were Japanese speakers. When we speak a foreign language, it is often the case that we can be more easily able to understand non-native speakers because they have very simple vocabularies. He didn’t take this factor into consideration when thinking about who would be in his audience. That was another error on his part – his preparation didn’t factor in who would be the audience for this one minute promotion of his company. This has to be the first thing we do, every time!
Don’t let the fear of speaking hold you back. Prepare thoroughly, understand who is going to be in your audience, spend your delivery time focused on engaging your audience, bring your enthusiasm and passion and forget about linguistic perfection. If he had done that, then his personal brand and his company’s brand wouldn’t have been shredded on the spot, as actually happened. Today, the risk is simply too high to let people who have no clue what they are doing, to go around representing the brand in public. Why do it that way? Give them training and then let them go forth and become a terrific brand ambassador for the organisation.
Recently I have been coaching people on their presentation skills. It is always amazing to me how some small changes can balloon into major improvements. If these things are so simple, then why aren’t they making the changes themselves? Why do they need coaching? Basically, we all wander through life with a minimum level of self-awareness about anything, let alone how we appear when we present. The other problem is the zone of vision when we are presenting is in an arc in front of us. It takes some organising to be able to see how we are doing in the eyes of the audience. Most of us are just not that well organised. So we wind up giving the presentations into the void and are not really sure what needs improving. Enter the coach.
I found I was focusing on a few items to help the participants in my class improve their persuasion power. The six elements were eyes, hands, face, voice, toes and energy. Let's dig in a bit deeper with each of them.
As a presenter, our hands have only one purpose – to strengthen the verbal point we are making. To find where your hands should be held, just hold your arms out about a shoulder height, then drop them – where they land is where you should keep them until you need to bring them up to bolster some thesis you are promoting.
We do our best though, to make the most of it by having a good vocal range around tone, speed and strength. The monotone delivery is the killer of audience attention. Side note: Japanese is a monotone language! Uh oh. Does that mean Japanese speakers are forever doomed to be the denizens of the boredom zone? Not all. Japanese speakers can create variety through speed and strength changes, which will be enough to keep the attention on them when presenting.
Think of the key points in the talk where you want to place emphasis and then marshal your energy to help you highlight that part of the talk. A very common error is that speakers allow their energy to drop right off at the end of their talk. Don’t fade out. Finish with a bang – remember final impressions are the lasting impressions and we want to be recalled in the right way.
These six points are so simple, but when corrected each of them made a significant impact on the quality of the talk. I would make the correction and then ask the audience to compare with what the speaker had been doing. When you see this before and after it is convincing.