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.

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 literary 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.