Life After PowerPoint!

They say, “Experience is the best teacher.” But it ain’t so.

Experience, in and by itself, doesn’t teach anything. Experience is an opportunity for learning.

The experience of being a parent, for example, does not necessarily give people special insight or wisdom. It doesn’t inevitably make them more loving, patient, or understanding. Sadly, all too many parents are self-absorbed, negligent, or abusive. Being a parent doesn’t, on its own, teach people anything; it puts them in a situation, which has its own demands and rewards, where they can learn — or not learn – how to be a person worthy of being called a mother or a father.

The same is true about learning how to speak.

On the one hand, you have to get up and give speeches. There’s nothing like the experience of being in front of an audience and giving it your best shot. (That’s one reason why I often recommend that people look into Toastmasters.)

On the other hand, giving speeches — even lots of them — doesn’t necessarily make you a good speaker. I listen to experienced speakers all the time who are disorganized, confusing, and boring. Maybe you do, too.

So how do you learn from your experience?

First, observe other speakers. And get critical. By critical, I don’t mean “inclined to find fault or to judge with severity.” I mean “using skillful judgment to determine something’s value or worth.”

Pay special attention to good speakers. And notice what they’re doing. If they lose you or confuse you, ask yourself what happened. Don’t blame yourself. Try to figure out why you got lost or what they said that didn’t make sense to you. And when you get caught up in what they’re saying, take a step back and analyze what they’re doing. How are they relating to the audience? Do they tell stories? Do they use humor? If so, what kind? And pay attention to speakers who aren’t so good.

For example, there’s a speaker I hear rather often. She’s prepared and she has good things to say. But I’m almost always bored. It’s as if she’s lulling me to sleep. One day I decided that since I had to listen to her anyway, I would use the time to figure out what she was doing that I found so sleep-inducing. And I noticed two things. First, she was reading her speech word for word. It’s hard to project energy and vitality when you’re reading a speech. Some people can do it. Most can’t. And second, she had written her speech for the eyes, not for the ears. She used long, complex sentences. They would be fine if you were reading them in a book or a journal, but not fine if you were listening to them. (Okay, I’ll confess it: I’m a fanatic. I can’t simply say someone’s sentences are too long. I had to count how many words were in each sentence. So for three or four minutes, I counted. And I found that her sentences were 45 to 50 words long. And she used, on average, five phrases per sentence!)

So observe good speakers and less riveting speakers. And pay attention to what they’re doing, to what works and what doesn’t work. Ask yourself how you can apply the lessons you’ve learned from them. (I’m not suggesting, by the way, that you imitate them.)

Second, get feedback from people you trust about your own speaking.

I give that piece of advice with some trepidation. Much of the feedback I’ve received over the years and have heard other people receive has been counterproductive. People — even well-meaning, intelligent people — can give some stupid advice about speaking.

Here’s what I do. When people say something nice or not so nice about a speech I’ve given, I ask them to be specific. What did I do or say that they liked or disliked. Where in my speech did I grab their attention or turn them off? What was I doing at that moment? How did they perceive it? How did it make them feel? And I listen real carefully. Then, they go on to tell me how I could fix it, and I listen less carefully. All too often people give advice about how they would do something. They don’t have the ability or the insight to help me do what I do better.

Listen to people’s advice and analyze it. Try it out if it makes sense.

Finally, take responsibility for your own learning. (That’s the theme that runs through my first two pieces of advice.) Observe others, analyze what they do, seek advice, listen, reflect, experiment. Let your experience be the classroom. But be your own teacher.

What about you? How do you learn best to be a good speaker?

Most presentations are a variation on the problem-solution format. The presenter surfaces a problem that affects the audience, explains it in some way (its scope, implications, causes, etc.), and prescribes a solution to it (what to do, how to do it, and the benefits of doing it).

There are many ways to define a problem. The definition that I’ve been working with lately is a version of one proposed by a friend who teaches game theory to both the military and to businesses. And it’s this:

A problem is anything — a set of circumstances, an object, an action, a process, a person, a rule, a condition — or a combination of all of those things that prevents you from achieving what you desire.

A locked door is not a problem if you’re a homeowner wanting to protect your family and your possessions. It is a problem 1) if you’re the owner of the home and you’ve locked yourself out, or 2) if you’re a burglar and you want to break in.

Something — anything — only becomes a problem when it keeps someone from getting what they want.

That means that when you’re talking to a mixed audience, you may need to define the problem in a couple of different ways, depending on what the different people in the audience want. The CFO, the VP of sales, and the head of R&D may all agree that a situation at a manufacturing plant is a problem. But they may — they probably will — define it differently because of how it affects them and their areas of responsibility.

