Orwellian word crimes- Modern heroes # 1

Who could have said this without irony?  They'd have to be in Management Consulting or HR wouldn't they?

Having finished my deck of (presumably PowerPoint) slides I shall now ping you over to Paul who will, no doubt be granular in providing you with the long-tail solutions in implementing the TOM by the TIMs through the twilight zone and beyond..

Answer he's the Head of HR, sorry, Human Resources, for Somerset County Council, a local government in the UK.  Speaking at a conference in Summer 2009.

3 acts worked for Shakespeare maybe they'll work for you- Story structure

Everbody knows that stories have structure.  They start with 'Once upon a time....' and end with 'happily ever after.' And in between the beginning and the end, comes the middle.  In Western culture, most novels, plays and films tend to follow a simple 3 act structure, with each act playing a particular role in driving the story to its end.  Broadly speaking-

• Act 1- Sets the scene and introduces the characters, the context and the challenge.
• Act 2- Introduces the challenge in more detail and gives choices for the character to take
• Act 3- Sees the pay-off where the character makes a decison, takes action and gets a result.

Each of the acts allows the audience to be taken on a journey that starts with- 'I Don't know anything about this character and don't really care what happens to the little bleeder...'; through 'I care now and don't want to see this lovely little thing fail'; to 'Oh my God, is he going to fall, die, leave, lose, love...?'  To the bitter (or sweet) end of the story, where our emotions are released in joy or pain or hope..., and we can relax and go back to our lives with a lesson learned, or a message taken.  But the story has to build step-by-step or it will fail.

Imagine the film 'Toy Story' going straight in at the scene where Buzz appears on the kid's bed.  It would have no meaning, because we wouldn't understand so many things.  Why his arrival changed things, why the toys were talking, who the skinny guy in the cowboy outfit was.  We wouldn't know and we wouldn't care and we wouldn't watch for long. Imagine 'Titanic' starting at the point where they're all in the water; or 'High Noon beginning with the gunfight. 'Saving Private Ryan' opening with the tedious walk through the hinterland of Omaha Beach, looking for a kid called Ryan.

Stories whether drama and fictional or commercial and factual work better if the thousand year old structure of a story is used.

P.S.  I know that there are more than 3 acts in Shakespeare, and there's alot of controversy about story structures, Freytag's 5 act structure and Quentin Tarantino's method, but sometimes you've just got to choose.  I did.  For more information- try this-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenwriting or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure

10 steps to creating a really strong story

It sounds like a presentation trainer's cliche, but it's not. In business presentations, the story is the thing. There's a skill and a structure to creating interesting and compelling narratives. A craft started in the verbal tradition by prehistoric man, developed by the ancient Greeks, sharpened by the French, the Italians, Spanish and British over centuries, is now made into a global, multi billion dollar industry by the Americans. Telling stories with a message is what people have always sought to do. And those who are good at it have real value in the places they live and work.

Children are brought up on stories with a beginning, middle and end. Adults expect a point, a message, interesting characters, love, laughter, joy, tears and pity, and are disappointed if they don't get them. Then we go to school, university, college and work and all of the joy seems to disappear. And we get talked at. Why? Because people don't apply the simplest of the story-telling crafts to the most important parts of their life.  Story structure? Ignore it at your peril or understand that when you've got a strong story, everything else will follow.  How do we do it then?  Here's a few thoughts:

1. Put yourself in your audience's shoes and ask 'if I were them what would be interesting, useful and relevant to know and understand about this subject?' 

2. Brainstorm everything you could say on the subject onto a single piece of paper.

3. Consult with key members of the audience about what it is they want to know, don't want to know. Then decide what you absolutely have to tell them.

4. Go back to your brainstorm and highlight those things that now will feature in your presentation and write your presentation objectives- In this presentation I will show X, Y and Z, and explain how we came to this decision. Then I will tell them exactly what I think they need to do and by when, to make the most of their investment.

5. Build the storyboard- Act by act (See a classic 3-act structure) and keep on grinding until there's a real rational, logical path through the presentation.

