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In business, when the point is not crystal clear, and when the benefit to the audience is not vividly evident, the investment is declined, the sale is not made, the approval is not granted; the presentation fails.
In my Power Presentations programs for my clients, and in this book, I bring a media sensibility to the business community, to deliver a set of prescriptive techniques and services that enables presenters like you to achieve their clarion call to action with their audiences, to get them to Aha! When creating television public affairs programs, I had to wade through hours of archival and new film footage and reels of videotape, rifle through massive reports, sort through stacks of interviews, and boil it all down to a clear minute-and second program that would capture.
In television, I worked in multi-million-dollar control rooms equipped with electronic character generators, vast color palettes, chroma key insertion, and computer-driven, on-screen animation. In television, I directed both film and video cameras, and then spliced and arranged their output into a compelling story. In doing so, I employed the professional practices of cinematography and editing to tell a story and create an impact on the audience.
A wise person once defined a classic simply as something that endures because it works. In ancient times, rhetoric was considered the greatest of the liberal arts; and what the philosophers of old called rhetoric is, in fact, what we refer to today as great storytelling.
Other methods I reference are based on established knowledge, as well as recent discoveries about the human mind. These scientific findings which detail how all brains and eyes absorb information relate directly to how every audience reacts to any data input.
In this book, as in my programs. The traditional presentation skills, body language, gestures, voice modulation, eye contact, and answering questions from the audience, are also important. Just show me what to do with my hands while I speak. There are a couple of good reasons for this:.
The reverse is never true. In , I got an anxious phone call from the public relations people at Microsoft, regular clients of mine. There was a slight pause on the other end of the line.
Jeff has only one day. What happened next is revealing. As requested, I spent one day with Jeff. Instead, we used our time to develop a cohesive focus of Windows for Pen Computing: about what this remarkable new software product was designed to do, about the markets Microsoft hoped to serve with it, the history behind its development, the benefits it offered computer users. In short, we created the story Jeff had to tell. I helped Jeff make some decisions about his story: which elements were most relevant and compelling to his audience; which technical details were necessary, and equally important, which ones were superfluous.
Then I helped Jeff organize his presentation so that the key ideas would flow naturally from beginning to end. Jeff was not only in command of the material, but also comfortable about delivering it.
The results? Simply getting the story right helped to transform a hesitant and. Pen Computing. To be truly effective, however, one Aha! The Power Presentation is a continuous series of end-to- end Aha! I liken making presentations to massage therapy. The good massage therapist never takes his or her The good presenter grabs their hands off your body. In the same way, minds at the beginning of the the good presenter never lets go of the presentation, navigates them audience.
The good presenter grabs through all the various parts, their minds at the beginning of the themes, and ideas, never letting presentation, navigates them through go, and then deposits them at all the various parts, themes, and ideas, the call to action. Notice the verbs I used in this analogy to describe the work of a skilled presenter: grab, navigate, and deposit.
All three can be reduced to a least-common denominator verb: manage. People are the deciding factor in business decisions, and management is. The good presenter is one who effectively manages the minds of the audience. Therefore, the subliminal takeaway of the effective presentation is Effective Management. Of course, no one is ever going to conclude explicitly that a good presenter is an effective manager, a skilled executive, an excellent director, or a superb CEO.
But the converse proves the point. Unconsciously, the audience makes assumptions. If they are subjected to a presentation whose point is unclear, they will be resistant to responding to the call to action. Influential investors from Warren Buffett to Peter Lynch subscribe to the commonly held principle of investing only in businesses they understand. Eventually, this hard work begins to produce first resistance, then irritation, then loss of confidence.
The effective presenter makes it easy for the audience to grasp ideas without having to work. The effective presentation story leads the audience to an irrefutable conclusion. Presenting, therefore, is essentially selling. Of course, I would never minimize the importance of having solid factual evidence that validates your business premise. A well- honed presentation is no substitute for a well-conceived business plan, just as a commanding speaking style is no substitute for personal integrity.
You must have the steak as well as the sizzle. Yet when two companies or two individuals of equal strength are. In the end, the most subtle impact of a clear and compelling presentation is perhaps the most powerful effect of all: The person who is able to tell an effective business story is perceived as being in command, and deserves the confidence of others.
