There are more and more good presenters out there today. Those presenters are earning promotion and better jobs. They are developing their careers while they are on stage. While many people may have mastered most aspects of presenting, real competitive edge can only be gained by that unusual ability to give your story and your presentation a splash of distinctive colour. The extra plus that makes the audience sit up and really remember what you are saying.
A nearly brilliant presentation in the making
Suppose you have a good story that you’ve stress-tested by making sure the logic is sound, that it is well structured and even your teenage cousin accepts isn’t totally boring. It obeys all the technical tenets of presenting:
- It’s relevant to your audience.
- It has a clear message.
- You’ve applied the ‘less is more’ rule so ruthlessly that it is now incredibly cryptic.
- It is 10 minutes long even though they asked you to give them half an hour.
- It has no detours, no irrelevance, no shades of anything but … grey.
In short, it has a great framework and is likely to be as dull as tap water – totally clear with just a faint back taste (well, this presentation sounds as though it has been through about 30 audiences already). Anyone could do this – even a Dalek.
Actually a Dalek would probably do it better.
A bare presentation is like bare walls
This chapter is about helping to put the intellectual ornaments and rhetorical colouring into your simple story – the stuff that will turn it from being a plotline into a narrative that engages the audience’s mind. In other words, something that has colour, perspective and emphasis. Something with highlights and lowlights with emotional intelligence as well as solid logic, which has a certainty of where it is heading, what its ultimate destination will be but which has surprises and interesting detours en route as well.
Talking about colour reminds me of contemporary classical composer and conductor Eric Whitacre. Eric looks like a rock star. Actually he wanted to be a rock star. At university they said ‘Join the choir.’ He said ‘No, I want to be a rock star.’ And then they said ‘There are lots of hot women in the choir and there’s an expenses-paid trip to Mexico coming up.’ So Eric joined the choir. He stood there among the basses regretting his decision until they burst into the Kyrie in Mozart’s Requiem. He said: ‘It was as though technicolour had suddenly filled my black and white world. That moment changed everything.’
That’s what splashes of colour can do.
Colour, atmosphere and suspense is the stuff that transforms a bare plotline into a narrative that engages the audience’s mind.
So how do you find these embellishments? As Dylan Thomas said, ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’ At breakfast time.
Work at breakfast time – be fresh
Read as many papers as you can. Focus on the Financial Times, The Times and The Sun. But always read The Week and Private Eye too. Snip out or record any good stories that you find. One of the things that freshens any story is something contemporary, something that’s just happened, something recent that demonstrates a point you want to make. Be ruthless in choosing a story that makes you look up to date: best of all, of course, is the statement of the type ‘This appeared in today’s FT – what do you make of it? Let me make just three points about it…’
There’s something about ‘morning fresh’ that is captivating. It positions you as an on-the-ball person. It also gives what you say an authoritative perspective and places you in the role of commentator, not just presenter.
A 24/7 sense of curiosity
Don’t take anything for granted. A sense of curiosity makes a business presentation sing. Curiosity delivers quirky insights, it is the lead-in to discovering the unusual, the story or fact that can captivate an audience. Curiosity’s currency is the line made famous by Michael Caine: ‘And not many people know that.’ What a sense of curiosity means is keeping your eyes open and seeing what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, what’s new and what’s been relaunched.
Become a question machine and an accumulator of news stories.
Look. Listen. Question. Like Andy Stefanovitch. He’s a founder of a US consultancy called Prophet. He talks about the need for a ‘museum-mentality’, that frame of mind that is awestruck by new, iconic discoveries. He claims to take off a month a year with his family, not on the beach but in New York City people-watching and soaking up art and theatre. He talks of keeping himself filled up and taking it all in. He is Mr Curiosity personified.
Be like Andy who says ‘experience everything to empathise with everyone’. Inspiring stuff.
And inspiring stuff is what audiences need
I was recently asked by a client how real audience involvement could be achieved at a relatively small seminar. When I said ‘Well, you could start by giving them sweets’ I think she thought I’d gone mad. Of course, what I was suggesting was interaction. Sweets, chocolates, anything like that would do – even sampling drinks if it’s relevant. Sampling an ordinary Bordeaux and a great New World wine both selling at the same price is a great way of starting a presentation or a debate on the new order and how things are changing today. To make it really interesting you could include Great Wall wine from China too – old world, new world, next world. (Now that’s a scary presentation which I’d really like to attend.) Give them ice cream if it’s hot and then lead a debate on climate change. Do your presentation but encourage interruptions and questions as you go along.
