Life After PowerPoint!

I’ve written earlier about Erroneous Assumptions #1, #2, and #3 that derail speeches and presentations. Today I’d like to look at the Fourth Erroneous Assumption: “People should be fair and reasonable.”

We assume that if people were fair and reasonable as they should be the best ideas (i.e. ours) would win out. Or we assume that our ideas (the best ones) get shot down or passed over or ignored because people aren’t being fair and reasonable as they should be.

The assumption that people are or should be fair and reasonable is a delusion, “a mistaken or unfounded opinion or idea held in the face of evidence to the contrary.” And it keeps us from being as effective as we could be.

People aren’t fair and reasonable, at least not consistently. We — I’m including you and me in this — act out of thousands of motives. Some are contradictory. Some are unconscious. Some are noble. Some are self-serving. Some are frightening. Sometimes the results are wonderful to behold. Sometimes they make the angels weep. Put us in groups — families, neighborhoods, political parties, countries, religious communities, companies, work teams — and the motivations become all the more complicated and inconsistent, marvelous and deplorable.

OK, so people aren’t fair and reasonable. Don’t we have the right to think that they should be? Maybe so. But what good does that do?

“Should” is a denial of reality, of the way things are.

The world and the people who inhabit it aren’t perfect. Maybe they should be. But they aren’t. And expecting perfection is a trap.

What good does it do to protest that people should be fair and reasonable? Or that bad things shouldn’t happen to good people? Or that people shouldn’t lie, cheat, and steal? Or that people should be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent? (That’s from the Boy Scout Law, in case you missed it.)

I’m not against moral standards, mind you, or opposed to striving to be better people. On the contrary, I think we got ourselves into the current economic and political mess because a lot — and I mean a lot — of people acted shamefully.

When we talk to people — either individually or in groups — we’ll have a better chance of winning them to our side, if we get beyond thinking that they’ll always and everywhere be fair and reasonable.

People often say — because there’s some truth in it — that a speech or presentation is like a conversation. It should be immediate, direct, and — whether formal or informal — unadorned. It has to be immediately understood, and it should create the sense of a give and take, an interchange of ideas and emotions.

Ronald Reagan told his speechwriters that he never wanted to say anything in a speech that he wouldn’t say in conversation with his barber in Santa Barbara. (His speeches, mind you, might have had more memorable passages, if he hadn’t imposed such a restraint on them.)

But every time you say something is like something else, you always have to acknowledge that the two things are also unalike.

Listen closely to a conversation or read the word-for-word transcription of one, and you’ll realize that most conversations don’t deserve to be emulated. Our day-to-day conversations are laced with ums and ers and you knows and it’s likes. Run-on or incomplete sentences are common. And changing subject mid-sentence is not uncommon. So in some ways you don’t want your speech or someone else’s speech to be exactly like a conversation.

(Max Atkinson has a great chapter in Lend Me Your Ears, titled “Speaking in Private and Speaking in Public,” that bears directly upon this topic.)

I think a speech or presentation should be like the conversation people have not in real life but in well-written books or movies.

Apply Mark Twain’s advice about creating dialogue for fictional characters to your speeches, and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about:

When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the circumstances, and have a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevance, and remain in the neighborhood of the the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

A college teacher wrote to tell me that she and her students were enjoying the “listening quiz” that’s posted on my website here.

In the intro to the quiz I stated, “80% (give or take 5%) of effective communication involves listening.” Because she’s an academic, she asked me where I got that statistic. What studies had I based that statement on? Sadly, I had to admit I made it up based on my experience.

I’m not going to die defending the 80% number, but I do firmly believe that effective communication depends much more on listening than on speaking.

And when it comes to promoting civil public discourse–as I’m trying to do in reaction all the very uncivil discourse out there–you can’t go wrong by listening. The various parties involved in what amounts to hate speech are always shouting at, talking over, or waving signs at other people. They never listen.

(You might want to check out the International Listening Association for its resources.)

Do you agree that listening is more important than speaking? What’s the percentage you’d assign to listening?

Image courtesy of Dave Fayram at Flickr.

Continuing my theme of promoting civil public discourse (as opposed to so much of the uncivil public discourse that’s out there), I’d like to promote a blog on honesty that Mark Sanborn has recently posted: Absolute Honesty: Avoiding Dishonesty Traps.

He lists five dishonesty traps. (Read them in their entirety here.)

1. Over-promising
2. Vagueness
3. Lies of omission
4. Lying to ourselves
5. Failing to take action

I would add the dishonesty of mislabeling something so it sounds more attractive than it actually is. (Politicians, their advisors, and representatives are masters at this.)

What would you add?

