I am 43 years old today and for the first time in about 10 years I am away from home and working on my birthday. The kids all phoned me this morning with birthday wishes, but the best present came in the form of a conversation with a delegate on the course I am facilitating in London.

Let me give you some context. 18 months ago, I was asked to speak at a conference about a consistent Value Proposition. I was give a one-hour time slot and was told that the delegates would have been working on a case study and have their draft VP’s ready. My talk was supposed to set up a presentation exercise afterwards. I had agreed with the organiser that when I arrived they would give me the list of VP’s and I would use this as the basis of my presentation. When I arrived, they hadn’t got that far in the exercise and so with 5 minutes to go I had to change the presentation.

I came off stage thinking I had done ok, the crowd seemed pleased and engaged and the applause genuine. The next day, however, I received an abusive e-mail from the organizers, accusing me of a whole host of sins—that I had offended and upset most of the audience and would never be invited back. I was upset for about a month but eventually came to the conclusion that you can’t please everybody and that maybe this lady was just having a bad day.

So this morning—18 months later—that company is one of m62’s largest global clients, and a delegate from the course came over and thanked me for that very same, allegedly offensive presentation. He has used my “Happy and Safe” story and the Killer Presentations diagram over and over again to argue to his management team that they need a consistent message and stop using bullet points.

So, my birthday gift? The reminder that for every person in the audience who disapproves of your content, there is another who’s finding it useful. I think there is a good chance the Lady Organiser is chewing out another presenter for not being psychic, while today’s delegate is enjoying a useful two days with the m62 crowd. You can’t please all the people all the time, but pleasing most of the people most of the time is good enough for me.

Happy days!

Sometimes, I feel like all of us professional presentation coaches are either a bit hypocritical or bit egotistical. We all collectively seem to have the opinion that humour is really beneficial if done well, but disastrous if not.

Since the telling of jokes is a black art that none of us understand, and in the absence of a set of codified rules about it, we usually resort to advice that says:

“Unless your really good at it (CAVEAT) don’t try, the risk is too great” and then we take to the stage ourselves and start off or end with a joke.

Well, I want a set of rules. When can I tell a joke? What can I tell a joke about? Enough of this avoiding the issue, lets given the clients the rules (even if complicated and needing practice) and then let them decide to try it or not.

I have some ideas, some great blogs and resources and a few good books and so far some pretty clear ideas on what may be a set of rules but what do you think? Where have you seen it work? Seen it fail?

In short, please respond, with a joke if possible? And maybe I can pull it all together into something better than “Be careful” cop out…

Moving from Monologue to Dialogue to encourage audience interaction and involvement.

A couple of weeks ago I was preparing a sales team for a two-day presentation session. The prospect is outsourcing a $1 billion IT project and scheduled 14 different sessions, 30-90 minutes each with 25 presenters and contributors in total.

In a sales situation like this, the more the prospect talks the better. So as the presenter, how do you encourage participation, control the debate and build on the relationship?

Step 1: Dialogue Themes

• Create five (or less) key critical themes (e.g. competitive differentiators, superior technology)
• Designate a presenter to deliver on each theme in their monologue
• Respond to questions in the dialogue with an answer that relates to one of the themes

Step 2: Distill Presentation Content

• Prepare enough material for each presenter to fill 75% of the allotted time
• Spend one week preparing and rehearsing the delivery
• Spend the day before the presentation cutting out material that does not address the issues associated with the key themes
• Add cut slides to the end of the presentation
• Deliver the content in half the time, with back up slides to cover the rest IF they are useful to the dialogue

If in the unlikely event the prospect has no questions, you can always go through these slides at the end but in my experience it never happens. If they don’t have any questions, they aren’t really considering you.

Step 3: Prompt Audience Interaction

• Coach the presenters to encourage dialogue by asking questions of the audience
• Rhetorical open questions have both a positive effect on audience synthesis but also encourage dialogue: What do you think?

So, How’d it Go?

Historically when I’ve worked with groups of technical or operations focused individuals, it is difficult to get the conversations flowing. So many are inherently quiet, perhaps so they are better able to process the insane amount of complex information that fills their day-to-day lives.

On the whole the session went really well, all presenters got through their core content, focused on the key themes and created good healthy productive dialogue. I consider this a great accomplishment – even the most introverted person can enliven a conversation when it’s something they are passionate and confident about!

