Creative Streak

#5: How to Break Your Presentation with Conversation

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."  It covers initial points on how to ask questions of the audience, how to lead exercises, and how to facilitate discussion and debate.

This post originates from an earlier one (“Want To Show How Intelligent You Are?”) although that purpose was slightly different.  There, my point was that presentations should be clear, succinct or prioritized – not an elaborate display of brain power, or an unending litany of details, facts and charts.

Related to that post, my point here is that lecture-based presentations – that is, when you do (nearly) all the talking – are often not effective at helping the audience listen.  You might be able to carry the burden of the speech for 10 minutes or so, but if your presentation stretches longer, say to an hour … well, even your mother wouldn’t find you that interesting.

There are several ways to break from the lecture and build rapport through discussion.

• Ask questions
• Conduct exercises, or
• Lead discussion and debate

#4: Be VARK

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

When you’re an audience member, listening to a speaker, do you realize how you are taking in information? How are you processing what's being said? How does it go from the speaker's lips to your brain?

Perhaps you’ve never given it much thought. If it's a particularly boring presenter, perhaps you thought nothing was going in. But in reality, there's a lot more than think.

Psychologists believe individuals are bombarded with as many as 10,000-12,000 sensory stimuli per second from the environment around them. According to Suzette Haden Elgin, in her book Business Speak, “If attention was paid to every one of those sensations, the result would be information overload. To avoid this, humans reduce the incoming information to manageable quantity, noticing some and discarding others, remembering some for short-term (working) memory, indexing other for long-term memory storage.” Elsewhere, she continued: “No later than the age of 5, we discover which one of the senses works best for (us), which is more useful to process information.”

#3: Break Your Presentation Into Chunks

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

In 1956, psychologist George Miller at Princeton University concluded from research that individuals normally only retain seven serial-order items of information (give or take two items) in their short-term memory. The theory became known as "Miller’s Law," or also "Miller’s Magic Number."

Since that time, additional research has shown that the idea of 7+2 is less exact than suggestive. Some claimed the "real number" was 5. Others – probably highly caffeinated, can’t-wait, A+ type people – strongly believed that they (the audience) will only remember one thing in their short-term memory. More so, if you follow the Ides of Twitter, they'd also suggest this one singular statement would also be no longer than 140 characters.

I myself think the magic number is 3. I use the Goldilocks Principle to prove my hypothesis. Two statements sounds like not enough, and four statements sounds like too many to remember. Therefore, 3 is “just right.”

#2. Know Your Audience (Part 2)

This is another post in a series from "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

This is the second of two posts on knowing and understanding your audience. The key point here: Who is your audience listening to? You, or the Little Voice in the back of their heads? The first part - What type of audience are you speaking to? - is posted here.

There’s an odd truth to listening, and it’s this: every time you speak, there are two voices in the conversation. Your audience hears your voice, they listen to what you say.  The other is more complicated, and (almost always) is louder and more credible than yours. The audience listens to "the little voice in the back of their heads."

You may remember a time when you were speaking to the audience, and you realized by looking at a specific person that they were not listening to you, they were listening to themselves. I’ll admit it too. Sometimes – even when I’m speaking – I’m listening to my own voice talk about the participants. In other words, they’re using their Little Voice on me, and I’m using my Little Voice on them. Funny how we ever listen at all, isn’t it?

How To Be An Authentic Speaker, Part 2

As a follow-up to a popular post I wrote in March about “How To Be An Authentic Speaker,” I enjoyed reading Matt Bai’s column this morning in the New York Times about Rick Perry's humiliating performance during a recent Republican presidential debate (“The Other Problem With Perry’s ‘Oops’ Moment”).

It seems everyone in the US knows about Perry’s painful moment when he blanked-out, unable to name the third government agency that he would shut-down if elected president. Go here to see the video, or double-click the photo.

Even if you like Perry, it's cringe-worthy. How many times have you seen someone make a gaffe during a presentation, and think, "Thank God that wasn't me." The speaker who’s forgotten their thoughts. They freeze on stage, we do the same in our seats.

A fact gets twisted-up coming out of their mouth, a tangent leads off into oblivion. I’ve seen people stumble and trip (I’ve done it myself). I remember one woman who accidently jumped from English to Chinese in nervousness. But in the end, they've usually emerged with their reputations (somewhat) intact.

