Practical Eloquence Blog |

Make Your Presentation Scalable

By Jack Malcolm / 12.12.2013 / No Comment

Presentations rarely go exactly as planned, and one of the most common reasons is the incredible—and inevitable—shrinking time slot. You prepare a half-hour presentation because you’ve been told that’s how much time you will have. But unlike you, the previous presenter showed up late or rambled on past their allotted time, and now you have to pay the price.

The meeting sponsor asks if you can give the presentation in 15 minutes instead of 30, and you agree because you really don’t have a choice.

Faced with this challenge, most speakers react in one of three unsatisfactory ways:

They talk reallyreallyreally fast
They go on at the same pace with same material, and just stop early
If they have time, they go through their slides in a panic and figure out which points to leave out

There’s a better way—structure your presentation so that it is scalable.

In its simplest form, a business presentation has an introduction, middle and end. In most cases, you can keep the beginning and end relatively unchanged. You may need to strip out some of the context out of the beginning and forgo the summary at the end, but neither of those will affect the length too much.

To make the middle of the presentation scalable, picture it as a pyramid, with a key message supported by three main points (although the exact number is of course flexible).

In the topical structure, you may have three supporting reasons to accept your theme, each supported by evidence and supporting reasons of its own. For example, the first reason might be that it will increase revenues. Supporting that might be the three ways that it will increase revenues, each illustrated or supported by stories, statistics, and such. In effect, you end up with a pyramid structure.

It does not have to be a topical structure to work. For example, your three main points may be problem description, causes and recommended solutions. Or yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Depending on how you create your presentation, each of the three main points could be a certain slide design, and the supporting evidence could be shown on slides with a different heading style, for example. That will allow you to go quickly through your slides in slide sorter view and hide the bottom level of the pyramid. Leave out the detail but keep the basic structure intact. If people ask for the detail, you can remind them that you don’t have time to provide it but will be glad to leave the complete set of slides or answer questions off line.

The point is that if you leave off the base of a pyramid, you still have a pyramid.

There’s an added advantage to designing your presentations this way. Your own structure and reasoning become much clearer, both for you and for the audience, and that clarity always pays credibility dividends.

By the way, especially when presenting to busy decision makers, it’s a good idea to tell them up front what decision you’re going to ask them to make. They’re pretty quick studies, and they’ll either tell you when they’ve heard enough, or they will tell you what they need to hear to say yes.

Productivity

Testing Yourself

By Jack Malcolm / 12.11.2013 / No Comment

I read an average of two books a week, and have done so all my adult life. (Before then, I read even more.) Not only that, but when I really relate to a topic, I write notes in the margins and highlight important parts, and because most of what I read is non-fiction, one would think that I have filled my head with close to 3,000 books worth of information, knowledge, and maybe even some accidentally accumulated bits of wisdom.

The problem is that apparently my mind has been like a river, with a torrent of information flowing through it but very little staying behind in deep pools of knowledge. To give you an example of how bad it can be, on a recent trip I read Roy Baumeister’s book, Willpower. I found the book fascinating and full of good sense, but I also had the strange feeling that some of the stories were vaguely familiar. When I returned home I checked my bookshelves and discovered that I already owned a copy of the book which I had read a couple of years before and filled with highlights—many of them the same exact ones that I highlighted this time!

So, while it’s great to constantly refresh your stocks of knowledge, I’ve learned that there is a huge difference between lifelong learning and lifelong reading.

It’s an illusion of learning. When I read a book and the ideas make sense, it’s easy to fool myself into thinking that just because I get it now, I will still have it when I need it. You probably remember your school days when everything seemed so clear while you were studying but you could not bring it to mind when you needed it for the test.

Like so much in life, things seem easy until you actually put them to the test. That’s when you find the gaps and weaknesses in your understanding, when you realize how little of what you have read or heard has actually stuck in your mind. If you can’t remember it or apply it when you need it, the time you have invested in learning it the first time has been wasted.

Just like a wild river needs to be dammed to capture the benefit of its power, the secret to retention and understanding is testing. Don’t wait for others to test you, or for life to test you, test yourself. Test yourself by trying to explain it aloud, either to someone else or just to yourself. You can also write down a summary of the ideas, and then go back and check yourself.

Researchers have compared various learning strategies, including highlighting, or reading the same material several times, and have found that the single most effective method of really learning is testing. That’s because when we pull something out of memory, it’s not like opening that drawer in our minds where we stuffed the information—the memory is reconstructed each time we need it. The more we reconstruct it, the easier it is. Testing yourself strips away the illusion of learning and exposes what you do or don’t know.

But testing doesn’t just test—it teaches. It teaches in the same way that lifting a heavy weight several times to failure makes you stronger. You have to find your limits in order to exceed them which is why when testing yourself, the best thing you can do is fail. If you haven’t failed you haven’t found your limits. Failure doesn’t cost you anything, except a little extra time—but that time makes all the difference.

