The Presentations Japan Series Dr. Greg Story

What a double act they were. Two economists giving us some insights into where the markets are going and making sense of the world we face.  Anytime you see an event where there is going to be some crystal ball gazing going on about where we are headed in the global economy, you want to be there.  We are all more risk averse than greedy, and we want to cocoon ourselves from trouble by getting some early warning of what to expect.  This was a Chamber of Commerce event, so I knew a lot of the attendees and did my best to exchange business cards with those I didn’t already know. In the process of doing so, I gained a very clear idea of who was in the room, what industry sectors they were in, and the relative size of their companies.  Neither of the double act speakers did that.
They migrated straight to the VIP table and sat there waiting to go on.  They were there to present, and that was it in their minds. For speakers, that is a basic error.  In many cases these days, the event hosts won’t share the details of who is attending.  We should always get there early and try to meet as many of the members of the audience as we can.  This does a couple of things. 
It connects us with complete strangers and creates a level of rapport with the listeners, which translates into support for us as the presenter.  It also enables us to gauge who is in the room, how senior they are, how big their operation is and how long they have been in Japan.  This is important, because we can adjust the level we set for the presentation to make sure we are not speaking down to anyone or over their heads. 
Our speakers didn’t bother to analyse their audience before they launched forth with their canned presentation. I say “canned” because it was obvious they had been travelling around APAC giving this same presentation to various audiences.  The first speaker was comfortable as a public speaker and had given many talks in his role as an economist.  He did a couple of things I found annoying, as someone in my role who instructs people on how to present.  He was good in many ways, but certainly not perfect. 
One thing I don’t recommend is wandering around the stage as you talk.  He did this and really, the movement had no relevance to the talk.  There should be some theory behind the movement rather than just sashaying around the stage to show you are a seasoned speaker.  There are three distances we can use.  If we want to make a macro point we can move to the back of the venue, away from the crowd.  If we want to make a micro point, we can move very close to members of the audience and deliver our comments at a very close quarters.  We shouldn’t stay in either position for too long and we should then move to a middle, more neutral position.
When we move around, we create a distraction from our message.  If we move, then we move with purpose and use those three distances, I noted, to our advantage. Otherwise, we anchor ourselves and use our neck to swivel around to make eye contact with members of the audience.  As he was wandering around, he was looking in the general direction of his audience and successfully making no specific eye contact with anyone.  That is a big opportunity lost to connect one on one with members of our audience.
There was one more problem with his talk.  The flair of public speaking was on display but the content was rather “so what”.  I keep up to date with the media and probably so did everyone else in that audience, so there were no “oh wow” moments.  I felt cheated that I had wasted my time and money listening to someone who didn’t deliver any value to my investment in attending the talk.
His colleague had the same wanderlust, although a little more restrained.  He also was someone who did these types of talks on a regular basis, so he was plainly comfortable to be standing up in front of a crowd and talking.  The problem became obvious almost immediately when he

Value is a difficult thing to pin down.  In any audience, there is bound to be a wide range of interests, needs, and wants.  How do we decipher that array into a presentation which meets all expectations?  Well, we can’t.  There are too many variables at play, so we have to work on hitting the target for the majority of those who have assembled to hear us speak.  There is a designated theme for the talk, hosted by an organisation whose members have aligned around a central set of interests.  That is a good starting point to ascertain which angle of approach will be the best and most effective. Within that broad spectrum, we have our own areas of expertise and interest, and we seek the nexus of those two forces to find the right theme for the talk. 
Having worked out which theme and approach will meet the needs of most of the audience, we need to look for our value bombs.  What do we know which they don’t?  What valuable experiences have we had, which they won’t have had?  What dead ends and failed missions have we experienced, which they won’t have had as yet and will want to avoid?  The process of elimination is at work here as we dissect our own knowledge bank and our host of experiences, as we draw on the resources we have available to us for assembling the talk.
There is a balance between talking about ourselves and making it relevant to the audience.  Some speakers get that line of demarcation confused and spend too much time on their own glorious career.  They forget the audience is not like us and have different drivers of importance to them.  Our examples, from our own hard wrought experiences, are certainly powerful and appealing to an audience.  However, we have to move from the specifics about us to the broader frame of reference to how the audience can apply the lessons we have learnt.