I was recently in New York City, and ended up watching a performance at the Jazz Standard.  Jazz audiences always seem eclectic to me. If you go to a Country and Western gig, the audience tend to be uniform, in fact they mostly wear a uniform – involving denim, boots and fantastic belt buckles. Last year at a Springsteen concert, the common passion was tailgating and BBQ in the parking lot, indicating that music is just one of the interests they all share. Point being that as a performer, you have the right to expect an audience that chooses to come because they fit a mold, they like jazz, blues or barbeque.

Do you recall the scene from the Blues Brothers movie where they inadvertently find themselves booked into a country western club? That’s what happens when the audience come expecting one thing and get another.. they throw bottles at you.

During the jazz gig,  I thought about how much the musicians were playing for each other, as well as for the audience. In the entertainment business you can make assumptions about who they are and what they expect – but in business, assumptions are dangerous, we need to know:

• Who are the audience?
• Why are they here?
• What do they want to hear and see?
• What do we want to achieve?

Then and only then can we begin to formulate objectives and build a communication strategy.

Begin with the end in mind

Most people start late in the process, starting with “what should I say?” I encourage clients to begin with gathering information about the audience, determining objectives and a clear definition of success (e.g. win the business, persuade to your line of thinking.)

My usual analogy is with chess players. A novice gets frustrated when the Grand Master takes 15 minutes to ponder a move – but the master does not try to win the battle in that move, he is focused on winning the war with his last move.

The same goes for the Jazz concert, all the players at times seemed to be playing on their own, but then they would all stop on the same note at the same time. And the crowd absolutely loved it.

A friend e-mailed me last week with this great article for adult learning professionals (instructional design). I encourage you to read it, but the gist is that the following data are lies:

People recall:

• 10% of that they hear
• 20% of what they read
• 30% of what they see

My friend was concerned that I refer to these stats in my book and corporate website. More specifically,  “On average, bullet-point slides yield a 15-20% recall of information after just five minutes.” 

While I am not about to make ANY academic claims,  I routinely do two tests with clients – one during the sales process and one during the training course.

The Training Course Test

When training presenters, I always give an active listening test. I play five minutes of audio and then test their recall of the information 30 minutes later. Guess what? There is an average recall rate of 15-20%, with some remembering nothing and a few outliers at 55%. Never had anyone get higher than 60%.

Which convinces me of the following:

• Most people do not actively listen
• When they do, their recall of information is poor
• Interest levels affect the levels of recall as does note taking
• Mind Map note takers do better then linear note takers
• Active Listening improves with practice
• Active Listening is a life skill not just a sales skill

The Sales Effectiveness Test

I show people four slides with the same five bullet points on them and then a diagrammatic version of the same information. About five minutes later, I ask them to recall four of the five bullet points. Generally they can recall one or two –  recall varies from 10% to 50%.

The test relies on the fact that the audience isn’t really paying attention to the bullet points, hence the low recall. I then test recall on the diagram and narrative. This never fails to demonstrate that Visual Cognitive Dissonance™ increases the audience attention and produces over 90% recall of the diagram, 80% recall of the information sequence and 75% recall of the verbal information (from the presenter!) that accompanies the diagram.

Which has convinced me of the following:

• People recall nothing if they’re not paying attention
• To get people to recall anything they must first be paying attention.
• Therefore spoken words that are not heard, written words that are not read and pictures that are not studied cannot be recalled.

Now logically the first trick is to get and hold the audience’s attention – through storytelling, relevance and repetition. I call these Passive Mnemonic Processes™, designed to allow us to select the information we want the audience to recall.

Conclusions

People don’t actively listen and unless they are interested in the material, or are motivated to do so. Even more depressing is that, when they do actively listen and know there’s going to be a test, they still don’t get it all. Even if you repeat it (the old “tell them tell, them tell them” etc) it’s still poor. They have to actually process the information for it to be recalled later. I believe there are some essential steps to this:

• They have to comprehend AND understand it (not sure these are the same)
• They have to see relevance to it (or at least be interested in it)
• They have to be allowed the mental processing power to actually process it

• 10-15% recall of bullet points 5 mins after presentation is a fact.
• 80% recall of an incomplete, diagram with a narrative explanation showing relevance 5 mins after is also a fact.

Please, please, please comment and respond; this is subject close to my heart, my business and my life and I have been searching for better data for 12 years. Do you actively incorporate techniques to help your audience encode and recall the message you are delivering?