6. Create a storyboard that tells the story with key scenes & content from each part.

7. Create the visuals to support the storyboard.

8. Add a high impact prologue (introduction) and epilogue (conclusion).

9. Build your 'script' through rehearsal and repetition out loud rather than writing it out.

10. Write your script to the level you require (bullet points are best but in some very important or sensitive presentations you have to be scripted word for word).

He might be a bully but he still has a point

Paul had just finished his presentation and the room was dead.   His boss, a notorious bully, said, when asked, if he had any questions,

"Yes, I've got a question for you.  What was the last half hour about?"

Paul said "Er, what do you mean?  I've just told you haven't I?" 

Boss said, "No, you haven't?"

Paul said, "Yes I have, it's about saving £5 million quid."

Boss said "Where was that?, I didn't hear it?" 

Paul said look slide 44..."

If Paul had got to the point at, or preferably before, before slide 1, he'd have had his boss's attention.  Then the rest of the time could be spent showing how it was to be done, and how much support he'd need from his boss to get there.  Then all concerned would have had a much more pleasant time. 

His boss may be a bully sometimes but he's no fool.

Think 5% for real focus or you'll be wasting your time

In retention and memory studies conducted by professional psychologists, (too dulll and detailed to be listed here) in esteemed places of learning they've learned a few really interesting things about the pointlessness of presenting too much information.  Here are a few highlights-

If you spoon-feed facts and figures to an audience for 20 minutes non-stop, and test them 24hours later to see how much they've remembered, in the best cases less than 5% of everything you told them will be remembered.

• That memory will dwindle down to almost zero over the next 72 hours.
• So if I talk to you on Monday at 9am, you'll have forgotten 99% of what I said by friday morning even if I'm a brilliant and entertaining speaker.  If I'm Bob from IT you'll recall much less than that.

So why bother with so many presentations?  Well humans are great at remembering broad messages that are relevant to them.  If the speaker manages to tell us something that's relevant to us, in a way that makes it easy for us to remember, and doesn't swamp us with detail- guess what?  We'll never forget.

Masterchef as presentation skills training

I love 'Masterchef', a televised cooking competition in the UK, where would be Michelin starred chefs are brought in, placed under lights and lightly grilled until they explode.  It's great telly and I've learned a whole new language too.

I thought reductionism was what Marxists did in argument. But no, in cooking, as I'm sure you already know, reduction is the process of thickening or intensifying the flavour of a liquid mixture such as a soup, sauce, wine, or jus by evaporation.

I've also learned that in the highest-end restaurants it's the sauce that makes the meal.  It's not simply a matter of boiling merrily away though, as the cook's dictionary tells us-

"...reduction does concentrate the flavors left in the pan, but extended cooking can drive away delicate flavour compounds, leaving behind less interesting tastes."  So be warned, and here's the point at last...

In public speaking, reduction is a skill that wil help even the most experienced presenter.  It's the skill of being able to boil down a speech to it's simplest, shortest essence where none of the 'delicate flavours' are lost. 

It's the 5-minute summary of the 30 minute speech, or the 60 second shortening of the quarter hour pitch.  Can you do that when someone says 'just give me the 5-minute version...'  If you can then you're as rare as a Michelin star in Birmingham (UK and Alabama, US of A).  If you can't then it's a good habit to get into before you start to prepare.

Go on then tell us what you do...

We've talked for a few times about elevator pitches, and as so often happens, we like the idea of having an interesting, short, enticing pitch for all seasons but we don't ever get round to creating one. So give it 10 minutes and lets's see what we can come up with. Take a pen and piece of paper and jot down some thoughts about-

• What your business does at the broadest level.
  
• A short example of a real life case study and the benefits that has had for the client concerned.
  
• A simple, truthful thing that makes you different to the competition.
  Here are my notes for me-
• We offer training and coaching in presentation skills to senior executives, we write speeches, we help design product launches, conferences and training workshops.
  
• We helped Mitsubishi Motors launch its last 13 cars to its pan-European dealer network, giving them coherent messages to share with their salespeople, high quality reference materials and consistent brand messaging, also saving them 100,000's of Euros in duplication of time and effort
  
• We would rather not do the work than work for organisations that don't care.
  

