Episode #284: Don't Be Predictable And Boring When Presenting

I was recently asked to be interviewed by a University senior for a project he was doing on communication in business. I don’t know if I was a good choice. After I left High School, I was working for an insurance company during the day and joined then dropped out of a night course on Communication at the Queensland University of Technology. The “communication” study idea sounded great, but what I found was the course was very theoretical and not what I was expecting. Subsequently, I have become a disciple of content marketing, which basically means you see your company as a publishing firm, in addition to your main thrust of your business. We push out copious quantities of information on speciality topics for free, to signal to potential buyers, that we are experts in these areas. In that sense, I agreed to the interview, because I have released 4 books, 1480 podcasts and have written thousands of blogs, so I thought maybe I qualify.

In the course of our interview, he mentioned that he was going to give the commencement speech at the graduation ceremony later this year. We have all seen these types of affairs. The student selected to give the talk, begins by thanking the University, the Dean of the Faculty, the worthy Professors and teaching staff and congratulates all of the fellow graduates. Boring and predictable.

As we know, the opening of our talk has to be a gripper. It has to keep the audience away from their mobile phones and instead transfixed on us. Anything which smacks of clique, predictability, platitudes or bromides will dissipate the attention on us. “I would like to thank the university…” is a death knell of an opening, so let’s avoid that one. In business it is the same thing. “I would like to thank the Chamber of Commerce…”, is another dud opening.

This senior had been at that institution for four years, so he will be brimming with experiences, memories, events accumulated during that time. We have been in our companies for many years, working away in our industries, so we have accumulated tons of stories. Our stories are a good place to start. We need to look at who is in our audience and divine an occurrence which will be relatable for the listeners, something topical, pertinent and uplifting. It should be uplifting. We don’t want some downer memory being trotted out for such a festive occasion.

There should be a series of stories in this talk. The first one has to be short though. We are going to get to all the usual words of appreciation to everyone, but before that we can grab attention with a quick story. If we had some defining moment at the university, something which was profound and which shows the institution, the professors or the students in a shining light, that would be a good choice. If it is a business talk then we can look for something about this association or the hosts organisation we can say nice things about.

After we deliver this little episode, we get to the ordained appreciation piece and then we should look for other stories we can tell in the time remaining, to make a point about the experience we have collectively had. In a five minute commencement speech, there will be time for maybe one more story, but in a forty minute business talk, there is plenty of scope. Anytime we have data we wish to impart, then carefully bundling that up inside a story is bound to get it remembered, rather than just trying to deliver the information by itself.

Stories work better when they have some key elements included in the retelling. Placing people the audience knows in the story is very powerful. It could be a contemporary figure or a historical figure, it doesn't matter, because we can easily see them in our mind’s eye and that is what we want. We need to include the season, the location and the timing. Again, we are laying breadcrumbs for our audience, to get them to the same visual image and join us inside our story. For example, “Two years ago prior to Covid, on a muggy Tokyo summer day, I made my way to the gorgeous wood panelled Boardroom of our client in Otemachi, to meet Mr. Tanaka the new President”.

We know how muggy Tokyo is in the summer, we remember life before Covid, we know there are a lot of expensive high rise office buildings in Otemachi, we can see the luxurious Boardroom scene and may we even know this President Tanaka through the media or through industry contacts. We are in that room.

When we engage our audience to that extent then we are able to get our key messages across more easily. Let’s avoid being predictable and instead seek out openings and stories which will keep our audience rivetted to us and what we are saying.