This is where the value transition takes place.  We need to craft that transition carefully.  This is what happened to me – the incident; this is what I learnt as a result – the insight; and here is what you can learn and apply for yourself – the application.  This incident-insight-application formula is a very handy frame of reference to throw over the talk we are designing, to make sure we can draw out the value for the listeners. 
Because it happened to us, it is true.  Now what we deduce from the experience can be debated, but usually when everyone shares the same context, the chances are high that similar conclusions will be reached. This lessens the chances of an audience disagreeing with our findings.  The application has to be broad enough to capture the various situations of those in the audience.  There is usually a range of industry sectors, ages, genders and experience sets we have to appeal to.
A good way to cover off this variety is to think about what would be the top five possible applications of our insight for this audience.  Probably we won’t get everyone perfectly included, but the chances are high we will get the majority catered for.  Even if we use the rule of three and say here are the three best applications of this idea, that will usually be enough if we think that five is stretching things too much. 
When we line up the experience, insight and application, the audience can all see that we are providing value, even if it happens that we are not hitting that particular person’s bullseye.  That effort to make the talk relevant for the listeners will be appreciated and it shows we really know what we are talking about. 
Pontificating is great fun, but audiences usually want the lessons on what not to do and what to do in that order.  The risk averse nature of people requires that we outline where we failed as a warning lesson to others, that they should avoid doing what we did and save themselves a lot of money and trouble in the process.  Everyone loves a good train wreck story, and I am sure we all have plenty of them to share.
The design stage of any

We love another acronym, not!  It is a handy memory jogger though, so let’s persevere with yet another one.  Whenever you are in a situation where you need to get collaboration,  support, funding or agreement, then the EAR formula is a very effective tool for presenters.  It is simplicity itself in terms of understanding the formula.  The delivery though is the key and this will make all the difference.
The Formula stands for E – Event, A – Action and R – Result.  It is quite counterintuitive and therein lies a lot of its success.  It is disarming and makes the presenter a small target for opposition to what they are recommending.  Often, we have something we want and our first instinct is to just blurt it out.  We have convinced ourselves that it is the best course of action, the most logical, high value approach and obviously the weight of all of these factors will automatically sway our listeners to adopt our recommendation.
What is the reaction to all of this blurting though?  Immediately the audience hears what we have to say, we are suddenly facing a crowd of card carrying sceptics.  We shouldn’t be surprised but we usually are.  What have we done?  We have offered the flimsiest tissue of an idea to the listeners and expected them to extrapolate what they have heard to encompass the full weight of our argument.  Of course we are intending to now launch into the detail of the idea, the rationale, the evidence etc.  This makes sense.  We are taught at business school to get the executive summary to the top of the report and then go into labyrinthine detail on why this idea makes a lot sense.  When it is in document form, the audience do read the detail and do pay attention to the proof of our idea.
Sadly, when we are live, they lose all senses and depart from the plan.  They hear our raw unaided, unprotected, unabashed idea and they go into deafness.  Their eyes are open but their mind has raced away to a distant place, where they are roiling through why this blurted idea makes little or no sense, or why it flies in the face of their experience or expectations, or a thousand other reasons why this simply won’t work.  We have lost their attention.
Instead we apply the EAR formula and we take them to a place in their mind’s eye.  There must be a reason why we believe what we think and that must have come from a limited number of sources – what we heard, read or experienced.  The Event piece is to reconstruct that moment when we had our epiphany, our realisation our breakthrough on this idea.  We want to transport them to the spot too, so that they can reconstruct the roots of this idea.
We don’t have unlimited time for this and we are telling a story, but it is a brief story.  If we get tangled up in the intricacies of the story and are going on and on, then the listeners will become impatient and dissatisfied.  If they are our bosses they will just tell us “to hurry up and get on with it”.
The secret is to put in the season – a snowy day, a hot summers day, a fall day, a spring day.  We can all imagine what that would look like, because it corresponds to our own experience and we can visualise it. We now locate the moment – a dark wood panelled boardroom, a meeting room at the headquarters, a Zoom call, on the factory or shop floor etc.  Again we paint the picture of the scene.  Not just a factory, but which factory, what type of factory, how did it look.  People they know should be introduced into the story where possible.  These actors may be known to them and this adds credibility to the story and the point. 
