Episode #382: Double Trouble Speakers In Tokyo

What a double act they were. Two economists giving us some insights into where the markets are going and making sense of the world we face. Anytime you see an event where there is going to be some crystal ball gazing going on about where we are headed in the global economy, you want to be there. We are all more risk averse than greedy, and we want to cocoon ourselves from trouble by getting some early warning of what to expect. This was a Chamber of Commerce event, so I knew a lot of the attendees and did my best to exchange business cards with those I didn’t already know. In the process of doing so, I gained a very clear idea of who was in the room, what industry sectors they were in, and the relative size of their companies. Neither of the double act speakers did that.

They migrated straight to the VIP table and sat there waiting to go on. They were there to present, and that was it in their minds. For speakers, that is a basic error. In many cases these days, the event hosts won’t share the details of who is attending. We should always get there early and try to meet as many of the members of the audience as we can. This does a couple of things.

It connects us with complete strangers and creates a level of rapport with the listeners, which translates into support for us as the presenter. It also enables us to gauge who is in the room, how senior they are, how big their operation is and how long they have been in Japan. This is important, because we can adjust the level we set for the presentation to make sure we are not speaking down to anyone or over their heads.

Our speakers didn’t bother to analyse their audience before they launched forth with their canned presentation. I say “canned” because it was obvious they had been travelling around APAC giving this same presentation to various audiences. The first speaker was comfortable as a public speaker and had given many talks in his role as an economist. He did a couple of things I found annoying, as someone in my role who instructs people on how to present. He was good in many ways, but certainly not perfect.

One thing I don’t recommend is wandering around the stage as you talk. He did this and really, the movement had no relevance to the talk. There should be some theory behind the movement rather than just sashaying around the stage to show you are a seasoned speaker. There are three distances we can use. If we want to make a macro point we can move to the back of the venue, away from the crowd. If we want to make a micro point, we can move very close to members of the audience and deliver our comments at a very close quarters. We shouldn’t stay in either position for too long and we should then move to a middle, more neutral position.

When we move around, we create a distraction from our message. If we move, then we move with purpose and use those three distances, I noted, to our advantage. Otherwise, we anchor ourselves and use our neck to swivel around to make eye contact with members of the audience. As he was wandering around, he was looking in the general direction of his audience and successfully making no specific eye contact with anyone. That is a big opportunity lost to connect one on one with members of our audience.

There was one more problem with his talk. The flair of public speaking was on display but the content was rather “so what”. I keep up to date with the media and probably so did everyone else in that audience, so there were no “oh wow” moments. I felt cheated that I had wasted my time and money listening to someone who didn’t deliver any value to my investment in attending the talk.

His colleague had the same wanderlust, although a little more restrained. He also was someone who did these types of talks on a regular basis, so he was plainly comfortable to be standing up in front of a crowd and talking. The problem became obvious almost immediately when he started putting up his slides. They were very difficult to understand. For whatever reason there were a lot of acronyms in use and abbreviations. This made parsing the content on screen extremely difficult. His method of explaining it all was also complicated to a simple punter like me. People I spoke to afterward said they were also struggling to follow where he was going.

This was an unforced error on his part. He didn’t research his audience to understand at what level he needed to pitch the talk. It was way over the heads of this audience, but he probably still has no idea of that, because he wasn’t engaging his listeners. When you single people out for six seconds of eye contact and you work the room using this technique, you can see in their eyes if they are following you or not and you can adjust. He was blind to the take up of the talk, because he wasn’t using any eye contact.

As a double act, they were duds, for different reasons and they hurt their personal and professional brands. It didn’t have to be like that and with some minor adjustments, they could have done a much better job. We should take their faults to heart and make sure we are not reproducing them ourselves.