When you are in command of your story, you are in command of the room. Your audience will follow where you lead, and so will money, influence, power, and success. The person who is able to tell an This is the core message and value of effective business story is perceived as being in command, this book to you, no matter what role and deserves the confidence of or level in business you currently others. I helped create Power Presentations for each of these companies.
I hope to do the same for you. This book is about presentations, yes. One recent estimate has it that 30 million presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint slides are made every day. How many of them were truly memorable, effective, and persuasive?
Probably only a handful. The vast majority of presentations fall prey to what I call the Five Cardinal Sins:. The audience leaves the presentation wondering what it was all about. The presentation fails to show how the audience can benefit from the information presented. The sequence of ideas is so confusing that it leaves the audience behind, unable to follow.
How did the presenter get there? So many facts are presented, including facts that are overly technical or irrelevant, that the main point is obscured. The audience loses focus and gets bored before the presentation ends. How many times in your entire professional career have you ever heard a presentation that was too short? When presenters commit any of these sins, they are wasting the time, energy, and attention of their audience.
Each of these Five Sins is quite separate and distinct from the others. But why on earth should you care about what I had for dinner last night? Can you recommend a new place? Now, if I told you about my fine meal by starting with the dessert, then I went back to the salad, then jumped forward to the cheese course, then back to the main course, my story would have no flow.
If I described the courses I ate by using the phylum, class, order, genus, and species of every animal and vegetable product in the dinner, it would be far too technical and too detailed. If instead I confined my description to descriptive adjectives and simple nouns, I would avoid the fourth sin. Finally, if I took four hours to tell you about a meal that took me only two hours to consume, my presentation would be too long. This analogy may be a little far-fetched, but the Five Cardinal Sins are all too The inevitable reaction of audiences to a Data Dump is real.
And although each of the five is not persuasion, but rather the unique and independent of the others, horrific effect known as MEGO: they can all be summarized in a least- Mine Eyes Glaze Over. Why would any presenter in his or her right mind do that to any audience?
Would you do that if you were trying to attract potential clients? Would you do that if you were trying to clinch a sale, raise investment capital, or convince analysts that your company is solid? The objectives of all of the above presentations are varied, but they all have one factor in common. In every case, you are trying to get the audience to do your bidding, to respond to your call to action, whether that means endorsing a proposal, signing a contract, writing a check, or working harder and smarter.
The Five Cardinal Sins stand in the way of achieving this goal. They spend 12 or 14 hours every day working on competitive strategies, product launches, financial analyses, marketing plans, mergers and acquisitions, sales pitches. They live, eat, sleep, breathe, dream, and inhale their businesses. They see every single one of the trees, but not the forest.
They rarely have the opportunity, or feel the need, to take several long steps back. For most businesspeople, when a situation arises in which they must sell their business story, their intense involvement in the minutia often proves a hindrance. They mistakenly think that for the audience to understand anything, they have to be told everything. The remedy is painfully apparent: Focus. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Give the audience only what they need to know. Persuasion is one of the crucial skills of life.
The persuasive situations you may face will be remarkably varied, each posing its own unique challenges and opportunities. Yet all presentation situations have one element in common. This dynamic shift is persuasion. Recognizing this truth is the best starting point for learning the art of persuasion. Your main and only purpose is to move people to Point B.
When the point is not apparent, you have committed one of the Five Cardinal Sins; when the point, Point B, is readily apparent, you have made your clarion call to action. What you are asking them to do is Point B. The precise nature of Point B depends on the particular persuasive situation you face. To reach Point B, you need to move the uninformed audience to understand, the dubious audience to believe, and the resistant audience to act in a particular way. In fact, understand, believe, and act are not three separate goals, but three stages in reaching a single, cumulative, ultimate goal.
Point B is the moment at which those investors are willing to sell some of their holdings in Intel or Microsoft and invest those valuable assets in shares of the fledging company. A toaster is an appliance. It does one thing and one thing well: It toasts bread. Managing data on networks is complicated. Until now, data has been managed by devices that do many things, not all of them well.
Our company makes a product called a File Server. A File Server does one thing and does it well: It manages data on networks. If Dan had stopped right there, his investor audience would have understood what his company did. We invite you to join us in that growth. That last sentence is the call to action. Notice that Dan did not ask the investor audience to buy his stock. A synonym for lead is manage. The subliminal takeaway, then, is Effective Management. Starting with the Objective in Sight Point B, then, is the endgame of every presentation: its goal.
