Fieldnotes for people who value honest and intelligent communication
I was thinking last week about what makes someone inspirational as a speaker, or at least interesting…!
Here’s what I came up with:
A real person speaking simply and passionately to real people about real issues.
Here’s what I mean.. Continue reading ‘What makes someone an inspirational speaker’
TED.com have announced their list of top 10 TED talks. 
Jill Bolte-Taylor’s is number one. Apparently it has been viewed 2.5 million times.
Just shows you what a striking presentation can do.
(If you haven’t read my moment-by-moment analysis of Jill’s presentation about what it was like for her as a neuroanatomist to experience her own stroke, you can find it here. )
One thing that’s important as a specialist is to confound people’s negative expectations of what a person like you is like.
We were training some senior technical specialists in the UK last week, and I was watching their final presentations. One of the major things I noticed was the most successful sessions were ones that dealt with the expectation that an IT specialist would be very focused on their technology to the exclusion of all else. It made an enormous difference when they spoke about the business issues, how the technology fitted into the lives of the people they were speaking to, and used non-technical language.
People will have certain expectations of what a person like you will be like.
If you’re in IT, they will expect someone who is smart but geeky, interested in the nerdy features of their system, and very detail-orientated. If you’re in marketing or PR, you’re interested in making pretty lies, not in telling the truth. If you’re in HR, you’re either touchy-feely, or overly concerned for regulations (depending on what type of HR department the company has!). If you’re a financial advisor, you’re only interested in the sale, and not in genuinely looking after people. If you’re an accountant, you’re boring. If you do anything even vaguely un-mainstream, you’re a bit woo-woo.
When dealing with people’s internal circus (what they’re thinking and feeling about you and your topic), it is often useful to first acknowledge their concerns by stating them out loud, then dealing with them.
With these types of preconceptions, I think it’s better to just be different. If you say, ‘Well, a presentation from an accountant, I bet you think this is going to be pretty tedious!’, it may be that some of the people you’re talking to weren’t thinking that. Also, you’re setting the bar pretty high – a bit like saying, ‘Let me tell you a funny story – you’re gonna love this…’
Much better to just be more interesting by taking the time to telling stories from your life and making sure that everything is super-relevant to their current situation.
Tacitly confounding people’s expectations in this way can leave them pleasantly surprised, and move you a step closer to delivering a presentation they will listen to, talk about and act upon.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about who I most enjoy working with.
The list of qualities was pretty easy to come up with. Here’s what I wrote the other day:
And then I thought about what the people we had trained had in common apart from this psychological profile. I realised that most of the people we had trained fell into two major categories: IT people and small business owners. There are also some people in marketing/PR who have gotten on pretty well with our class too. The IT bit was pretty easy to find, as we have taken 350+ IT managers through our masterclass. What I realised is that the other people had something in common: they were specialists.
We don’t tend to train what I would call ‘professional managers’ ie people whose job it is to manage people. We certainly don’t train sales people.
We tend to train people who have specialist knowledge and need to convey that, to both a specialist and a non-specialist audience.
So you’ll notice that the tagline for Real.Smart.Now has changed. It now reads ‘Credible presentation skills for IT professionals and other specialists.’
That’s because ‘Credible presentation skills for IT professionals and other specialists who are passionate, smart, curious, not easily duped, up for it, want to convince without selling out and are interested in being authentic and not fake’ was a bit long.
Watch this video of Cisco’s telepresence system that means a speaker in Bangalore can have real-time interaction with a speaker in California, with it looking to the audience like they’re in the same physical space.
Ok, for magic nerds amongst you so this is just Pepper’s Ghost from the 17th Century (where they would project images onto glass to make ghosts), but man, it looks totally cool!
More info on the holographic tech here:
New York Times: Illusory Characters with Startling Stage Presence
I think this could work, if the speaker gets to see/hear the audience. It’s not going to have quite the same energy as a flesh-and-blood presentation, but it might make it possible to have some world-class speakers speak at your conference without having to fly them all the way there…
Loads of applications of 3d Holographic Projection at Musion. Click the links on the left.
I mean, the real technology is the telepresence stuff, but the two together… genius.
For those of you who’ve seen Kung Fu Panda, fun as it is, will know it follows the American trend towards ‘Just believe in yourself…’
Whilst there’s a lot to be said for confidence, I think there needs to be a place for confidence based on competence. It’s not enough to just feel good about your abilities, you gotta be good too.
So, don’t gloss over the fact that the training sequence (using Char Siew Bao as motivation for a food-loving Panda is genius) makes the secret of the scroll any use.
I don’t mean to be cynical – I loved the movie. Maybe I’m just more of a ‘Here’s where you start paying… in sweat’ kind of guy.
Well, I’m just as shocked as you are.
I’m recommending a book on PowerPoint. Never did I think I’d see the day.
For those of you who haven’t worked with me yet, I have been running an anti-PowerPoint campaign for years. I see how much PowerPoint (and other slideware) robs people of both their power, and often their point. Slides are used either as a way of hiding from the audience or distracting them, as speaker notes, or as handouts. None of these (ab)uses does anything for your credibility.
And so I dedicated my professional career to enabling people to speak to groups without needing slides or scripts, so that any visual aid is chosen because your listeners need it, not from a personal need of the speaker.
Garr Reynolds came at it from the other side. He saw terrible PowerPoint presentations and thought, ‘How can I teach people to use slides so that they help the audience to learn what the speaker is looking to convey?’