I came upon a great article, The Humble Flipchart - a Project Manager’s Best Friend by Tom Ferguson. It lists the benefits of using a flipchart to facilitate brainstorming:

1. Provides focus for the team.
2. Records and displays our thoughts so far
3. Communicates more than words and sometimes what words cannot
4. Invites participation and when participants see their ideas up there in print, this encourages even more and better participation
5. Leverages the diverse knowledge, skills and experiences in the team towards specific objectives
6. Captures the thoughts of all and not just your own
7. Provides a platform for all to refer to and work from
8. Verifies that all contributions have been accepted, understood and are of value
9. Allows fast forward and rewind back and forth to add to or reposition a particular point
10. Pages can be reordered easily with the help of tape or bluetack

I think that many types of presentations can reap the same benefits.

You wouldn’t want to use a flipchart if your presentation is predominantly a one-way transfer of knowledge, where your goal is to communicate content you know to people who don’t know it. And you wouldn’t want to use a flipchart in a large room where people would be unable to see it. But you might want to use a flipchart, when you’re trying to facilitate a sharing of information or a group process (like brainstorming).

Using a flipchart encourages audience participation and interaction more effectively than just about any other process or tool that’s available. Audience members aren’t just responding or adding to the content on a slide someone else (i.e. you) created and displayed. They aren’t simply asking questions, which keeps them in the learner mode. They’re actually creating content. They’re generating ideas. They’re taking ownership. They, in effect, are acting like adults, which is — to my way of thinking — to be encouraged.

Do you use flipcharts? If so, what suggestions or reservations do you have about doing so?

I haven’t written many posts lately. And I’ve wondered why. At first I blamed the fact — alas — that my home/office was flooded during a mid-December rainstorm. Then I blamed getting caught up in the holidays. But finally I realized that I was suffering — again! — from an overexposure to uncivil civil discourse.

I love public debate and the lively exchange of ideas. And I think that speeches, especially those given by leaders – politicians, executives, community leaders, religious authorities, and the like – should set forth big ideas, whether they’re popular or not. As a result, I’ve found this past year or so overwhelmingly painful.

The tone and tenor of our public discourse has too frequently become polarized and polarizing, shrill and strident, malicious, abusive, and offensive. Shouting has replaced listening. Courtesy is nonexistent. Name calling is common. Evidence, logic, and the common good are commonly ignored. People who expound ideas that others dislike are shouted down or maligned.

I let the negativity get to me. I needed to take a break from it all. Now I’m back.

In this blog I want to reflect on and host a discussion of speeches and presentations — the good, the bad, and the boring — in a civil manner. I don’t mind controversy. I kind of like it. But I won’t tolerate discourtesy.

Next up: a discussion of what civil discourse means. Any ideas you’d like to share?

In Emotional Structure: A Guide for Screenwriters, Peter Dunne makes an interesting distinction. He writes: “The plot provides the action: the film’s motion. And the story provides the reaction: the film’s emotion.”

Plot is what happens to the main character. Story is what the character becomes as a result.

GI Joe Cast

Action movies — think Transformers, GI Joe, X-Men — are heavy on plot. One action careens into another, sometimes logically, sometimes not. The characters may or may not change, but whatever change they do make is relatively minor and always subordinate to the action.

I make a similar distinction. I think that a speech’s content is its information and ideas: what the speech is about. And its message is what the content means: how the information ties together in a way that the audience can understand and use.

Technical presentations can be a lot like action movies. They are often heavy on content: more PowerPoint slides that can possibly be adequately addressed in the time available and — always — too much information for the audience to understand and absorb. Too often the message, if there is one, gets overwhelmed by the content. How many times have you walked away from a presentation wondering what it was about?

You — and your audience — should be able to sum up your message in one sentence. The content is there to substantiate, illustrate, or explain your message.

What do you think?

I work with a lot of technical teams as they’re preparing oral proposals for large contracts. The contracts may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Scores of people may be engaged in the process for weeks or months on end. And the presentations may involve hundreds of slides. Somewhere along the way someone — usually the capture manager or the person in charge of shepherding the proposal through the process — will ask “What’s our story?”

I’m not quite sure what the question means.

This much I know. People who ask “What’s our story?” are not thinking about story the same way I do. I think of a story, in its most basic form, as a narrative about a person (a character) who goes through a series of actions (a plot) that results in a change of some sort (the resolution), usually to the character but sometimes to the situation.

When people involved in a large technical presentation talk about its story, they’re talking about something else. (I believe that even — or especially — highly technical presentations can be improved by telling a story in the sense I described above. But that’s the topic of another post.)

Here’s what I think technical people mean by a presentation’s story. Or, at least, here’s what I hope they mean. The presentation’s story is the thread that ties everything together into a unified, meaningful, and desirable whole. It is a one-sentence summary of how you — your team, resources, knowledge, approach, tools, products, technology, etc. — can help your audience get from where they are to where they want to be.