The only sure way to create a successful presentation is to begin with the goal in mind. This is an age-old concept. Aristotle called it teleology: the study of matters with their end or purpose in mind.
In author Stephen R. Aristotle in everyday garb. The missing point is Point B: the call to action. Unfortunately, and inexplicably, Point B is missing from all too many presentations.
Ask for the order! Call your audience to action! Get to the point! Get to Point B! Mastering Audience Advocacy means learning to view yourself, your company, your story, and your presentation through the eyes of your audience. In programs with my clients, I role-play potential investors, prospective customers, or would-be partners.
In developing my own program material, I take the point of view of my clients. I urge you do the same in whatever presentation you are developing. This is a shift in thinking that requires both knowledge and practice. Let me refer again to Aristotle, that pioneer in the art of persuasion. In his master Mastering Audience Advocacy work, the Rhetoric, Aristotle identified means learning to view yourself, the key elements of persuasion, the your company, your story, and most important of which he called, in your presentation through the the Greek of his day, pathos.
Pathos eyes of your audience. Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile. The question is: How can you communicate so that your audience will be pleased, friendly, and ready to act on your Point B? My experience, and that of hundreds of my clients, suggests that the best method is Audience Advocacy. Everything you say and do in your presentation must serve the needs of your audience.
Shift the Focus from Features to Benefits One way to understand the concept of Audience Advocacy more fully is via one of the classic rules of advertising and sales. In fact, when you shift the focus of any presentation from Features to Benefits you heighten the chances of winning converts to your cause. By contrast, a Benefit is how that fact or quality will help your audience.
Whereas a Feature may be irrelevant to the needs or interests of your audience, a Benefit, by definition, is always 1. Aristotle, Rhetoric. Translated by W. Without Benefits, you have no Audience Advocacy. For people to act For people to act on anything, on anything, they must have a reason they must have a reason to act, and it must be their reason, not to act, and it must be their reason, not yours.
The same principle applies to any persuasive challenge you face. Features are of interest only to the persuader; Benefits are of interest to the audience. Go with Benefits every time. This means doing your homework. And while you need to understand them as representatives of the marketplace or of a client company, you also need to understand them as human beings. What are their biggest headaches, fears, worries, aspirations, needs, loves, and hates?
How can what you have to offer serve them? At times, your interests and those of your audience are bound to diverge, which creates the potential for conflict and frustration. You may dearly desire that raise, that lucrative sales contract, or that crucial loan or investment needed to keep your business afloat.
Inevitably, your audience members will have their own motivations and issues that differ from your own. The art of persuasion must be balanced by Audience Advocacy: convincing your audience that what you want will serve their interests, too. Alex Naqvi is the CEO of Luminous Networks, a private Silicon Valley company providing optical Ethernet solutions that enable the giant telecommunications carriers to deliver, on a single.
Although a veteran in the industry, Alex usually finds the telecoms, as they are known in the trade, a crowd that is an especially tough sell. But, Alex has learned to recognize, understand, and respond to the interests and feelings of those audiences. Alex explains:. Our new technology makes it possible for telecoms to deliver better Internet service more economically than ever before. We thought that using Luminous Networks would be a no-brainer for any telecom manager.
Many of the managers we were hoping to sell our services to had been with the firm for 20 years. They were conservative and maybe a little afraid of the new and the unknown. We were alienating the very people we needed to win over. In time, we learned to soften our presentations. We started describing our technology not as a radical shift, but as a natural evolution from the current technology.
The technology you now have in place was perfectly appropriate for its day. But now the world has changed, and Luminous is ready with the next-generation technology you and your customers need. We forget the human factor. The message must be honed to address those human motivations. The MEGO syndrome sets in. Persuasion is the art of moving your audience from Point A, a place of ignorance, indifference, or even hostility toward your goal.
It is only possible to move your audiences along this path when you follow the principles of Audience Advocacy: to place their needs at the heart of your presentation. The central expression of Audience Advocacy is presenting Benefits rather than Features. Few communicators achieve the sheer exhilaration of end-to-end Aha!
But most communicators can come a lot closer than they usually do. This is the essence of Audience Advocacy in action. There will usually be one overarching, grand WIIFY that unites the entire presentation and is at the heart of your persuasive case.
On the other hand, when a corporate headhunter makes a job offer to a sought-after young recruit, the WIIFY is,. You might want to copy this list from Appendix B and tack it on the wall for continual inspiration.