The result is his book Presentation Zen, based on his blog of the same name.
I’m only part of the way through it, but I don’t think I’ve disagreed with a single word yet. Things I’ve been saying for years are mirrored in what Garr is writing about, illustrated beautifully, of course.
It’s so great to find someone who is doing the same job as me, but from an entirely unexpected angle. Another person being fully self-expressed in his chosen career…
In fact, it’s so well written, that I got quite dizzy in the bookstore, wondering if I’d been wrong all these years. It took me a while to realise that we were just coming at the same problem from different angles.
Same intention, different solution.
I’ll be posting more about Presentation Zen as I move through it. So far, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, especially if you’re in an organisation that demands PowerPoint.
If you’d like to explore this one with me, here’s a link to the book on Amazon.com.
Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter)
Small print: going to Amazon via this link, or the pic at the top of the page, means that for anything you spend in that trip, Amazon will pay this blog 4% or so, at no cost to you. So if you were going to Amazon.com anyway (not co.uk, I’m afraid – working on that!), feel free to do it from here, and in doing so, support Real.Smart.Now. Think of it as a tip for good service!
I’m doing some thinking around storytelling, and will be posting some thoughts soon.
In the meantime, here’s a concise bit of advice from Susan Trivers about incorporating stories into a presentation
Look around you at the news of the world. In tragedies and in triumphs there are stories of human nature that should spark your thinking. How do parents go out in front of their communities when they’re overcome with grief? Thousands of activists will travel miles at their own expense to share their message. There are sports figures, and political leaders and business executives who face difficulties and turn them into opportunities.
I’m not recommending that you tell these stories, because they are not your own. I am recommending that you let your mind wander over your own life and you’ll suddenly be reminded of a time when you experienced something similar and acted in an inspiring way. Think relevance rather than replication.
The three essential elements of a story are:
1. Crisis
2. Obstacles to overcoming the crisis
3. ResolutionWhen you remember your own stories, identify the three elements. Craft your story using dramatic language, short phrasing and the active voice. Then end the story with a quick lesson learned. Now you’ve found an inspiring story you can take to your audiences.
I particularly like ‘Relevance, not replication’.
We work a lot with smart people who really know their stuff. This means that we often have to talk with them about how they pitch their material at the right level of detail. Having a multi-faceted understanding of your topic means that you see all the subtlety, and can sometimes find it hard to filter that for a group. It can often feel like you’re dumbing down to an ridiculous extent.
Edward Hall was an anthropologist who wrote some key texts about cross-cultural communication. I came across him when I was researching a programme which we called Global Communication Strategies. His work is accessible and fascinating.
One concept of his from cross-cultural communication that I am shamelessly appropriating for us here is the idea of High Context and Low Context. This is particularly relevant if you work in a technical or highly specialised field, but at times speak or write for people who come from outside of that field.
High Context is communication that relies very little, if at all, on the explicit words that are being used. Think of a couple who have been together for 15 years, and how much can be communicated with a glance. Almost all of the information is ‘stored’ in the context of the communication – High Context.
Low Context would be typing code for computers. Everything must be explicit for a computer – there is no room for even a punctuation mark out of place when typing code. None of the information is reliant on knowledge outside of what is expicitly stated, thus Low Context.
High Context delegation would be ‘Make the business more profitable this year.’ Low Context delegation would involve precise process instructions.
Hall’s idea was that this was a useful axis from which to examine national cultures. Particularly writing for a reasonably untravelled (at the time) American audience, he helped to unravel cultures that seemed so alien: Japanese, Mexican… Hall lived for a quite a time in Japan, and discovered that he was misconstruing much of what was being communicated because he was listening to the words, rather than working from an understanding about the way the words were being said, and what wasn’t being said. Coming from a ‘let’s put all the cards on the table’ American culture he wasn’t trained to respond to communication where much of the relevant information was being conveyed by the context in which it was delivered.
Just to be clear, we are talking about a continuum, not an on/off digital distinction. Speaking of relatively High Context, or relatively Low Context makes more sense.
Pitching your communication at the right level means finding where your audience is at with your topic. Using the metaphor of High/Low Context can be helpful if we take it out of the concept of national culture and apply it to any kind of in-group.
Watch your conversation the next time you speak to someone you know who is also a specialist in your field. How much assumed knowledge is there between you? What would be gobbledygook to your grandmother? If a friend from a different field came into the conversation, what would you have to apologise for and explain? This is how we communicate in a High Context situation. Much of the information is unstated and implied. It can also be very efficient in terms of time.
Now think about actually explaining your job to your grandmother…
My granny asked me the other day if it might be good for her to get a computer. Thinking about how much detail we went into to show her how to use her cable tv remote (‘First press this button – that will switch it on. Then…’) I know how Low Context the communication would have to be to teach her how to use the internet. Low Context communication is detailed and explicit and slow. My granny is a smart lady, it’s just that she doesn’t have a schema, a framework, to place instructions about website addresses, or even mouse clicks.
Pitching your communication too Low Context will patronise someone who is familiar with your topic. Pitching it too High Context for people who have little detailed understanding will leave them lost.
Particularly get sensitive to the specialist language that is used in your field. These are essential shortcuts in a High Context situation, but jargon in a Low Context one.
Like so much of your thinking about communication, if you pitch it just right, people won’t even be aware of the planning you’ve done. You’ll hit the right balance between what can be assumed and what must be made explicit, and your information will be that much more likely to slide right in.
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