The bulk of the speaking time is given over to the telling of the background of how we got to this idea.  An excellent outcome is upon hearing all of this background context, the listener is racing ahead of us and drawing their own conclusions on what needs to be done based on the evidence given.  Given the same context, the chances are strong that

Where is the line between referencing our experiences and insights and just talking about ourselves?  I attended a talk recently where the speaker had a perspective to share with the audience, to add value to their careers and businesses.  What surprised me was how much of the talk was cantered on the speaker rather than the audience.  I was thinking about this later and wondered what the better balance would be?  When we go on about ourselves, we are getting further away from points of relevance for the listeners.  We have to remember that people are unapologetically 100% focused on themselves and their own interests and don’t care all that much about our story.
As the speaker, the closer we can align what we are saying to the listener’s interests, the greater the acceptance of what we are saying and the bigger the impact we will have as the presenter.  That is fine in theory, but we can’t just make a series of pompous statements about how things should be and not back them up with evidence.  Often that evidence is coming from our own experiences and that can be the most convincing variety.  Unveiling a lot of sexy data during the talk is interesting, but a mud and blood rendition of what happened to us in the trenches, is always more gripping and compelling. This speaker, in my mind, strayed across the line and was wallowing in too much self-indulgence about what they had been doing.
How do we balance our story with the audience's need for alignment with their benefit?  What the speaker could have done was better draw out how to transfer their learnings into concrete examples, where the listeners could apply them to their own circumstances.  Instead of just saying this is what I did, and this is how it worked for me, they could have gone a bit deeper on the application for others who are not them.  When the example is too idiosyncratic, the agency for others becomes diminished or diluted.
We could say, “I did this and got this result.  Now here are three ways you could take this same idea and apply it to your situation”.  We have now crossed over to the audience’s application of the knowledge. By giving more than one opportunity, we are more likely to hit on what the majority of audience members are looking for.   Importantly, by prior analysis of who is showing up the talk, we can anticipate common needs and circumstances. This allows us to get closer to the mark of listener reality when we explain our examples.
A simple rule of thumb should be 20% of what happened to us and 80% of the time on explaining why this will work for our audience.  Our speaker, in this case, reversed those percentages and spent the majority of the time talking about what happened to them. The problem with this is we in the audience are not them and we have to parse out what we can apply from their story.  It is much better of the speaker saves us that drama and they tell us what we can apply. 
We draw out the key points we want to make for the audience, align our war stories with the points and then add a significant section in the talk on explaining why doing this is a great idea and specifically why it is a great idea bolstered with concrete cases and options.  This is an unbeatable combination.  We demonstrate in words that because we did it, they can, too.  We draw out how it will work for the audience and convince them that it has a broader application than just working for us alone.  We have to marshal the benefits of taking our advice, and the more concretely we can do that, the better.
Our speaker convinced us that it worked for them, but failed to make the case that it would work for us.  They hinted at it, but statements are cheap and we sceptical folk want more evidence.  We are all risk averse, so we want chapter and verse and solid provable details.
When constructing the talk, keep that 20%-80% dichotomy in mind.  Certainly use ourselves as proof, but don’t rely on it exclusively.  If

I was recently reminded of the importance of openings and transitions when presenting watching a new speaker in action. They were using the occasion to establish their business here in Japan.  Like this speaker, most of us face an audience who don’t know us when we start speaking.  They may have glanced at the blurb from the organisers listing our accomplishments and background, all proving we are a legitimate expert, someone people should listen to.  Regardless of the massive self-promotion we passed across to the hosts of the event to send out to everyone, we still have to deliver the goods. 
The audience enters the room thinking about a lot of things, but thinking about us isn’t the highest priority.  They have that day at work to process what has happened so far. They also think about things they must do after our talk and what is coming up later that day or the next day.  In other words, mentally they are pretty busy and then we turn up.
Usually, the MC will introduce us and set the stage for us.  The quality of these introductions is scarily various.  Some MCs are arrogant and won’t be guided by the carefully hand crafted, elegantly wordsmithed script we have laboured over. We have been working hard to marshal all of our key selling points, aiming to stack high our massive credibility.  Whenever one of the MCs goes off piste, it is rare that they do a better job than what we have put together.  They often get the facts wrong and miss the key selling points. 
As the speaker, we should “insist” to the meeting hosts that the MC read out what we have prepared and not ad lib, freestyle or indulge themselves with our entry point to our talk.  Be firm with this.  Most people don’t give talks and don’t put their personal and public brands out there. They have no idea how important these small details actually are.