When you work on a presentation as part of a team, use these triggers on your colleagues, and encourage them to return the favor. By the tenth time you pull a WIIFY trigger, you may catch a nasty look or two, but the quality of the resulting presentation will make it all worthwhile.
Jim Bixby was the CEO of Brooktree, a company that made and sold custom-designed integrated circuits used by electronics manufacturers. I role-played a money manager at Fidelity, considering whether our mutual fund might invest in Brooktree. No other company in the industry has as many products in its catalog as we do. Jim set down the catalog and was about to move on to the next topic when I raised my hand and fired off a WIIFY trigger. Why should I care about the size of your catalog?
The lights went on. What benefit does this offer my listener? But if there is a benefit, be sure you explain it, clearly, explicitly, and with emphasis, just as Jim did when I pulled the WIIFY trigger. They can figure out the benefits of whatever I mention. They might even feel insulted if I spell it all out for them!
This is not necessarily true. Remember the Five Cardinal Sins. One is lack of a clear benefit. An essential truth about Audience Advocacy is that most business people today are overloaded with information, with commitments, with responsibilities. Although your audience members are eminently capable of realizing the WIIFY on their own, when you state it for them, you lead them toward a conclusion, which of course is your Point B.
In doing this, you manage their minds, you persuade them, and you instill confidence in your story, your presentation, and yourself. Plus, you accomplish something else. The audience may have just gotten to the Aha! By articulating it, you win their agreement. Debbie runs a small but growing catering business. In the past, she has managed to keep most of her weekends largely free of work, which her husband Rich thoroughly appreciates.
It will be quite lucrative as well as prestigious, but Debbie has to convince Rich to support her in this endeavor. She also had to adjust her plans so that Rich will receive a definite personal benefit. WIIFY will force you to do just that.
Now, as CEO, Mark was preparing to take his new company public. I was coaching him through a rehearsal of his IPO road show by role-playing, as I usually do, a high-powered fund manager at Fidelity. Mark eloquently presented the strengths of his company, focusing in particular on the high quality of their products.
As an example, he described the special features of the new dental instrument his company had developed. I stopped him. To hone his appeal to the investors who were now his audience, it was necessary for Mark to carefully focus on their concerns, which related to the size of the market for his instruments. Can you get away with the wrong you? Will your audience be able to translate the benefit to another party into terms that are meaningful for to them?
Of course they can. But if they do, they will have to make a split-second interpolation to adjust to the correct you. During that interval, they will may stop listening to you and start thinking. Make it easy for your audience to follow, and the audience Consider those words as a guideline for will follow your lead. Audience Advocacy. Make it easy for your audience to follow, and the audience will follow your lead. Suppose the audience does make the leap themselves, translating the WIIFY into terms that are meaningful to them?
This problem of the wrong you is a surprisingly common one. Many of us in business have to sell ourselves and our stories to. At that time, I taught Reed, as I do all my clients, the subtle but important difference of addressing the correct you.
Nonetheless, when Reed emailed me the draft of his road show for Netflix, one of the first slides in the presentation described his core business as shown in Figure 2. That can be handled by your sales force. Reed accepted the revision, polished his presentation, and then left to begin his IPO road show. One month later, when Netflix went public, they offered 5. They received orders for 50 million shares: oversubscribed by nearly ten times.
By providing the logic for them, Reed led them to a conclusion, and, in doing so, built their confidence. Reed seized his opportunity. Also note this: The problem of the wrong you is a major reason to resist the temptation to create a generic presentation about yourself, your company, or your products.
The same story that excites and inspires your own employees may bore your customers and actually alienate and anger your suppliers, or vice versa. The same story that persuades technical customers to buy your product may confound your potential investors.
Luminous, which had started in business in , planned to eventually to go public, but given the challenging market conditions in , Alex and his team decided to take their show on the private, rather than the public, road to seek additional financing.
Before we presented to the investors, we also did due diligence on them and their professional backgrounds. We did a total of about 60 presentations. It was a very tough environment, a poor financial market. But in the end, the presentation helped us raise the money we needed. While a strong speaking voice, appropriate gestures, and skilled answers to challenging questions are important factors, none of them will yield a really powerful presentation unless your story is clear and leads your audience directly where you want them to go: your Point B.