How would you apply this? After you read a page or a chapter or even a whole book (depending on the density and difficulty of the information), set aside a few minutes and try to explain the key ideas out loud or on paper. Explain does not mean a bullet-point listing of the key points. It’s an actual description using full sentences that links the ideas together in narrative or causal links. If you have trouble remembering a key piece of information, resist the temptation to check back—really test yourself by trying to fill in the missing pieces to make complete sense. Then, go back and check yourself. When you find you’ve left out a key point, try again.

It can be devilishly hard to do the first few times, but it does get easier. After you’ve done it enough times, you’ll find that the nature of your reading or listening will also change. You will begin mentally organizing the information in ways that will be easier to retain and call to mind when you need them.

Persuasive communication

Words Count

By Jack Malcolm / 12.10.2013 / No Comment

You can create magic by choosing the right ones

The overwhelming trend these days among what’s written about presentations and communications in general is toward visuals and stories to evoke emotions and leave lasting impressions.

That’s a good thing in a lot of ways, especially if it will kill the “wall of words” approach that sadly is still too prevalent in slide presentations today.

But words still count for a lot. In fact, one word can evoke such strong emotions that it overpowers all the context around it. The most glaring example of this in the recent news was Dolphins’ lineman Richie Incognito’s use of the “N-word” in his text message to his teammate Jonathan Martin. Regardless of what comes out of the investigation that is ongoing, the use of that one word has irrevocably changed his life.

Of course most of our daily business and personal communication is not so emotionally charged, but we would do well to continue to pay close attention to the effect that our word choice has on our listeners. Why?

Words can be as memorable as visuals. Did Obama have a slide showing behind him when he said, “Yes we can?”
The right combination of words can compress complex thoughts into one memorable phrase:
- “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”,
- “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”
Although it’s true that a lot of emotional meaning comes from nonverbal sources such as tone of voice and body language, that assumes face to face communication, which is clearly declining as a proportion of the time that we spend communicating and influencing others. Text, twitter and sound-bites make word choice even more important, because words are all we have.

So What?

Choose your words carefully. Keep in mind that words often carry emotional meaning far beyond their dictionary definitions, which is why armies of political consultants make a living changing gambling to gaming, or inheritance tax to death tax.

Know your audience. Don’t tell a room full of Lanier salespeople during a training class to “Xerox” their sales call plans, as one of my instructors once did.

Use short, simple words. They pack more punch.

Don’t overdo it. Words are so powerful that we use euphemisms to avoid political incorrectness, and sometimes lose clarity. My pet peeve is the horror at using the word “problem” or “weakness” when coaching others. There may be times when someone needs to hear very clearly that they need to solve a problem, not “address an issue.”

Rehearse. When you have to choose your words carefully, don’t count on winging it and being able to confidently say the right thing. I made this mistake once when I was delivering my wrap-up after a two day class to a sales force. I told them they were “pretty good”; two words that negated two days’ worth of enthusiasm—and I couldn’t say a thing to undo the damage.

Success

The Beanie Baby Effect

By Jack Malcolm / 12.9.2013 / No Comment

Remember Beanie Babies? They were a fad that took off in the late 90s when my kids were young enough to participate. They were little stuffed animals that only cost about $5 apiece, so when I first found out about them, I thought it was a good idea. They were nice wholesome toys that didn’t cost much, so I was all for them.

But the low price actually was the problem, because my wife would think nothing of picking up a couple here and there when she was at the mall. Then McDonalds started giving them away in Happy Meals. Pretty soon it became competitive, because other kids had more and different ones than mine did. They started figuring out strategies. The idea was that different cities would have different varieties, so, since I traveled a lot, I had to be on the lookout for new ones everywhere I went. Once we took a family trip to Alaska and almost missed our connection in Seattle because Lisa and the kids had fanned out to case all the airport stores.

The worst part was when I took stock one day, and figured out that they had spent over $800!

Little things add up to a lot over enough time. It was bad enough with Beanie Babies, but even worse with other bad habits. I suspect that if I added up all the time I’ve wasted in my life giving in to this distraction or that every once in a while, it would add up to years.

But let’s focus on the positive side of the Beanie Baby effect. The rest of the world knows it as kaizen, and it is a powerful, powerful tool for productivity and self-improvement. People tell me all the time they would like to write more, or work out more, or learn more, but they just can’t find the time. Maybe their mistake is in trying to do it in large chunks (although there are definite benefits to spending larger chunks of time with thinking work, but that’s a different article). If you can’t dedicate large blocks of time to a worthwhile goal, set aside just five minutes. Maybe five minutes at the start of your day, or five minutes right at the end, or squeeze in five minutes reading an informative article, or just writing between appointments and tasks. After a while, just like Beanie Babies, you find that the more you pick up a few here and there the more motivation you have to get even more, so five minutes turn into ten, ten into fifteen, and so on.

Precisely because the individual inputs are so small, it may not seem like much is happening, until one day you suddenly realize how much you have done. Like drops of water wearing away the hardest rock, little bits of effort and attention here and there can accomplish a lot. And the best part is that the benefits tend to accelerate, because hard things get easier or turn into habits.

By the way, does anyone want to buy some Beanie Babies?