Episode #64 Design Your Talk For Success

Okay, I have a presentation to give, so which slides can I use? Bad idea. This is the last thing you should be doing, in terms of preparing for your talk. You have the topic, but who will be in the audience and what level of familiarity will they have with your topic? Start with the end! Go straight to the design of your key punch line, your biggest takeaway, the one thing you want to audience to get from your talk. Start there and design the conclusion. Move to the main body and finally decide how you will break through all the audience distraction and grab their attention with your opening. Speakers don’t plan to fail, they fail to design properly.

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

Automation of retail is upon us. We had a kiosk recently open on Akabane station here in Tokyo with no staff and everything automated, similar to AmazonGo in the USA. Seven-eleven has now launched an experimental convenience store in Tokyo with an unmanned payment system integrated with facial recognition technology. The NEC developed system checks customers faces against pre-registered facial images of customers using cameras when they enter the outlet and make payments. In other news, Japan is opening up the door to foreign workers but will they come? Japan is only twenty ninth out of sixty there countries in terms of ability to attract develop talent behind Taiwan and Estonia according to the IMD World Competitiveness Center. According to a Gallup survey, even if there were total global freedom of movement, Japan isn’t all that attractive and the population would only grow an extra one percent. Canada’s population by contrast would grow one hundred and forty seven percent and the US by forty six percent.

This is episode number sixty four and we are talking about Design Your Talk For Success.

Many people don't start out with a design for their talk. They launch straight into the details, especially working with the slides. The lack of design shows as the structure isn't tight enough, the points are nor clear enough and mostly the talk is totally forgettable. They feel happy however because the talk was completed and they can tick that box. This is often the case here in Japan where giving the speech well and just giving the speech are confused. Our objective is to provide value to our audience and build our personal and professional brand, not just give a speech. We judge companies based on who we meet. If the person speaking is really impressive, we extrapolate that ability and project it to the whole team. Conversely, if the speaker is a dud, then we assume nobody at that shop is much good.

Designing our presentation is a critical stage. We have identified our target audience for our key messages. We have selected the title to really engage our audience. We know the purpose of the exercise - inform, persuade, entertain, motivate to action.

Designing the conclusion is always a good place to start. The conclusion is really the summary of the key message we want to get across. The actual content delivery of the concluding message may vary from what we design at the beginning, but it is still a very good discipline to force us to focus on the one central thing we want our audience to take away from our speech.

Having boiled all of the various things we could say down to the one most important thing, we can now work backward and think about how we can get our audience to agree with our conclusion.

Covering too many points and our audience will have trouble following the thread of our argument. Too few points and the argument may not seem convincing for lack of depth and evidence.

We may group similar ideas under the one umbrella idea and may include those together. We have the key points selected that we want to raise and now we have to construct the argument to support the ideas. This would include some evidence based around statistics, data, expert opinion and authority references.

Usually three key points is easy for an audience to follow, but if the subject matter is complex or if you have been given a longer time to speak then five may be needed. There are a number of structures for how you present the individual ideas. It could be a result/problem/ solution structure or you may switch the problem to the start and then outline the solution and the consequent result. The key is that the structure flows logically to make it as easy as possible to follow.

Having derived the key points we are going to make, we go back and design two closes. One is for the very end of the speech. This is to tie the whole presentation together. We might review what we said or we might focus on a particular key point.

Having designed that close, we now design a different one to follow the Q & A session. We need this second close, so that we can keep the whole proceedings on track. We have no control over what people will raise at the end by way of questions and so it often happens that an audience member will take the discussion off topic. If we just allow the event to finish at that point we have lost control of the messaging. We need to wrap it up in a way that the audience have our key point ringing in their ears as they leave the venue.

Finally we design the opening. This is a tricky one because it is wrapped tightly together with the first impression we will make with the audience. If we try a joke that is weak and falls flat, our initial impression is negative. If we start rambling, we lose the audience's attention. If we commence with something very boring we are going to have trouble breaking through the noise that is humming away between the ears of our audience. We need to break into their attention and capture them for the receipt of our key message.

Questions are very powerful. These should be asked rhetorically, in a way that the audience is not actually sure if it is a rhetorical question or something they actually have to answer. This creates a certain amount of tension that drives their attention to what the speaker is saying. They are curious to find out what you meant.

Other opening techniques include quoting some relevant expert on the subject is also good because it references the topic and gives the speaker additional authority to their message.

Statistics are powerful because they are hard evidence and tell the audience this is going to be a fact based presentation and not just opinion.

Something shocking is a good way to grab attention, so make a provocative statement and then explain what you mean.

We can always flag our conclusion at the start and then spend the rest of the time justifying our interpretation.

This is a standard ploy and it has it’s own risks. Audiences are already distracted and anything that smacks of predictability sees them drifting away from us and straying into extraneous unrelated thoughts, completely off-topic.

The title of our talk is usually selected before we get down to the nitty gritty of the speech design. We may have been requested to speak on a certain subject, so our ability to use our title to intrigue may be contained. It is not such a problem because most people will have forgotten the exact title of your talk and unless there is a slide with the title listed, they will have trouble recalling it word for word.

The opening, therefore is the opportunity to break through all the audience noise - all their screaming monkeys running around inside their brains. This should be designed with great precision and delivered the same way. Don't digress or comment on something that has happened in the lead up, get straight into the opening and grab the audience.

Before the start of the event, get there early and mix with some of the participants. Get them talking about the topic, this is a good way to connect with the audience by referencing what a couple of them said in the moments before the speech started. The person referenced feels very special through the recognition and the imaginary boundary between the speaker and the audience disappears as the speaker becomes one with the group.

Only at this point in our preparation should we start playing around with the slides to support the presentation. Once you have designed it this way the need for a lot of text on the screen disappears. We know what we need to say and so we can start introducing pictures and diagrams, as well as text. Even the text can be just one word because we are able to talk to the key points covered by that word. This is very powerful because it keeps your eyes on the audience and off your text.

When we are designing the talk there will be key words that lend a lot of weight to our argument and these may be key words we want to emphasis on the screen, though a photo or a video or some image.

Everyone is used to seeing lots of text on the screen and when you present in a different way you remain memorable. The audience will not remember the details of your speech, but they will remember their impression of you, the speaker.

Japan may be the land of Zen but there is very little Zen influence going on when it comes to slides. Baroque with its ornate detail is more the flavor here with many competing colors and a screens packed with information, spread across an astonishing number of different fonts styles and sizes.

Japan has a love for detail, but we don't have to put it all up on the screen. Japan also has a love of the written word and what is written down carries a lot more weight that in Western countries. The point here is that Japan is still some way behind the rest of the world in this aspect of clear communication.