Creating your presentation begins with the development of your story. Here is one of the first places where traditional methods of creating a presentation can go wrong. Remember the MEGO syndrome? It strikes when Mine Eyes Glaze Over during a presentation that overflows with too many facts, all poured out without purpose, structure, or logic.
When that happens, the presentation degenerates into a Data Dump: a shapeless outpouring of everything the presenter knows about the topic. All too many businesspeople labor under the mistaken assumption that, for their audience to understand anything, they have to be told everything.
Throw in some excerpts from the press coverage we got after our product launch. The audiences to these Data Dumps are hapless victims. But sometimes the victims rebel. Those interruptions, however, are made more out of self- protection than rudeness. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. But performing one is vital to the success of any presentation. The secret: The Data Dump must be part of your preparation, not the presentation. Do it backstage, not in the show itself.
What you need instead is a proven system to incorporate a thorough Data Dump into the development of your story.
Brainstorming is the ticket. Later on in the process, you can sort, select, eliminate, add, and organize these raw materials into a form that flows logically and compellingly from Point A to Point B. At the start, the key is not to apply logic to the materials, but simply to get them all out on the table where they can be examined, evaluated, and sorted. Do the distillation before the organization: Focus before Flow.
Left Brain versus Right Brain Scientists have long been fascinated by the way in which different mental functions are centered in different areas of the human brain. Most of the higher brain activities occur in the cerebrum, which is divided into left and right hemispheres. According to most scientists, the left and right halves of the brain are responsible for different forms of reasoning. The left side controls logical functions. The right side controls creative functions. The right brain bounces around among concepts, following connections that are impossible to explain logically.
Building a presentation is a creative process. That means starting with the right brain. They try to jump immediately to a logical, structured, linear end product, when their right brain is still caroming around in nonlinear mode.
Because businesspeople are essentially results-oriented rather than process-oriented. When it comes to results-oriented tasks, like a presentation to a very important client with a deadline on-stage , you want to get there in the shortest distance between two points.
A time- consuming process might delay the result. The solution is timing. Focus before Flow. A vivid illustration of the distinct difference between right and left brain functioning is spoken language. Speech reflects the way the right brain operates in its spontaneity, its grammatical and syntactical messiness, and in its frequent logical leaps. Let me illustrate with an excerpt from the live presidential debate between then-Governor George W. Each candidate was given a chance to respond separately to questions posed by ordinary citizens.
Everybody who pays taxes is going to get tax relief. I think also what you need to think about is not the immediate, but what about Medicare? So it will be a modern Medicare system that trusts you to make a variety of options for you. A judicious use of the military which will help keep the peace. See, an educated child is one much more likely to be hopeful and optimistic. Should be a helping hand. And tax relief in the proposals I just described should be a good helping hand.
The response given by Governor Bush soon, of course, to be President Bush veers and rambles all over the place. He never specifically addresses the question of how a year-old single person would be affected by his tax plan. Next, he skips to Medicare a subject of less-than-immediate interest to a year-old. Then he skips further off the path on to the topics of world peace, military policy, education, and finally, work ethic. Some of our most effective political leaders have been known to speak in a rambling fashion Dwight D.
Eisenhower for one. And, speaking crisply and logically is no guarantee of statesmanship or political wisdom. My essential point is a more general one. An excerpt of spoken language, when transcribed and printed, will never read like well- crafted prose. When I read the transcription, I was most surprised to see how irregular my word patterns were. The reason: Spoken language is governed by the right brain. Rather than focusing on the rules of logic, grammar, syntax, and consistency, it flows freely, wherever the concepts lead.
By contrast, the production of written language tends to be governed by the left brain. When most people sit down to write a letter, memo, or report, their minds are front-loaded with left- brain functions: logic, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Rather than bouncing freely from one idea to the next, dragging in. The result is a document that is technically correct. But because the writer ruled by the left brain is concentrating on the rules of logic, grammar, and so on, the natural flow of concepts is often impeded.
Almost inevitably, the writer omits ideas that are necessary or includes ideas that are unnecessary, overly detailed, or irrelevant. This is a natural by-product of left- brain dominance. Starting the work of developing a presentation with left-brain considerations such as logic, sequence, grammar, and word choice or, for that matter, the color, style, and design of slides is simply not Use the right tool for the effective. Crafting a presentation is a right job.
Use the right tool for the right job. Therefore, start the story development process by doing what your brain is going to do anyway: follow the stream of consciousness and capture the results during Brainstorming.
