Presentation Skills HQ

In our last post we spoke about using anecdotes in a presentation. But we can also structure our entire presentation as a story. And its not that hard to build the foundations of a good story. Once you have the basics you can then refine your content to make it compelling and engaging.

Story telling Basics:

Set the Scene

Start by telling your audience the most important details of the story. Set the scene with a clear explanation of the context and what’s at stake. This will help them understand why they should care.

Show the Conflict

Now that your audience knows the setup, show them the conflict. Explain the challenge or problem you’re trying to solve. This will help them empathize with the story.

Describe the Resolution

Finally, explain how you overcame the challenge or solved the problem. Give details about the process and the result.

Conclusion

Once you’ve taken your audience through the story, end with a strong conclusion to emphasize the point. Your conclusion should include a call to action. Encourage your audience to apply what they’ve learned to their own lives

Why do stories work?

In his book Moving Mountains  Henry Boettinger puts it like this. “Present your idea in this structure and sequence: statement of the problem, development of its relevant aspects, and resolution of the problem and its development.  Use this structure and you send your idea rolling down the well-worn grooves of the human mind.  Ignore it and you send it into rocky, unknown canyons from which it may never return.”

You will notice that the four steps outlined above are represented in the Boettinger quotes above. But we still need a bit more detail in order to build out our presentation. Fortunately we have the SCORE method developed by Dr. Andrew Abela.

S stands for situation (setting the scene), Co stands for Complication (showing the conflict), R for Resolution (describe the resolution) and E for Example. The example has been added as a separate step because in a business presentation you need evidence in every sequence to convince your audience that your resolution will work.

At the beginning of a business presentation we start with the Situation and let the audience know why we are there, we then grab their attention and identify the biggest issue we are trying to resolve for them (Co), we give the over-arching solution (R), tell them why it will work in general terms and provide some evidence (E).

Next we move onto the next complication, resolution and example. But the way we get there is to ask “yeh but” from our audiences perspective, what would be their likely objection to our solution. For example they may say – but that sounds expensive. That’s our next complication. we provide a resolution and then an example. Then keep asking “yeh but” until we have cleaned up all the audiences potential objections.

So it’s SCoRE then CoRE, CoRE etc,

What we have done is brought the audience into the story, they become a key character in the story.

There you have it a very simple formula for developing a story.

They say a powerful story is one that grabs you by the throat and that’s definitely what UNCUT GEMS staring Adam Sandler did to me, but not a good way. It consisted of Adam Sandler yelling  and swearing and talking over the top of everyone else for 120 minutes – but I was determined to see it through because my son said it was a great movie. Having said that I think the story line was fantastic as Sandler got into and out of trouble – tension release, tension release – all the way through.

However, overarching the entire story was the tension created by Sandler’s delivery style.  When this tension came to an end, the release was one I wasn’t expecting. I think the writers did this deliberately but the emotion I felt was very much a surprise.

There is a part in The Extreme Presentation Method program where we show participants how to construct an anecdote. In order to do that we have to tell them one. Without fail, as soon as I say “I have a story to tell you” I have everyone’s attention, they are all focused on the storyteller. Why are they so powerful?  There are many reasons from historical to neurological, but the famous American writer Kurt Vonnegut helps us with a simple explanation.

If you think of the Cinderella story, you have a dynamic of ecstasy and misery played out over time.  Derek Sivers draws it like this:

https://sivers.org/drama

So why is this so compelling. It’s because most of our lives don’t have this dynamic.  They look like this:

So when you are constructing anecdotes (hypotheticals) or deciding which story to tell, make sure they are dynamic so that you grab the audiences attention.

I recently viewed an interesting TED presentation by Tom Wujec titled “The Three Ways the Brain Creates Meaning.”  Wujec has this to say:

We make meaning by seeing, by an act of visual interrogation. The lessons for us are three-fold. First, use images to clarify what we’re trying to communicate. Secondly make those images interactive so that we engage much more fully. And the third is to augment memory by creating a visual persistence. 

What does this mean for us in a presentation context?  In the Extreme Presentation method we design presentations using five essential elements: Logic, Rhetoric, Graphics, Metrics and Politics.  We then apply these five elements to one of two presentation idioms, Conference Room style or Ballroom Style.

I believe we can apply Wujec’s findings to the graphics element when working with the “Conference Room Style” idiom:

1.    Use images to clarify what we’re trying to communicate.

We can do this by designing each page so that the page layout itself reinforces the main message of the page. Sample layouts that achieve this can be found here.

2.    Make those images interactive so that we engage much more fully.

This is achieved by having all the information on one page and contained in or around an appropriate layout (see point 1) including charts. Most importantly this page is handed out, not projected. By doing this we can get the audience to absorb and adopt what we are presenting to them by allowing interactive discussion, which then gives them the opportunity to engage with our material and reflect on it.  Here’s an example.

3.    Augment memory by creating a visual persistence.

If you look at a well-lit scene and then close your eyes, you will notice that the image can still be sensed for some time after your eyes close.  This is visual persistence.  Under the Extreme Presentation Method we can determine whether the presentation will create visual persistence by applying the squint test.

Another way of applying these lessons is to think of a traditional painting, one that tells a story, such as “Shearing the Rams,” by Australian painter Tom Roberts, 1888.

Here Roberts depicts six men hunched over in a staggered pattern extending towards the back of a narrow sided room which belongs to a large shearing shed. By creating such a line, Roberts brings the viewer’s focus on the men’s positions, leaving the sheep secondary. Furthermore, he orientates the painting so that the viewer is directly in line with the shearers, practically hiding the sheep from view. But of even greater significance is the presence and position of the foreman to the right of the shearers. The foreman represents the shearing industry, which at the time imposed brutal and oppressive working conditions upon the shearers.

Hence in Roberts painting he uses images to clarify what he is trying to communicate – the struggle of the shearer not only with the rams but also against oppressive working conditions. He makes those images interactive so that we engage more fully through the different characters, their ages, their ranks and the painting’s location. And finally he creates a visual persistence through his artistry.

So the cognitive science research  as described by Wujec seems to confirm what our great classical artists have always known. That is, we need to use images to clarify our message, enable audience interaction and create a visual persistence.  This in turn further reinforces our confidence that the Extreme Presentation method provides the means by which this can be achieved in our business presentations.