Episode #332: The Five Minute Cadence When Presenting

Normally a talk for a business audience will be around 40 minutes long. That seems a lot until you start putting the talk together and you always feel you don’t have enough time to include all of the cool information and stories you have at your disposal. The absolutely wrong way to start is to harvest slides from previous presentations and then start cobbling together all of the visual pieces and make that the talk. Why? The format for a presentation has various cadences and we need to master each stage. That requires planning and rehearsal. I would guess 99% of business talks are given once - on that day, to that live audience. What that means is that the talk wasn’t refined through rehearsal to make it sparkle and for it to fit perfectly into the time allowed. Businesspeople buy bespoke clothing and shoes, because they want these items to fit perfectly and we should apply the same logic to making our talk fit perfectly for our audience.

The start and end are two specific cadences with clear purposes and so are easy to understand. ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder is now a global pandemic infecting all of our business audiences. That is why the opening has to break through that attention deficit problem and grab everyone’s attention. The process starts from the moment we arrive before the audience, to check all the tech is working and to start engaging with the listeners as they enter the room. We want to build a personal connection, which will make it more likely they will actually pay attention to us when we start.

It also continues the moment we are being introduced. Often there is a lunch before our talk and we are placed on the table with all of the big shots. I don’t recommend getting up from the table and walking to the stage. As soon as the MC begins our introduction, we should stand up and off to the side, so that we are clearly visible to everyone right from the start. This gives the audience the chance to look us up and down and get through that initial judgement they make on how we are dressed and how professional we look. It also makes it smoother and quicker to mount the stage when it is time to start.

We get straight into the opening, using our blockbuster statement to grab attention, to tantalise the listeners with what is to come and then we can introduce ourselves and thank the organisers. Preferably someone else is switching the slide decks over or getting ours slides up. We don’t want be distracted from focusing on our audience, especially at the start, when all of those first impressions are being created. This standing up, getting on stage and getting started takes around five minutes and we try and break the forty minutes into eight five minute blocks. Our talk has been rehearsed, so we know exactly how long each section takes.

We are doing all of the talking and that can be tiring for an audience to sit there and listen to us blabbing away. We need to have it planned such that we switch up the action roughly every five minutes. This is using what is called a “pattern interrupt”, so that the listeners are not getting what they expected. Expectation in audiences can lead to them day dreaming and leaving us, as their thoughts take over. They stop taking in what we are saying or even worse, they are now looking at their phones. We might use a great visual we have selected or we might change our energy during the delivery. Classical music has it cadences from highs to lows to highs, to make sure we don’t get bored listening to it. Our talk can copy this idea. Maybe we drop our voice down to a conspiratorial whisper or we raise it to stentorian heights – it doesn’t matter, because the point is to use our energy to create a change, which adds interest to what is going on. We don’t want to be predictable, because this is when attention will stray on the part of the audience.

The end cadence is actually split into two parts – before the Q&A and after the Q&A. We can use a summary of our key points or a call to take action and man the barricades. We need to put a bow on this talk and draw the whole apparatus together so that the main message remains the message the audience retains. We switch over to Q&A, which invariably will take the whole talk off track and there is no way of controlling that. What we need to do though is to repeat our summary or call to action. We must monopolise the messaging after the Q&A, for that audience and make sure they get what we want them to get.

Naturally the talk won’t fit into precise five minute segments, but the key is regularly change the content, the energy, the delivery, the flow so that we keep a stranglehold on the attention of the audience and no phones are being surreptitiously engaged instead concentrating of us. There is no doubt that this outbreak of ADD, combined with the mobile phone, has made our task as speakers, so much more complex and fraught. We can rage against the inequities, or we can adjust what we are doing to overcome these challenges.