I doubt it. Do you want to start by thinking about the rest of your schedule on the day of your important presentation? Attire and calendar are related to the presentation, but only peripherally.
Before you begin the Brainstorming process, you must first tighten your focus past the peripheral. To do this, begin with the tool I call the Framework Form. Think of your presentation as a blank canvas within a frame. This is where you will do your Brainstorming. To tighten the focus, you need to set the outer limits, the parameters, of your presentation. They include the following elements:. Point B Since most presentations lack a clear point the first of the Five Cardinal Sins , why not start with it?
In other words, start with the objective in sight and work toward it. Once again, this rule incorporates the wisdom of Aristotle and Stephen Covey. Audience Now that you appreciate the importance of Audience Advocacy, you must analyze what your intended audience knows and what they need to know to understand, believe, or act on what you asking.
Use the following three metrics to analyze your audience:. Who will be in the audience? What are their roles? Remember that one of the Five Cardinal Sins is being too technical. You cannot be an effective audience. It measures knowledge along the vertical axis, from zero no background knowledge about the presentation topic at all to the maximum knowledge which usually only the presenter would have.
The horizontal axis measures the number of people in the audience. To use this graph, mark points along it that represent what fraction of your audience will be located at each knowledge level along the vertical axis. Thus, for a presentation about a new high- tech product to an audience that includes a large number of relatively unsophisticated listeners along with a handful of engineers and other knowledgeable experts, the graph might look like Figure 3.
The specific shape of the line you draw should be constantly in your mind as you prepare and present your material. This is undoubtedly the most important factor in analyzing your audience. Remember that another of the Five Cardinal Sins is no clear benefit to the audience. Ask yourself: What does your audience want? How does the subject of your presentation offer it to them?
How can you make the benefits to your audience crystal clear? Some external factors will be positive, some negative. For instance, when making a pitch for investment dollars for your company, a rapidly expanding market for your product would be a positive external factor, while the emergence of powerful new competitors would be a negative external factor.
You must consider all the external factors as you prepare your presentation. In some cases, you may need to change the content of your presentation or alter its structure to respond to unusually powerful factors.
Setting Throughout the preparation process, keep in mind the physical setting for your presentation. These factors, too, may affect the content of your presentation. You can analyze the setting by asking and then answering these classic journalistic questions:.
Will you be the only presenter? If not, how many others will be presenting before and after you? How will you distribute the parts of the story among the presenters? When will you be making the presentation? How much time will you be allotted? Will you have time for audience interaction? Will there be a Question-and-Answer period? How will the room be arranged? Will it be an intimate or massive setting? In a smaller setting, interruptions are inevitable.
If so, allow time for discussion. What kind of audio-visual aids will you be using? If so, will there be room and visibility to perform the demo? When will you do the demo: before, during, or after the presentation? You need to ascertain all these factors and define them in writing before you start your Brainstorming. Use the Framework Form shown in Figure 3. Define all these factors as clearly and as specifically as possible.
The idea is to build a presentation tailored to one audience, on one occasion, presented by one set of presenters, conveying one story, with one purpose. A presentation that is less than custom-built will inevitably be less effective and less likely to persuade. Why bother with presenting at all if you are not prepared to invest the time needed to make your presentation all it can be? Does that mean that you need to start every presentation from scratch?
Not necessarily. It usually takes 15 minutes the second time, and less each time thereafter. The secret is to consider each presentation by starting with the basic concepts of the Framework Form. This initializing process will help ensure that your presentation, rather than becoming generic, is effectively focused on the specific persuasive situation you face. Resist any temptation to skip or short-circuit the Framework Form process.
Lay out these facts in black and white; they will have a positive impact on what should and should not appear in your presentation, and in what form. Now your right brain output, instead of considering attire or schedule, can focus on more relevant ideas. Set up a large whiteboard or an easel with a big pad of paper and lots of push pins to mount the sheets.
I prefer a whiteboard because it allows me to erase and rewrite free- flowing ideas at will. It also results in a neater and easier-to- read set of Brainstorming notes. Have on hand a supply of markers in several colors. Use different colors to indicate different groups or levels of ideas. There are several high-tech products on the market that can capture written scrawls electronically from a whiteboard to a computer and then to a printer my favorite is eBeam from Electronics for Imaging.
These tools are very cool, but not essential. You can always ask someone to hand-copy the notes during or after the Brainstorming. Gather your Brainstorming team. It should include all those who will participate in the presentation as well as any others who have ideas or information to contribute.
