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The lesson for all of us from this talk is how the speaker takes something complex and often boring, and gives us filters to make it approachable, and maybe even a bit exciting.

Anyone else got a complex, boring topic they want to make approachable?

Anyone?

Rather than do this analysis in one-hit, like this one and this one I’m going to spread it out over a couple of posts. For this one, you’re just watching two minutes of the session (from 1:24 – 3:18).

Decide what skills/info your listeners need in order to be able to make sense of your topic

Benjamin Zander is a musician, and whilst he has some ideas about leadership, it’s when he deals with music that he is crystal clear.

When you go really slow-mo, there’s a lot to see in this session that’s practical to apply.

Following Presentation Analysis Question Two for the music section of the talk, what Zander wants us to be able to do is listen to a whole piece of classical music without having our minds wander.

To do this, we need to be able to:

~ make the music make sense, i.e. hear the progression from B to E
~ link in to the emotion behind the piece

Create a filter for your listeners

When your topic is just an incomprehensible mess for your listeners, you have to give them filters to make sense of it. It’s also good to give them a way of calibrating the experience: ‘This is you without the filter, this is you with the filter – see the difference?’

That’s what Zander does quite systematically.

Part 1 – the impulse filter

In order for people to follow the Chopin piece, they need to be able to hear the progression of notes. Cleverly, Zander doesn’t start there. He starts with something very simple: the ‘impulse’ filter.

By starting with impulses, he give us a simple tool which makes sense of a piece of classical music. We have something to hold on to that doesn’t rely on our grasp of music theory, or even on our ability to hear notes.

This technique would work particularly well if your topic seems totally opaque to a part of your audience. Offering a way to process and categorise their experience so that they start to differentiate parts of the whole can help them come away feeling like they’ve had a new insight.

His technique is:

1. Give people an experience of the topic naked
2. Give them a simple filter
3. Give them a positive experience using that filter

The important thing about making this strategy work is making enough contrast between 1 and 3.

Moment-by-moment analysis

1:24 He starts with the examples of a kid playing the piano over the first few years of learning. It seems like a joke, but it’s actually the pre-filter bookmark (I didn’t hear any difference in the last three examples, to my shame).

2:20 ‘… at that point they usually give up.’ Zander’s jokes work because they are matching the audience’s experience and are slightly putting down his topic – showing he’s a good sport.

This is not a bad thing to emulate – people are often intimidated by a technical topic they don’t understand, so if you can show how that’s ok, they may find it easier to relax and follow you.

2:26 ‘If you’d waited one more year you would have heard this…’ [Question in our heads: What changed apart from it just sounding better?]

2:36 (Answers our question) ‘Now what happened was not maybe what you thought…[lists the possibilities]… The impulses were reduced.’ This is the beginning of giving the audience the first filter- the one about impulses. [Question: What's an impulse?]

3:01 ‘You can see it by looking at my head.’ Hearing impulses might appear to be quite subtle, so he gives a crossover signal in another sense – ‘amplifying’ the auditory cue with a visual one.

3:16 ‘…one impulse on the whole phrase.’ We immediately hear not only that the music is better, but we understand why. Not bad for less than 2 minutes!

You can see this technique also here, where the speaker has a huge amount of data in an unfamiliar form, and gives us the keys to understand it.

Another fantastic example of filtering complex data for a non-technical audience

It happens first between 2:30 – 5:14, if you’re in a rush…

(In fact, as I watch that presentation again there is lots to see…)

Over to you

What complex topics do you have to convey? How could you use/have you used this filter technique to make things simpler for them? Who do you remember teaching you that did particularly well at making the complex simple?

To be continued…

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