The EAR Formula For Presenting

We love another acronym, not! It is a handy memory jogger though, so let’s persevere with yet another one. Whenever you are in a situation where you need to get collaboration, support, funding or agreement, then the EAR formula is a very effective tool for presenters. It is simplicity itself in terms of understanding the formula. The delivery though is the key and this will make all the difference.

The Formula stands for E – Event, A – Action and R – Result. It is quite counterintuitive and therein lies a lot of its success. It is disarming and makes the presenter a small target for opposition to what they are recommending. Often, we have something we want and our first instinct is to just blurt it out. We have convinced ourselves that it is the best course of action, the most logical, high value approach and obviously the weight of all of these factors will automatically sway our listeners to adopt our recommendation.

What is the reaction to all of this blurting though? Immediately the audience hears what we have to say, we are suddenly facing a crowd of card carrying sceptics. We shouldn’t be surprised but we usually are. What have we done? We have offered the flimsiest tissue of an idea to the listeners and expected them to extrapolate what they have heard to encompass the full weight of our argument. Of course we are intending to now launch into the detail of the idea, the rationale, the evidence etc. This makes sense. We are taught at business school to get the executive summary to the top of the report and then go into labyrinthine detail on why this idea makes a lot sense. When it is in document form, the audience do read the detail and do pay attention to the proof of our idea.

Sadly, when we are live, they lose all senses and depart from the plan. They hear our raw unaided, unprotected, unabashed idea and they go into deafness. Their eyes are open but their mind has raced away to a distant place, where they are roiling through why this blurted idea makes little or no sense, or why it flies in the face of their experience or expectations, or a thousand other reasons why this simply won’t work. We have lost their attention.

Instead we apply the EAR formula and we take them to a place in their mind’s eye. There must be a reason why we believe what we think and that must have come from a limited number of sources – what we heard, read or experienced. The Event piece is to reconstruct that moment when we had our epiphany, our realisation our breakthrough on this idea. We want to transport them to the spot too, so that they can reconstruct the roots of this idea.

We don’t have unlimited time for this and we are telling a story, but it is a brief story. If we get tangled up in the intricacies of the story and are going on and on, then the listeners will become impatient and dissatisfied. If they are our bosses they will just tell us “to hurry up and get on with it”.

The secret is to put in the season – a snowy day, a hot summers day, a fall day, a spring day. We can all imagine what that would look like, because it corresponds to our own experience and we can visualise it. We now locate the moment – a dark wood panelled boardroom, a meeting room at the headquarters, a Zoom call, on the factory or shop floor etc. Again we paint the picture of the scene. Not just a factory, but which factory, what type of factory, how did it look. People they know should be introduced into the story where possible. These actors may be known to them and this adds credibility to the story and the point.

The bulk of the speaking time is given over to the telling of the background of how we got to this idea. An excellent outcome is upon hearing all of this background context, the listener is racing ahead of us and drawing their own conclusions on what needs to be done based on the evidence given. Given the same context, the chances are strong that they have reached the same conclusion we have, looking at the same evidence.

After we tell the story we lower the boom and hit them with our call to action. This is A- Action we want them to take component. The big mistake a lot of people make at this point is to just keep adding a series of actions, rather than singling out one central action we want executed. We cannot distract them or nudge them away from considering one decision only. Take action or not. This part of the puzzle is about 5-10 seconds long. This forces us to be crystal clear on what is the one thing we want them to do. For example, “So based on the research, I recommend we begin a prototype and test our assumptions”.

We cannot let that hang there alone. We need to back it up with one of the goodies that will come with it and we must settle on the most powerful “Result” we will enjoy if they take our advice. We do not keep adding benefits and dilute the core message. We go for the blockbuster benefit and that also only takes 5-10 seconds and then we shut up and wait for their response. We could say, “if the prototype works, we are looking at an immediate 30% lift in revenues just in the first year”.

The EAR formula is a jujitsu move, because we are navigating around their potential objections. They just cannot disagree with our context. Our conclusions yes, but not the background to that conclusion. They also have to hear the whole story first before they jump in with a rebuttal. This formula provides us with the means to be heard in a genuine and fair manner. We can keep doing things the hard way or we can use the EAR formula and make business a lot easier for ourselves.