You, as the presenter, or someone from your group with reasonably neat handwriting , should handle the markers and capture the Brainstorming ideas on the whiteboard. This person is your scribe. In my programs with my clients, I act as both scribe and facilitator. As a facilitator, I assume a neutral point of view and simply take down all ideas as they come up, without judgment.
There are no bad ideas in Brainstorming. Let them all flow. That is the essence of right-brain thinking. I also ask that each person in the group feed his or her ideas through me so as not to lose any ideas in side discussions, crosstalk, or digressions. I post all the ideas on the whiteboard for all to see and There are no bad ideas in share.
Have your scribe assume a similar role. Your scribe should not have a bias for or against any idea that emerges. Consider your scribe as Switzerland: neutral in all events.
Launch the Brainstorming session by having someone, anyone, call out an idea about something that might go into the presentation. As each concept comes up, the entire group should help to explode the concept. You or your scribe should jot these down as they come up, circle them, and link the circles to form a cluster of related ideas.
Continue to do the same for other concepts that people in the group suggest. As you work, be flexible! We forgot to list Jim, the marketing vice president, as a member of the management team.
If necessary, use the eraser. The placeholder will remind you that further research is needed. The ideas will shift, connect, disconnect and duplicate as they seek relationships with other ideas. This is your right brain at work. As ideas continue to come up, they will move around. Let it happen. Relationships will emerge, change, and develop. Capture all the activity on the whiteboard. The Spirit of the Brainstorm While your team is Brainstorming, the right brain must rule.
Remember that most businesspeople are left-brain-oriented, conditioned by education and experience to apply logic, reason, and rules to every activity. Learn to stifle this tendency during your Brainstorming. Avoid wordsmithing ideas. Remember: There are no bad ideas in Brainstorming.
Avoid censoring any ideas. The person whose idea is rejected is likely. When Brainstorm as candidates, not anyone mentions a new idea, jot it finalists. Even a needless idea can be useful, since it may stimulate someone else to bring up a related fact that may turn out to be important. Get it all down. Consider all ideas during Brainstorming as candidates, not finalists.
The right time to do the Data Dump is during your preparation! Avoid thinking about structure, sequence, or hierarchy. Structuring front-loads your mind with sequence, order, and linear thinking, the hallmarks of your powerful left brain.
Instead, let the concepts tumble out in nonlinear fashion, just the way the synapses of your brain fire naturally.
Think about structure later. Remember: Focus before Flow. Give yourself enough time to do a thorough Data Dump. Chances are the group is just taking a mental breather. When you are truly done, your whiteboard will be filled with lots of circles. At that point, the entire group will be able to see all the elements of your story, all the candidate ideas, laid out for easy examination and organization.
If any of this sounds familiar, it should: It is the kind of out-of-the- box thinking that many businesspeople use in strategic planning,. Well, these are the very same minds and the very same subject matter that go into a presentation. Why not use the same process? Spreading out the raw materials of your presentation gives you ready access to and control of all your ideas.
Contrast this approach with a left-brain, linear process. The problem is that, as you focus on the slides one by one, each slide effectively covers and hides the slide before. You never see the whole story at once; therefore, you never see the best way to organize all its components into a single, compelling whole that flows powerfully from start to finish. It allows your ideas to pour out in a random, nonlinear fashion, ensuring that every relevant concept as well as every irrelevant one gets a place on the radar screen.
Roman Columns: The Technique of Clustering Brainstorming will generate a host of ideas of varying importance, loosely related to one another. The first step in getting from this. In the previous group Brainstorming example, every time the group exploded a concept into a series of related concepts, forming a group of linked circles on the whiteboard, they created a cluster.
These clusters reflected the natural relationships among the ideas as they poured out during Brainstorming: parents and children. Clustering is a necessary technique for organizing any complex material for presentation to an audience. It may have been Cicero, although the documentation is sparse. The orator often spoke in the Roman Forum extemporaneously for hours, without referring to a single note.
His secret was a memory technique that is still used today. Did you notice today how I walked around the Forum as I spoke? I assumed you did so in order to reach out to those in every corner of the audience. As I walked from point to point around the edges of the Forum, I paused for a time at six different marble columns. Those columns are my memory aids.
