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How understanding your audience will stop them attacking you

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I was contacted by a PR company who was representing a psychologist. The psychologist had developed a workshop for the clients of a financial services firm. They asked me to facilitate that workshop.

The workshop was only two hours long and straight forward. It was about planning your use of time once you had retired. Even though I had many conversations with all the groups above, I didn’t investigate who was coming to the workshop.

On the evening of the workshop we were halfway through and I asked whether the workshop was making sense? One half of the room said the workshop was fantastic and the material really opened their eyes and made them think.

The other half of the room almost erupted in protest. “None of this makes sense”, “Only came here for the coffee” they yelled.  What was I going to do?

As it turned out there was nothing I could do at the time. The group who were “up in arms” had already retired, so telling them how to plan for their retirement was not very useful. The other group who were full of compliments were years off retiring so found the techniques relevant.

If I had my time over, I would have rung the financial advisers and found out more about who they were inviting. They could then have invited more of the right people!

Moving Mountains

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A participant on a program recently worked on a presentation that was due in two days time. He delivered the presentation and I called him the day after: “How did it go Jim?”

“Not so good Justin”

“Why was that Jim, did you achieve your objective?”

“Yes I achieved everything I wanted to, but it just turned into a conversation”

Jim was stuck in an old school mindset of presenting – the “sage on the stage”.  What happened was his presentation turned into a conversation and he started to engage the audience because he was talking about things that are important to them – he nailed it!

So, the formulae we use to get the audience involved is what Andrew Abela calls the SCoRE method which is based on the work of Henry Boettinger in his book Moving Mountains. It works by juxtaposing tension and release – the formulae for all good stories.

SCoRE stands for:

Situation – what are you there to talk about – put simply in a few words

Complication – What’s the biggest problem the audience is facing.  This creates tension and the need.

Resolution – what’s the solution to that problem.  This creates the release and satisfies the need.

Example – provide some evidence as to why your resolution will work.

Then continue on with the next CoRE (Complication Resolution Example) for as long as you need to.

This simple formula enables us to craft a story, engage the audience and achieve our objective.

Boettinger, HM 1974, Moving mountains; or, The art and craft of letting others see things your way, 1st Collier Booksedn., Collier Books, New York,.

How to stop people from sabotaging you pitch

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It’s interesting to watch team dynamics when coaching bid presentation teams. Especially when the team has come together having previously not known each other. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman came up with the phrase “forming, storming, norming, and performing”, which pretty much describes what we see in bid presentation teams.  In the storming phase people start to push against the boundaries established in the forming stage and start to belittle each other as they jockey for position.

I’ve seen this belittling present itself when a senior member told a less experienced and nervous team member that their presentation style was boring. And another senior team member telling two other presenters, two days before a major $400million bid that if they presented “like that” the team was stuffed!

In both these situations the senior members were deflecting – denying their own failings and projecting them onto someone else.

Here’s three things you can do to prevent this from happening.

  1. Set the ground rules up front for feedback and that you as the facilitator will control (not dominate) that process. Make sure everyone knows there is a right time and place for giving feedback.
  2. Make sure everyone uses the aware, impact, change model. For example, rather than saying ”you’re boring”, say “are you aware that when you read from your notes the impact is you stop engaging the audience, you can change that by making sure you use more eye contact when you speak which will give you more energy.”
  3.  If people start to deflect call them on it quickly. Preferably one on one.

So watch out for the any narcissistic behaviour because it can undermine what should be the celebration of a lot of hard work.