Have an ‘as you present-Twitter commentary’ like the RSA did recently. They’ve also introduced RSA Animate which takes slides to a new dimension – check it out. Take risks, be imaginative, run polls on issues, show the results on screen. It creates amazing tensions and excitements and, for some reason, we all seem to love scores.
Always involve the audience. Do live interviews – get people up on stage with you or pass microphones around the audience.
Think about the role of presenter differently. Matthew Taylor, CEO of the RSA, is breaking new ground as a leading-edge facilitator and speaker. Be like him.
Become a compere not just a presenter.
- Look for the big thought or quote – and keep one eye open for a big idea: Read the most brilliant management and thought provoking books around. As an aspiring ‘big-time-brilliant presenter’ you have no choice but to be an avid consumer of the key, current management thinkers – from Steve Levitt to Malcolm Gladwell, from Thomas Friedman to Matt Ridley, from Jim Collins to Sean Meehan, through to a much longer list. These are people who will give you insights, thoughts or who will simply give you amazing slides. You don’t have to read all these books from cover to cover of course – just learn to be a great scanner.
- There is nothing more exciting than to be taken on a visually adventurous presentational journey: Keep a look out for big pictures, the big changes and trends. These are all around us but we seldom either think or have the courage to use them – pictures of sport, of natural disasters or man-made disruption or anything which has that ‘wow’ factor, the list is endless. Some will be corny and some contemporary. Some will be pictures you’ve seen before – from Munch’s Scream to Picasso’s Guernica, Hirst’s sheep, Turner’s sunsets or Tracy Emin’s bed. Look out for great news pictures, especially recent ones that will resonate with your audience. Also look out for visual treats in the papers – study the Financial Times which, at its best, does some awesome graphic design work with financial results.
- In a digital age an ideas notebook still wins: Keep a ‘brilliant ideas’ book beside you in which the great quotes and insights you gather are kept. Not because you are a trainspotter who has to write everything down but because you never know when they may be useful in fleshing out a presentation. For example, if you are talking about the importance of speed in business today, Mario Andretti, the one-time great Formula 1 driver, said: ‘If you’re in control you aren’t going fast enough.’ Now that’s similar to the comment made to the British ice skating champion Robin Cousins who was told that he wasn’t going to make it internationally because ‘he didn’t skate to fall’. Consider both of these quotes and what they mean. Could you do a presentation just focusing on these two quotes? Or suppose there’s been a corporate marriage. I love this one, by Anthony Hilton in the Evening Standard writing on takeovers and mergers: ‘The lunch comes immediately; the bill comes later.’
- Bear in mind that too many words on screen can slow you down: Don’t have dull slides. Jack Welch tells stories of how he and his colleagues spent hours trying to refine just one chart that encapsulated a whole strategic thought. Finding a way of talking about, say, a new people strategy may be as arid as the Sahara when expressed in bullet points but in contrasting the two shapes or, if your people are really clever, morphing from a triangle (normal structure) to, say, a circle (twenty-first century structure) may say more things more quickly and more clearly than you can imagine. Besides which, interesting material and visual material can be more interesting for you to talk to.
- The next will be printed on an inflatable – what a great way of doing an agenda for a global conference: Don’t underestimate the importance of agendas. They are the key to expectation yet ironically most people regard the agenda as a necessary extra that sits rather drably in the ‘conference housekeeping drawer’. But how would you feel about a restaurant with a scruffy menu? Your agenda is your menu. Treat it as your way of previewing how the meeting is going to be – serious and data-filled or fun and innovative, about people or about business plans, about the future or a review of the past. Your agenda’s the dustcover to the book you are going to launch, so treat it with great respect and produce something that looks well thought out, attention-getting and important. At recent meetings I’ve had laminated agendas, pocket-sized agendas, bookmark agendas – anything that takes you from the prosaic to the land of the possible.
