Episode #70: Have you Got Your Presentation Rhythm Going

We hear a lot about the current age of disruption but it is also the age of distraction. If you are a speaker, then today’s miniscule attention span problem on the part of your audience is definitely a big problem. How can we speak in a way that keeps the audience with us and off their phones and escaping to the charms of the internet? We need to look at our speech forensically. Breaking it down to five minute blocks and structuring those blocks so that we can keep changing the rhythm of the speech, to keep the audience with us. How do we do that?

Juniper research says the “smart store” market is projected to process more than seventy eight billion dollars in annual transactions in twenty twenty two. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sees seamless shopping as the way of the future. In Japan, Signpost has launched a rival concept to AmazonGo, the fully automated shopping experience. Signpost opened an experimental kiosk on Akabane Station here in Tokyo in October 2018. Cameras and artificial intelligence software track merchandise and purchases. They call the system the Super Wonder Register and say the system can be installed in any store. They plan to start selling their system in Japan and overseas, launching in stores, supermarkets and train station kiosks this year. They are predicting installing thirty thousand systems in Japan by twenty twenty one. San Francisco’s Standard Cognition plans to enter Japan with their competitor system through a deal with the suburban drugstore chain Yakudo. Japan’s retail market for automated checkouts is promising, with more than fifty five thousand convenience stores and everyone having trouble hiring enough clerks to work in them. Kambara says, “Amazon won’t share their Go technology with others. They’re going to try and kill off existing retail stores, so we want to give retail stores the weapons they need to fight back”. In other news, Japan’s labour force in 2017 was sixty seven point two million workers. The government predicts that this will fall to fifty eight million by twenty thirty. The labour participation rate by senior citizens in Japan is already high. The rate among men sixty five and older is thirty one percent compared to twenty three percent in the USA, twenty one percent in Sweden and nine percent in Germany. Women are a big hope to increase work participation rates. In Japan, in the age bracket between twenty five and fifty four the participation rate is seventy five percent compared to eighty eight percent in Sweden, eighty three percent in France and Eighty Two point five percent in Germany. A rise of ten percent in Japan’s rate would add another two point four million workers to the labour force. The Diet has approved the use of foreign workers, aiming for three hundred and forty five thousand over five years. According to the OECD the ratio of foreign born people in Japan was one point nine percent in two thousand and seventeen, compared to the OECD average of thirteen percent. Maybe AI and robots will save the day. The Oxford University Nomura Institute prediction was that almost half of Japanese jobs would be taken over by robots and AI by twenty thirty. Finally, fifteen percent of Japanese say they have no social intercourse at all outside the family, the highest in the OECD. For young and middle aged men eight point four percent live alone. Fifteen percent of elderly men living alone have fewer than one conversation in two weeks. Currently twenty percent of Japanese are classified as “lifetime singles’. This is going to become a very lonely nation in the future.

Usually a speech or presentation is somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour long. Obviously, the longer the talk, the harder it is to keep the audience’s attention. Even worse, today, everyone has their internet connection to email, social media and apps in their hand, right there under the desk, while we are speaking. We have all become fervent multi-taskers, listening to someone speak while surreptitiously scrolling through our email feed, Facebook or LinkedIn or all three!

For the speaker to be persuasive there must be a transfer of passion and belief to the members of the audience. How does this work when we speakers are only getting the partial attention from those we wish to persuade? The irony is we have never had so many devices to aid our message communication and yet we are becoming less communicative thanks to our small screen obsession. Talking at others is not communication. Having our listener follow what we are saying, digest it and agree with it, must be the goal. Otherwise, why are we bothering? We could just send everyone the ten key bullet points by email and we can all head off early to cocktails.

Words carry their weight through the delivery. I was reminded of this recently when some clever person put together a video of Donald Trump speaking, but dubbed him with a very polished posh Oxbridge style, British accent. The precise same words were there from the original speech by The Donald, but they were magically transformed into something that sounded more intelligent. How was that possible? The delivery is what made the difference and the dubbed speaker was very skilled and polished.

Many people imagine that the content of their talk will be sufficient to carry the day with their presentation and that emphasising delivery skills is simply dabbling in verbal voodoo. Such beliefs are often firmly held by technically oriented people, for whom proof, evidence, statistics and data are sacrosanct, solid and sacred. They believe that the weight of the evidence is all we need to persuade others. Not true!

“If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it matter?”, is one of those cool, hipster questions some people like to throw around. Here is another version: “If your evidence was compelling, but nobody was paying close attention, would it matter?”. The answer is obviously “Yes, it matters”. The degree of difficulty in being heard in a cacophonous, blue screen focused world is increasing everyday. We have to rise to the task.

Let’s presume that the presentation’s opening has been well designed and is successful in grabbing the attention of even the most distracted audience. Before we get to the wrap up and call for Q & A, we have our main points to present. This number will probably range between three and five points. If it is a forty minute speech, then we have roughly thirty minutes for the main body and so around five to ten minutes per section of the speech. There may be main points and sub-points in each section, depending on the density of the topic.

We can take a bracket of five to six minutes as our framework for the speech. Every bracket needs to have a change of pace to keep our audience’s attention. Even within the same topic or sub-topic, we need to switch gears and vary the delivery. This is not something we leave to happenstance – we plan this from the very start.

We might introduce a powerful visual effect, be it on screen or in the room using a prop. I used a rolled up Japanese scroll to great effect in a speech. I wanted to unfurl the scroll so it would drop quickly and reveal what was written there. I attached some small weights to the bottom of the scroll to have it make a slight snapping sound when it unfurled for even more dramatic effect.

On the scroll was written “DatsuO NyuA” (脱欧入亜), which was a play on words reversing a Meiji era slogan of Japan turning away from Asia and going toward European civilization. I was making the point that my country of Australia was moving away from Europe toward Asia. I could have just said so in words, but the scroll drop was much more powerful.

On another occasion, I was making the point about Australia being as safe Japan, because of the similar strict gun control laws. Hidden in my suit jacket I had a plastic replica Magnum 38 handgun, which Clint Eastwood made so famous in his Dirty Harry movies. It has a very long barrel and is a physically big gun, so even when viewed at a distance, it has visual impact. I slowly pulled the gun out and held it high above my head, in profile view to the audience, saying “This is illegal in Australia, the same as in Japan”, to make my argument about the safety of sending their children to study in Australia.

Now our speech cannot become littered with too many such devices every five minutes, because we will be exhausting our audience. However, there should be a change of pace at regular intervals to keep our audience with us. It might be a powerful quotation, a joke or a visual on a slide that grabs our attention. We are going for the mental equivalent of an audience stretch break every five minutes or so. The key is to plan the speech this way from the beginning, if we want our message to be heard. We do want it to be heard, don’t we.