Next, look at what you've written and edit it for repetition, pretension and bullshit. Then simplify the language, to a sentence or two that a real person would say to his or her friends, and see how you're doing. My effort now looks like this-

We offer training and coaching in presentation skills to senior executives, we write speeches, we help design product launches, conferences and training workshops. We help our clients sell their products and services more effectively...

We helped Mitsubishi Motors launch its last 13 cars to its pan-European dealer network, giving them coherent messages to share with their salespeople, high quality reference materials and consistent brand messaging, also saving them 100,000's of Euros in duplication of time and effort- We've helped Mitsubishi launch their cars in Europe with a consistency and quality that has helped them achieve their commercial objectives over the last 8 years.

• We would rather not do the work than work for organisations that don't care.- We really care about our clients and tend to build long-term partnerships with them.

Now look at the whole thing again and edit for all of those things again, and say it out loud to yourself. If you gag, rewrite it; if you vomit, start again- until you can say those words with real sincerity. That's your pitch for all seasons. Mine?

"We help our clients sell more and better stuff whatever they do. We've worked with motor manufacturers, architects, drug companies and many others we simply help them to tell the world what they do with precision, passion and pride. "

What is presentation ‘clutter’?

PowerPoint slides, jokes, data,

Waffle, jargon, handouts (paper),

Anecdotes with no punchline,

Or point to help you underline,

 

Music, graphics, sound effects

That do not support the text,

Images that make no sense

Or patronise the audience

 

Graphs and charts of pie or venn

The thoughts of Chairman Mao or Zen

Buddhists when your thoughts would do

And clear conclusions reasoned to.

 

So in short a simple story

Beginning, middle, end no more,

With key factors pointed out

With evidence that leaves no doubt

 

You've thought things through from every side

So all we do is just decide

A yes / no / maybe decision

Not we don't understand- Derision
 

Removing ‘clutter’ from your presentations

You're going to look around a new house on a Saturday morning. You're making a commitment already. You've given up 2 hours of your valuable time, and you've left the kids with Grandma. The details of the property looked good enough, the price seems right, and the sun is shining as you pull up outside your possible future home.
First impressions are good. The road is lovely, wide and tree-lined. There's a pretty cafe with tables outside and people drinking tea, there's the village green with ducks, and a pub, and a cricket ground where kids are playing happily on bikes and each other. You walk up the gravelled path and notice the roses around the door, just in bloom, no traffic mars the sound of songbirds and the whispering of a spring breeze in the trees all around you tell you that all is well with the world. You rap the brass knocker, gently, so as not to disturb anything or anybody and the door opens to a smiling face of a kindly soul who lives there now... 'Oh my expletive deleted God!'
You walk into the hallway and your eyes are assailed by a million impressions at once. The carpet of crazy kaleidoscope colours, the 146 pictures on the walls, the rugs, and hangings, the dresser, armoire and long-case clock, the horse-brasses, the cats, the smell of something burning in the kitchen, the radio, the chandeliers, antimacassars, shoes, umbrella stand, coat hooks, coats, wellington boots, so much stuff. So much stuff, in fact, that you can barely see the walls, the floor or the shape of the room. Every room is a rococo nightmare of mix and match madness.
After 5 minutes you've got a headache, after 10 it's a migraine and in 15 minutes flat, you're back in the car, speechless with disappointment. The 'clutter' got in the way. The house was lost behind it. All curves and personality, interest and promise erased by 'interference'.
In the world of selling houses, how often do we hear the professionals telling us to remove the rubbish before a viewing. Some of us even listen to them. Many of us though think 'people will be able to see through a bit of mess, and make up their own minds...' Won't they?'
And the answer is... Maybe. My research tells me that 20% can and do, but the rest just can't. And honestly; why should they? We're selling and they are looking to buy. How and why is it not our responsibility to do everything that we can to help the other party see the real value in the thing they're looking at? So if you're wondering what you should do? Tidy up...Now.
I know you can already see the link to presentations, so I'll just finish with a list of things that I've seen clutter up the average corporate presentation and if you'd like to go tidy up afterwards it will help you make your point much more powerfully.

Why 'Pearl Harbour' is the the worst fim ever made- or It's not only presenters that put too much in

Focus is important throughout our lives. It’s important in conversation, in writing, in story-telling and the visual arts. The ability to make your point and move on is incredibly rare and undervalued.