In this speaker’s case, the MC did a great job of selling them to the audience. What comes next is very important.  We have to say something which grabs attention and sets the stage for the main points we are going to make.  Remember, the entire crowd are fully obsessed with themselves and not us, so we have to smash through that mental preoccupation they have with their world and bring them into our world. 
We should have received a list of company names and their positions before the talk.  This is a big help.  It allows us to gauge the temperature in the room.  Are they experts or amateurs or a mix?  Depending on who is in front of us, we construct our opening.  We know they are all self-interested, so if we can open with something which appeals to that obsession all the better. 
In this speaker’s case, the opening was all about them and not about the greatest interests of the audience.  That was an opportunity missed.  We need to connect us with what the audience is most interested in and typically with the thing they fear the most.  We are all risk averse and we gravitate toward our fears before we head for our pleasure points.  That means scaring the hell out of your audience is always a reliable starter to make sure they have forgotten all about the day and are now solidly with us in the room. Think about the hottest topics with the greatest sex appeal at the moment.  Talk about that. 
Always avoid controversial elements like politics and religion, though.  As Michael Jordan famously said, “Republicans buy sneakers too”.  We do not want to create hostiles in the audience, if we bag Trump or Biden in our opening.  There are plenty of other scary topics to choose from and something closer to home is always best. 
For example, in Japan, we have a major decline in population underway.  That is an abstract idea for most of us. We just see the media headlines.  We don’t really notice the decline though, because it is gradual. The trains seem just as crowded as ever, when we are going to work.  However, if we can connect that to our own futures, we c

When we are planning our talk, we have to decide what is the purpose of this presentation?  In business, typically, we most often deliver the “inform” type.  We will pass over information we have come across in our travels and research for the edification of the audience.  They have turned up to learn something they didn’t already know and expect value for the time and money they have invested.  It might be the “motivate” talk to bolster the fandom numbers for our brand.  We extoll the virtues of our firm and our widget and get the listeners excited about buying our offerings.  If we give an “inspire” talk, then we are appealing to the audience to become the best version of themselves and maximise their potential.  This is often the “rags to riches” type of encouragement, using our own example as a source of inspiration.  If we could do it, then the audience can also do it.  If we are giving the “entertain” talk, this will mainly be a light presentation between the arrival of the next rounds of heavy red wines after a big dinner.
Regardless of the type of talk, we face a problem of too much information for the time we have to present.  I am sure you have made this fatal error like me.  Before doing any serious planning, we plunder other presentations for interesting, relevant and cool slides to add to this talk.  We start from the wrong point and before you know it we have fallen in love with a lot of content.  We have missed the viewpoint of deciding our central thesis and then going around and matching the proof and evidence to drive home our conclusions.
This bottom-up approach usually means we have way too many slides and certainly many more than we need to make our point.  What we think is adding power and strength to our argument is, in fact, weakening it.  The problem is one of dilution.  If we give the audience too many things to consider and take in, then they don’t gain a strong central message from us. 
I notice this tendency when we are teaching the Magic Formula to give talks.  There is a period at the beginning of the talk to set the stage, to draw out the context, explain the background.  Then we recommend an action and we follow this up with the benefit of taking that action.  It is a very simple and tight formula.  What always happens though, when we do the roleplay, and the coaching is people go off the track. 
They need to nominate the one central, most important action they want the audience to take.  That instruction is fairly easy to understand, but most people manage to get it wrong.  They wax lyrical about the many great and wondrous actions the listeners should take.  They also pile on the benefits of the various actions.  For the listener, it is overwhelming. They cannot remember any of it.  If the audience can’t recall what we said, then we will have to count that presentation as a failure.
The idea of three things for your audience to work on is not new.  However, common sense is not common and established, proven ideas have to be re-discovered every generation.  For any talk, there will be three main elements which are the most powerful components of supporting the argument we are making.  Within each of these points, there will be three key aspects which prove our point.  We are already at nine points and we haven’t added in the start and close of the talk yet.  In a forty-minute speech, we will be bumping up against the time limit.  Remember, we also have a ton of sexy slides we want to use, which will blow the time out completely. We need to exercise great discipline in our selection of what to keep and what to discard.
Forcing the Rule Of Three on ourselves is a very good way of making sure we get the key point fully supported and convincing, without confusing our listeners about what it is we want to say.  I would like to say it is more complex and difficult than this, to make myself look more “presentation guru” like.