Before I elaborate on this idea, let me ask for your input. Have you heard people use the term story in this way? Do you use the term yourself? What do you mean by it? Is it something like what I’ve described?

I’m not going to analyze the content of President Obama’s acceptance speech in Oslo, other than to say I enjoyed the fact that it was substantial enough to merit discussion.

(For the full text of his speech, go here.)

Instead I’m going to use his speech as a jumping off point to discuss three points about how and why leaders give speeches.

First, leaders speak all the time, and most of their speeches can be grouped into three categories:

1. Stump speeches are speeches that leaders give over and over again. Politicians on the campaign trail may give their stump speech four or five times a day — word for word the same but to different audiences. Leaders in other arenas — in nonprofit circles, in the corporate world, in the public sector — do the same thing. They develop a speech (maybe two or three) that sets out their main themes or principles. They refine and polish that speech, and they more or less commit it to memory.
2. Ceremonials are mini-speeches that leaders are frequently called upon to deliver. Welcoming visitors, accepting or giving an award, proposing a toast, introducing a dignitary, speaking at an induction ceremony, a graduation, or a retirement — all such events are ceremonials. Experienced leaders save themselves a lot of time by a) using a simple template for each different type, and 2) incorporating the themes or principles from their stump speeches into their ceremonials.
3. Policy statements are one-time-only speeches that set out a leader’s thoughts about some important event, development, or occasion. When a CEO announces a new direction or a major acquisition, when the executive director of a nonprofit agency launches a new initiative, or when a community leader addresses a governmental body, they are making policy statements. They are the most labor-intensive type of speech a leader gives, because they require so much thought, so much is riding on them, and they will only be given once.

Obama’s speech in Oslo earlier this week was a policy statement.

Second, leaders give speeches for one of three reasons.

1. To shape a group’s identity — Leaders are constantly telling their audiences who we are, what we value, where we have come from (our history), and where we are headed (our mission). A significant section of Obama’s speech was devoted to telling his audience about what it means to be an American.
2. To influence who the audience thinks and feels about an important issue — Leaders aren’t primarily concerned about communicating information. They don’t want to add to the audience’s storehouse of knowledge; they want to shape how the audience perceives what they already know. The bulk of Obama’s speech does this. He devotes at least two-thirds of his speech to discussing war, the necessity of using force, and the conditions of peace.
3. To inspire the audience – Leaders call their audiences to act in a way that is consistent with their deeply held beliefs and values. (For my discussion about how inspiration is different from motivation, go here.) Obama ended his speech on an inspirational note: “So let us reach for the world that ought to be…”

Third, leaders don’t do PowerPoint.

Okay, so that just so happens to be the title of my book, but I can’t see how Obama’s speech would have been improved in any way by PowerPoint. Save PowerPoint for presentations, when your main objective is to communicate information. Whether you’re giving a stump speech, a ceremonial, or a policy statement, whether you’re speaking to identify, influence, or inspire, stay away from PowerPoint. Trust yourself and the power of your words.

Let’s not get into a political discussion here. There are other blogs devoted to that. But I’d love to hear what you took away from Obama’s speech.

In case I haven’t mentioned it often enough I’ve written a book, Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint. It’s published in the U.S. by Crown Business. And it’s been brought out in Brazil, the Netherlands, China, Australia, and the U.K.

It is being published this week in India by Piatkus. (You can buy it online through IndiaPlaza here.)

Here’s an excerpt from the chapter titled “Content Is King.”

It’s true that some perfectly good ideas have been ignored or discounted because they were poorly delivered. And, conversely, some bogus ideas have made more of an impact that they deserve because they were so well delivered. So I’m not saying that delivery is unimportant. Far from it. A masterful delivery is one of the cornerstones of a great speech.

But clearly the words you use and what they mean are more important than how you say them. Content is king. Delivery is merely its helpful, or unhelpful, servant.

When my clients need to spruce up their appearance, I refer them to an image consultant I know. She’s accustomed to working with business professionals, so she doesn’t go for glamour or glitz. “I don’t want people to look at someone I’ve dressed and say, ‘That’s a great tie’ or ‘I love that blouse,’” she explains. “I want them to say, ‘You look sharp.’”

Similarly, you don’t want people to go away from your speech saying, “You used great vocal variety” or “Your gestures were truly outstanding.” Instead, you want them to get the big picture. You want them to see things the way you see things, to feel about them the way you feel about them, to want to act the way you want them to act. You want people to pay attention to your message, to remember it, and to be changed by it.

I visited India for two months some time ago (as in 20 years ago) and had a great time. I hope to return in order to see more. To my readers in India, namaste.