Movie makers in Hollywood have the largest budgets and greatest amount of talent in the film-world to choose from, and even they get it horribly wrong sometimes. James Cameron's multi Oscar winning film, "Titanic", is a great picture in many people's eyes, but for me and most of the rest of the world, it’s too long by about 1hour. It could have made its point much more quickly, but it didn’t. On the subject of James Cameron, it's worth remembering too that "Pearl Harbour" is so appalling in every aspect that I think it’s actually 2 films stuck together and put out as one by mistake.

Clear objectives (Specific points you’d like your audience understand, remember, be able to tell other people about) for your speech are your “final destination” so it’s a great idea to get into the habit of knowing exactly where you're going before you start. It’s only fair to your audience that you tell them where you’re going before they get on the bus, so they can choose whether to join you, or not.

It’s all about focus:

Focus in a speech or a presentation leads to short, specific speeches constructed around a central idea and some key points to be remembered by the audience. If a focused speech were a piece of meat, it would be lean steak. If a film it would be that one with Humphrey Bogart and the Swedish woman, Ingrid Bergman.

2 steps to really focused presentations

The first step towards real focus in your presentations is being ruthless at the construction stage of every speech. –

1. Simply, put less in and deliver just the essence of your thoughts in verbal form so that your absolutely key messages stand out.
2. The second step is to make more of your key points, the “If your life depended on it” (IYLDOI) bits.

If your life did depend on your audience remembering, when tested, your key points, you’d probably make sure that you'd taken stuff out so that those bits were obvious, and do a few simple things to make sure that it was those bits that they did remember when everything else had been forgotten.

We can't remember the detail dummy- Retention & memory issues for presenters:

Retention:
In a vast scientific study into memory and retention in education, (Gillian Cohen, Martin Conway and Nicola Stanhop, March 1992) showed that after a lecture or presentation:

Rapid forgetting occurs in the first two years after learning.
Thereafter memory stabilized and remained at above chance levels for the remainder of the period.
Knowledge, still retained after approximately two years, appears to remain intact indefinitely.

There were two exceptions to this pattern of forgetting.
Memory for details and highly specific facts declined rapidly. In as little as 48 hours as much as 95% of the detail of any presentation is lost.
Memory for general principles was extremely stable and showed no forgetting over the 12-year period of the study.

So let’s just confirm some of that in plain English.

Highly specific, detailed information will be 95% gone from us 2 days after the talking stops.
We’ll remember the general principles of a presentation very well if they are clearly made.

So for those of us keen on detail for detail’s sake, there are a couple of really important things to remember. For the rest of us it probably means we should do
Less on the detail because it’s going to be forgotten anyway, and
More to ensure that the general principles of what we are saying are clear, interesting, relevant and repeated enough times to make sure that that’s what the audience remembers when everything else is lost. Interesting Eh?

(Don't) Stuff the audience like a goose

Do you know how pate de foie gras is made? Here's a short outline that gives us all we need to know.

“Foie gras is made from the enlarged livers of male ducks and geese. Birds have up to 2 pounds of food per day pumped into their stomachs through long metal pipes that are shoved down their throats. The cruel ordeal often causes severe injuries that make it painful or even impossible for birds to drink. Those who survive the feedings suffer from a painful illness that causes their livers to swell to eight to 10 times their normal size. Many birds become too sick to walk and are reduced to pushing themselves across their cages with their wings. When the birds are slaughtered, their livers are sold for foie gras. “
People Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Website

Most presenters treat their audiences as if they were those poor little geese. They stuff their captive public full of facts and figures and details that often have only a passing relevance to the point of the presentation. Achieving clear and real focus is probably the most difficult part of preparing a presentation.

So what’s wrong with detail?
There’s nothing wrong with detail. Detail is often the difference between really understanding a subject and having only a flimsy veneer of comprehension. What’s important is who is the detail for.

If you give a detailed answer to questions that come directly from your audience, then that’s fine. That’s exactly what you should be doing. But if the detail is in there because you’re making assumptions about the audiences wants & needs, then you’re adding unnecessarily to the length and complexity of the talk, and probably undermining the clarity of the whole message.

There is much data and research from psychologists that might help show you a little more reason why detail doesn’t work.