- A good takeaway puts the gloss on a great presentation: Don’t forget takeaways. These are reminders of the event – at analysts’ meetings you need presentation printouts on which they can make their copious notes. But these represent a small part of all the meetings and presentations that most people have to do. What every presentation needs is an elegant follow-up, and I love what Martin Conradi at Showcase invented – he calls them ‘lunch-books’. They are called this because they are ring-bound, A5 and easy to handle, so you can use them while having lunch without knocking the water or anything else over. They contain the slides and as many appendices as are necessary.
- Look to have a moment in your presentation that you are looking forward to presenting – a moment to remember: Always remember the power of the ‘money shot’. There is that moment in every Bond film that has people sitting on the edge of their seats – the one that everyone tells their friends about: ‘A so-so movie, but that bit where they go over the glacier on a snowmobile is incredible.’ In the same way with presentations we are looking for charismatically memorable effects. Now these are not always appropriate, especially with small audiences where pyrotechnics will seem superfluous. But for larger audiences you need not only that killer slide but also that moment of drama – maybe borrowed from a favourite film. Maybe it’s animation. I recently did a fairly corny but very effective ‘tipping point’ animation featuring the client using a see-saw that was incredibly hard to move until – whoops – suddenly it tips and all else follows. Corny but memorable.
These are the big thoughts and ideas on colouring-in your presentation, on giving it energy and life. But I also want you and your team to think about how you can become more exciting and how you can keep on trying to achieve brilliant effects.
Be fresh. Be creative. Be spontaneous. Be nice
- Be fresh: Think of every presentation as a new one, not one that is re-hashed. A presentation will nearly always be enhanced by individualised splashes of colour because it will appear to be ‘freshly cooked’, as opposed to being ready-prepared in some presentation factory or, worse still, a congealed leftover from a previous meeting.
- Be creative: Think creatively about your presentation. We live in a world of increasing sophistication. Most of us are processing more and more arcane pieces of information. They used to say that information is power. This may be true for Google, but for the rest of us clarity of thought and creativity are what are really powerful. Information is merely there to be used. So use it – use it to intrigue and to educate; use it to make your presentations more fun and more lively.
Facts sell, facts sizzle. Be specific: time, place, temperature.
- Be spontaneous: Thinking on your feet is colourful in itself. One of the most exciting presentations I recently saw, one crammed with colour, was by Matthew Taylor down in Brighton when he talked about ‘the white frostbite of austerity’ and suggested that the gap between Britain’s desire for its future and its current trajectory could only be closed by a richer understanding of human nature. Matthew talks with clarity but ostensibly off the cuff. He creates a wonderful sense of spontaneity. Or Andy Stefanovitch again, recalling a student-created flier he’d found in Starbucks. It said ‘Free – blank strips of paper. Useful for a 100 things. Bookmarks. Roll-ups. Small bandages. Decorations, etc.’ It made him laugh so much he wanted to hire that kid. Free blank strips of paper. Brilliant spontaneous performance.
Clarity of thought is really powerful: clarity of thinking on your feet even more so.
- Be nice: Guru Margaret Heffernan with panel members like Kirstin Furber (BBC) at a conference on women and why the future is female were smart and they were nice. QED. Their smiles and charm lent colour and diffidence just where it was needed. Pastel splashes of colour. Margaret reflected that today ‘nice is the new mean’. Let’s hope she’s right.
Do not aim to be good enough because good enough is no good. Colourful, memorable and brilliant is the target.
The moral is to ask the following questions of yourself and your team at that first critical meeting, when you are writing the brief for your presentation:
- Can we remember that, whatever we are doing, this is going to be brilliant?
- How do we make this presentation different, one that is quite different from expectation?
- How do we give it a real extra wow factor somewhere?
- How do we get audiences to say: ‘Very good story, very interesting and memorable too’?
Remember that colour usually comes from the ability to describe and make you feel as though you’d been there yourself (wherever ‘there’ is). That’s why Leon Taylor, Olympic silver medallist diver, describing the pain of diving backwards into a pool from the height of two and a half double-decker buses and reaching 40mph at impact, as ‘really hurting’, resonates so much. Taylor provides colour, impact and personality.