Perry, not so much. As the Washington Post said, "This could be the beginning of the end." As an essay of analysis, Bai’s column was aimed at understanding what made the disaster so … well, disastrous.  

#2. Know Your Audience (Part 1)

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

This is the first of two longer posts about knowing and understanding your audience. The key point in this post: What type of audience are you speaking to?  The second part – Who is your audience listening to? You, or the LIttle Voice in the back of their heads? – is posted here.)

When I ask workshop participants to describe their audience, I typically get answers which define the audience’s demographics, such as their gender, their titles or jobs, age, department.  That’s a good start, but there are two further – and more important – steps to learn about the audience to enable them to listen better to your presentation and its ideas.

1. Who is your audience, and what type of audience member are they?

2. What do they know (already) about your presentation topic or subject? 

Who Is Your Audience?

There are three questions to ask about your audience. First, what’s your relationship to them?  Do you have any credibility to them?  To paraphrase the famous Harvard Business Review article: Why should anyone want to listen to you?  Depending upon which research you prefer, as much as 50% to 70% of your audience won’t start listening at the beginning of your presentation until they have a strong understanding of why you are a subject matter expect about your topic. That means you need credibility from the get-go.

If you don’t have two credibility, you have only two ways to establish it: you either tell the audience why you’re the expert, or you get the person introducing you to establish why you’re the expert. If your lead-in doesn’t know how to introduce you, tell them in explicit messages how to do so.

#1: Get To The Point

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

As quickly as possible, you should tell the audience …

• the purpose of your presentation – from their point of view, not yours
• what your objective is for speaking – from their point of view, not yours
• what action you want the audience to consider or do at the end of the presentation – from their point of view, not yours

Notice a theme?

Obvious perhaps, but the first and best way to prevent your audience from not listening to you: stop talking about you. On your first date with the person who you knew you were going to spend the rest of your life, did you talk about you all night? (Hopefully not.) You shouldn't do the same to your audience. Talk about their favourite subject: them.

10 Things To Help Your Audience Listen To Your Ideas

While preparing for a listening skills workshop last week, I went back over a number of good books on listening from my bookshelves and the local library, as well as re-read some excellent resources online - including a few of my earlier posts on the topic.  (Check the Listening category for the entire group of posts.)

But, when I was actually facilitating the workshop – watching how some people were listening, some others not so much – I was reminded that there’s some important tasks that the presenter should do to help the audience listen better too. 

The list below is not necessarily my own, but a collective project between me and all of the 3,500 people who’ve attended my workshops over the years.

Here’s the list. Click on any point below to jump to more detail.

Communications Rule #1

This popped into my in-box this morning. Funny how spam can sometimes be insightful.

Need more explanation? Go here.

Want To Show How Intelligent You Are?

Perhaps it's because my body doesn't know what time zone it's in, but one thing has been sticking in my craw since I got back to Chicago. I've sat in a dozen workshops and meetings over the past few weeks, and among all of the presentations, one element was consistent.

Of the time allotted to them, many presenters filled up the agenda with themselves – I call it “ME” time – leaving little room for Q&A and/or keeping audience interaction to a minimum. These meetings looked like Drawing A.  

In contrast, a few presenters chose to use the agenda to get their organised points across quickly, spending the remaining time with key people discussing and debating the recommendations. These meetings looked like Drawing B. 

I understand why the A people chose to facilitate the meeting the way they did. They wanted to get the maximum amount of information across to their audience, to show how much they knew their topic or recommendation, to show they were thorough and comprehensive.

Afterwards, when I asked why, the reasons were various. One said they reported to someone who was anal-retentive and controlling. Meetings were meant to agree on decisions: instead, they turned into opportunities for their boss to micro-manage information. Others realised they were justifying their employment or position in uncertain economic times. Most admitted that the idea of editing their thoughts never occurred to them.

Ironic, isn’t it? What they ultimately wanted to achieve (to show value, get promoted, keep their job) was in direct opposition of what they actually did in their PowerPoint presentations.

I applaud the B people who elected to facilitate their meeting differently. They chose to convey their recommendations in messages which were clear, succinct or prioritised. They’d learnt that distilling a sea of information down to its essential points demonstrates as much (if not more) command of the topic as filling up a slide up with charts, graphs and detail. Their response to the anal retentive boss was to show they could differentiate between strategic data and minutiae. Their response to a tenuous position was to show their efficiency and effectiveness.