Episode #298: Clarify Your Message When Presenting.

The head of a pin isn’t much real estate is it? The metaphor for presenting is to have pin point accuracy around what you are presenting. Going straight to the slide deck production component dilutes our message concentration and takes us too broad. This should be the last element, rather than the first. The temptation though is to get into thinking about different visuals, graphs, statistics, etc., we can show, to back up our argument. There is the rub. Just what exactly is our argument? What is the one key message we want to get across to the audience. Often we have too many things we want to get across and so we go too broad in our approach. We want to think about getting that one main message so concentrated, we could get it on to the head of that pin.

A good way to start, is to brainstorm all of the elements of that subject area, which are most relevant to the audience. There is a dilemma here between what we want to say and knowing what interests our audience. Starting with the audience in mind though is a good discipline. This is because designing something for ourselves runs the risk of alienating our listeners and delivering a talk to a totally bored, listless, irritated bunch of faces. This boring people experience is plain painful.

Get the ideas out, yes but take the audience perspective. Get them out visually and then start to rank them by priority order. This ranking process forces us to make judgments about which elements are considered more important than others. Is this easy? Absolutely not. Does it have to be perfect. Not really, because the audience themselves are not united on agreeing what they think are the most important items. As long as we can isolate out what we believe will be of the most interest to that wide spectrum audience and we address that, then we are in a good place as a presenter.

Before we start assembling the argument though, we need to write down in one sentence, what is the key point we want to get across. This type of wordsmithing is important to help us get clarity around where we need to go with our supporting arguments. Getting the key point into one sentence, the head of the pin metaphor, then allows us to scoop upevidence to back up what we are saying. We have a limited amount of time in which to speak, so we need to pare down the possibilities we can cover, to only the most rich and powerful arguments. This paring process is like choosing between your children. I am often hopeless at it, because I tend to fall in love with too much material, for the time allotted. It is painful, but I have to toss stuff out and sometimes that process kills me to do it.

Once we have selected the most convincing evidence to back up our case, we need to arrange those points into chapters of the talk. This is the main body of the presentation. We have already created our conclusion when we were refining our key point. We need to elaborate a bit more on the key point and then craft our Conclusion One. Following that, we design Conclusion Two, which we use for after the Q&A. We don’t want to lose control of the talk, at the Q&A point and have someone take the whole conversation off script. Their question may have absolutely nothing to do what we have been talking about and there is the danger that this becomes the final focus of the talk. We cannot allow that. We have to control how the presentation will end and what will be the last words ringing in the ears of the audience. Our words and our key message.

Now we are ready to design the opening. We need to achieve two things in the opening: grab the attention of the audience and introduce our conclusion. The grabbing attention part might be a famous quote like “when you are going through hell, keep going” or “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” or “the teacher appears when the student is ready”. These are recognisable quotes that gives the talk some credibility and smoothly allows us to transition into the key point we want to make.

We might start by telling a story on the basis that we are all designed from childhood to identify with storytelling. It gets us in and we want to hear what is the point of the story. For example, “It was early Sunday morning and the doctor attached the portable x-ray machine to my chest. I was barely conscious, fighting for the air coming through the plastic tubes delivering the oxygen. The results showed the lungs were down from three quarters filled with fluids to now only two thirds full. I knew at that moment that I would live”. Hearing that story at the start of the talk, you would want to know why I was in hospital in that condition. This is the power of storytelling to engage an audience and keep them with you to the end.

We could use a surprising statistic. “Power harassment claims in Japan have increased by 320% over the last ten years”. Our audience will want to know why that is and what does it mean for them. We can move into our main point for this talk, now that we have their full attention.

The success of our talk comes from having a clear focus on what the audience is interested in, combined with a very clear “be able to write it on the head of a pin” statement about what is the take away we are going to deliver during our presentation. The rest is mechanics around the Conclusion, the Main Body and the Opening. The slide deck is the heavy artillery we bring in to back up what we are saying with visuals to get the message across concisely and quickly. The discipline required to start well will carry us forward for the end of the talk and we will be successful in delivering our message and maintaining people’s attention throughout. Given this audience Age of Distraction we are living in today, that is no longer an easy task. Clarity is absolutely needed to be effective as a communicator in this modern world.