Episode #285: Leading Your Audience Up The Garden Path

I was sitting in the lecture theater, as usual in the front row, so that I could catch everything that was being said. University was a big deal for someone who climbed out of the trench and put the shovel down on a Friday and hit the campus the next Monday. Calling me earnest about my studies doesn’t even get close. On this occasion we had a guest lecturer, who was giving a talk on the battle of Sekigahara, a turning point in Japanese history which would usher in hundreds of years of rule by the one family, the Tokugawas.

The Professor was reeling off the ten reasons why Tokugawa Ieyasu won the battle and I was diligently scribbling down all of these logical, worthy points. At the end of the ten points, he then said these were not the reasons and then spent the remainder of the lecture explaining his view on the real reasons for Ieyasu’s success. This was very clever.

By providing sound, credible reasons first, he had established his command of the literature and the related scholarship. It all sounded very convincing to me and what is more I had invested myself in recording it all. The bait and switch technique now elevated him above the rough and tumble of academic insurgencies over the finer points of history, to stand above the fray and position himself as the one who really knew his stuff. His reputation was enhanced by a conjurer’s trick of making the penny disappear and then draw it out from behind your ear.

Academic illusionist or not, it worked like a charm. Think about the standard business presentations you have been exposed to. They are usually pedestrian affairs, involving the doling out of data and information, specialised only in delivering the talk in a deadly boring manner.

Today we presenters face the most difficult presentation environment in history. It has never been this bad. Our audience are glued to their phones and live in the internet for disturbingly long periods of the day. They have microscopically short concentration spans, are quickly distracted and constantly moving, ever doom scrolling and unable to settle. Then we turn up for our little party piece representing our industry and firm. Getting and keeping people’s attention has become the search for the holy grail for presenters.

Are we allowed to use magic tricks to grab and hold their attention? Absolutely we are! This is a zero sum game we are involved with here and we either get our point across or we don’t even get a desultory reception. Technology and social media have made us experts at pattern recognition. This has always been a strength of our species, which has kept us going, as we anticipate trouble before it arrives. This means that as speakers the pattern interrupt aspect of what we are doing becomes very important.

The lecturer mentioned earlier took us down a predictable path, with a fulsome list of plausible explanations. He then executed a pivot and pulled off a pattern interrupt telling us all of that was codswallop. We were invested in what he had told us and I for one, had written it all down, so the shock was palpable when he said to forget about all that stuff. “Hello, hello”, I thought, “what is going on here”. He had removed the central pillar of our commitment to the content and now promised to replace it with a much sexier version.

When we are giving our talks, this can sometimes be added to our repertoire of techniques for commanding the attention of the audience. We can start with a predictable, safe version for the crowd, leading them up the garden path with content which is persuasive, plausible, cogent and rational. Throwing all of that overboard creates a vacuum. Our brain doesn’t like that and wants the correct version to be implanted, so we are all ears to hear the truth, the real story.

We have also self-elevated ourselves above the fray and self-selected ourselves as the superior being, the enlightened purveyor of the most accurate knowledge and best quality information on the subject. This is a major credibility boost and the audience is wide open to it, because of the way we have set it up. The flip side is you have to have the goods. If you say the standard interpretation is rubbish, then your next contribution had better be totally worthy of the rock star you are purporting to be.

Obviously, we wouldn’t put ourselves up on the high wire without a safety harness, if we were not confident we could carry this off. This is where we need to have real knowledge and better research on the subject than our audience. We also have to deliver the talk with a passion for sharing key information with our audience. They will absorb the trick if they feel the intention was pure. Just being a trickster won’t work. We have to deliver unexpected value and exceed audience expectations.