Each one symbolizes and reminds me of one group of ideas. Thus, rather than memorizing dozens of particular details, I have to recall only the six key ideas. Each of those key ideas evokes the details related to it. Did Cicero really use this technique 2, years ago? No one knows for sure. But today I urge my clients to use the same. Clustering lets you reduce the 40 or 50 ideas that fill your whiteboard to five or six Roman columns, the key ideas that will organize all the rest.
Each column has a group of subordinate ideas. Now instead of trying to organize many ideas at the detail level, you can organize them at the 35,foot level. When you look at your whiteboard filled with ideas, you will find key clusters emerging from the chaos. Examine the whiteboard and use a new colored marker to highlight the most significant ideas. The idea is to make the parents stand out visually from the mass of data, as in Figure 3. If some ideas seem to have no connection to any of your Roman columns, now is the time to ask whether those ideas are truly.
And if you think of new ideas now that ought to be inserted, go ahead and add them. As you can see, the technique of Clustering begins the process of organizing and introducing logic into the presentation.
After having deliberately held back your left brain, you can now let it begin to get into the act. Splat and Polish You may be tempted to short-circuit the process by skipping the Brainstorming stage.
That would save us all a lot of time. It wants to avoid the messy, uncontrolled process of free association. Organize them later, and later still polish them into words and sentences and paragraphs and, ultimately, into slides. I call this process Splat and Polish. They may note their ideas on Post-Its, on dog- eared index cards, in spiral-bound notebooks, or simply in stacks of loose pages.
Those notes, of course, are their Data Dump. Find the shortest distance between two points. They figure that the quickest way to get a presentation done is to just start writing. Logical, yes? Yes, and wrong. Judy Tarabini now McNulty was a vice president in the technology unit of the Hill and Knowlton Public Relations Agency when Ben Rosen, continuing his promise to help me grow my business, introduced me to the firm. In , Judy joined the corporate communications department of Adobe Systems.
This time she had a high-level, mission-critical presentation: Adobe was about to introduce its Acrobat product, and they were planning to have their entire senior management team, about 15 strong, fan out into the market to make launch presentations.
As always, we started with a blank slate. They have since moved to even newer and more advanced facilities in San Jose. I started drawing out the executives. As those very bright and very high-powered people spouted their thoughts, I raced to capture them on the. We got lots of clusters: the Acrobat rollout schedule, the distribution plan, the Acrobat partners, the product benefits, the market, and many more. Before long, the whiteboard was filled to the edges with clusters of ideas.
Then there was a pause. A thoughtful silence ensued. Then suddenly, reverberating in the silence, there was a sharp thwack! Does that sound odd? Sure it does. But it happens a lot. Take the time to make certain that everything and I mean everything that may be relevant has had a chance to surface. Realizing what you omitted five minutes before the start of your presentation will be too late! First, get the heart of your story straight; then and only then can you think about the most effective sequence of concepts for presenting that story persuasively.
You brainstormed potential ideas to include in the presentation and distilled those ideas into clusters, also known as Roman columns. Good lectures, and by extension, good presentations are the ones that make us think and make us think more efficiently. Students need to think because without it they will never understand.
However, it is difficult to think about new ideas, and good presentations tap the power of distributed cognition to manage the cognitive load required, to make thinking more efficient so that thinking can be focused on what is important for understanding. To achieve this requires a different approach to designing and delivering presentations. The approach explained in this workshop is a version of the assertion-evidence approach that is adapted using the principles from my first three workshops.
In essence this adapted approach makes the teacher focus on critical ideas and exploit the uniqueness of lectures. Terrance Goan. Neil Peterson. Ksenia Volchenkova. Wayne Padgett.
David Farkas. International Professional Communication Conference. Anita Murnieks. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Summary - Presenting to Win. Kashif Ali. Related Papers. Oral presentations in international contexts: published advice, actual practice, problematic issues. Computer Human Interaction Observing presenters' use of visual aids to inform the design of classroom presentation software.
Presentation skills amongst surgical trainees at a national conference: an observational study. English for presentations at international conferences adrian wallwork. Practical Teaching Skills Workshop 9: Designing presentations that make lectures useful Presenting to Win!
The audience leaves the presentation wondering what it was all about. The presentation fails to show how the audience can benefit from the information? The sequence of ideas is so confusing that the audience is unable to follow. The main point is obscured by irrelevant information. The audience loses focus and gets bored.
Give the audience only what it needs to know.
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