Episode #377: Signpost Your Presentation In Japan

Navigation is critical in presenting. This is how we keep the audience with us and keep reinforcing our key messages. Years ago, I attended a speech by a serious VIP. He had jetted in from the US to visit Japan and made time to give the Chamber of Commerce members the benefits of his insights. It was a seriously meandering and confusing talk. I was left befuddled and bemused. Later, speaking with others, I found I wasn’t the only one struggling to understand where he was going with his messaging. What was the impression he left with me – negative, unimpressed, insulted. He did serious damage to his personal and professional brands that day. Here we are years later I and I am still recalling that catastrophe.
Recently, I was asked to provide a review of a new book and because I am always time poor, I thought listening to the audio version would give me more flexibility to work my way through it. I have narrated my own book on “Japan Sales Mastery”, so I know how tough that recording process is. Interestingly, apart from being reminded how exhausting doing the narration was, I was noting the importance of navigation in that medium.

I was trying to scan the subject matter to be able to cobble together a review which captured the breadth of the topic and the point of view being offered. This meant I had to stabilise a lot of information in my mind and draw on that to pull the threads together. Actually, I found it hard to do and had to listen to the audio a second time to get the overview I needed. So much for saving time!
You only have voice on the audio and that is very similar to our presentations. Of course, we can add visual stimulation through the slide deck and that mechanism also adds great navigation possibilities to keep the listeners with us. Nevertheless, I was thinking about those occasions where you don’t or can’t use slides and what were the learnings about navigation, when all you have to work with is voice.

This is where signposts come in. As trainers, we are taught to set up the phases of the training. For example, if we are going to go into small groups to discuss a point, we don’t just say, “break into three groups”. We will say, “In a moment, we are going to break into three groups to discuss XYZ”. The reason for this is we need navigation for the participants during the class. They need to mentally prepare themselves for the pivot from what they have been doing to what is coming in the next phase.
Our presentations are like that too. We will have certain topics in the speech providing the points we want to make and the evidence to support our position. Generally, in a forty-minute speech, we will have a limited number of “chapters” for our speech. We have our overarching key point we want to make and then we back that up with sub-points arranged as chapters and then surround those sub-points with proof. There are a series of pivots, from one chapter to the next, throughout the talk. We need to make sure we are guiding our audience to come with us, rather than making a pivot and losing them on the turn.

We might bridge from one topic to the next if the theme is related, or we may need to make a sharp turn to a new topic. Either way, we need to announce it to the audience. For example, “we have been talking about the economic ramifications of this change in regulation. Let me now talk about the HR dimensions of these proposed changes”. The regulatory changes are the common issue and we are slightly elongating the topic to cover another different but related angle, so the transition is easy for our listeners to follow.

If we are making a major pivot, then we need to set that up. For example, “we have been talking about the economic ramifications of this change in regulation. Let me switch gears and talk about a new topic, which we will all have to deal with in the next six months”. In this way, the audience understands that regulatory issues as a topic is completed and now we are moving to an entirely new subject. When we warn them that this switch is coming, they mentally adjust their concentration to deal with the new direction.

If we don’t do this, we are changing topics and listeners are left to their own devices to understand if these two topics are related or different and what is the connection between them, if there is a connection. You can see how easily we can confuse the crowd when we pivot subjects. So, let’s leave some breadcrumbs so the listeners can stay with us, as we move around the topic and make our main points during the talk. If we do this, they will be with us at the end, rather than lost and reaching for their mobile phones to find something infinitely more interesting than us. We can’t have that now, can we!