So to begin creating a problem-solution presentation, you need to understand at least three things: 1) the situation as it is, 2) the people affected by it, and 3) their desires and objectives.

Have I left something out? How do you define a problem?

March is Listening Awareness Month according to the International Listening Association, and since I believe listening is by far the most important part of communicating I offer these comments…

Speakers and presenters do most of the talking during a program. Sometimes — during keynote addresses to huge audiences, for example — they may do all of the talking. But, if you’re a masterful speaker, you actually do an equal amount of listening. Maybe even more.

First, you listen before you speak. It’s called research or speech preparation. You speak to the meeting planner. You reach out to prospective audience members. And you ask questions. Then you listen, not to confirm what you already believe but to uncover something new and to begin forging a bond with some of the people you’ll be addressing. (That’s what listening does — at least in part: it exposes you to the thoughts and feelings of others, and in the process it creates a relationship.)

Second, you listen as you’re speaking. This is difficult to do when you’re just starting out. Usually, you’re so nervous that you spend most of your energy focusing on yourself. You’re trying to avoid panic, to remember what you’re going to say next, and to slow down. You can’t imagine what it might mean to listen to your audience as you’re speaking. But if you get beyond all that and tune in to what your audience is saying to you — what they’re telling you in a thousand different ways through their body language, through the way they’re looking at you, through the quality and nature of their silence — you’ll become a much more powerful speaker.

Third, you listen during the Q&A portions of your talk, if you’re taking questions. (With a few exceptions, you should always, in my not so humble opinion, take questions.) The ability to understand what people are really asking and to respond in an appropriate way is what sets great speakers apart from all the rest. Listen on as many levels as possible: listen for the factual basis of the question, for the emotions underneath the question, and for the intent of the question. And then decide which level to respond to.

Finally, you listen after you’ve spoken. Listen to what people say about what you’ve said. Don’t just listen for praise or criticism. Listen to find out how people understood your presentation. Did they get the main point? If someone says, “I really liked your speech,” don’t go fishing for more compliments. Ask, “What’s the main thing that you remember about it?” Don’t try to correct them. (You’ll often be surprised — I know I am — when they attach to some relatively minor point you made, and loved it.) Just listen.

(You might want to take the listening quiz I created and posted here.)

Are there other times or ways you listen, as a speaker or presenter?

Photo courtesy of Ky Olsen at Flickr.

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.

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?

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?

Every successful speech and presentation drives home one — and only one — big idea.

A big idea organizes, ties together, and makes sense of many smaller ideas.

Great speeches advance one big idea. At Gettysburg Lincoln spoke of the birth, death, and rebirth of liberty. At the outbreak of WWII in his first address as Prime Minister to the House of Commons, Churchill answered the question “What is our aim?” with one word: Victory. On the steps of the Lincoln Monument, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of his dream – and America’s dream — of freedom and equality.

Lincoln’s speech, which was by far the shortest (under two minutes), was also the most tightly focused. But even it addressed — and tied together — several smaller ideas (dedicating a graveyard, honoring the dead, committing ourselves to their struggle).

The problem with most speeches is their lack of a big idea. If they present any overarching idea at all, it’s usually a small idea that leaves audiences asking, “Is that all there is?” or “Who cares?”

By their very nature, presentations tend to communicate more information and, often times, more ideas than speeches. (Here is how I differentiate a speech from a presentation.) But effective presentations still expound one big idea.

Watch Hans Rosling’s presentation at TED. (It’s a masterful presentation.) In 15 minutes he presents an amazing amount of information — especially statistics — and he develops several ideas. (Many of his ideas deserve their own speech.) But all of the information and all of his ideas develop a single message, Rosling’s big idea: The economies of Asia are catching up to the economies of the West.

The greatest curse of most presentations — audience’s most common complaint — is too much information. But the real culprit is not too much information but the lack of a big idea that ties all the information together and makes sense of it.

Do you have any examples of presentations that develop a single, clear big idea that you’d like to share?

Photo courtesy of Guido van Nispen at Flickr.

There’s an article worth reading on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s web site. It’s titled “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom.”

It isn’t a rant against the use of PowerPoint in teaching, but it does try to get teachers away from an over-reliance on it. The article extensively cites the thoughts of José A. Bowen, a dean at Southern Methodist University.  Here’s a brief summary of his approach:

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

Later in the article there are examples of how to use PowerPoint not at a “crutch” but as a “creative tool.”

You can watch an interview of Bowen here.

Bowen makes an implicit distinction between learning information (through lectures aided by PowerPoint and other means) and learning how to think (through discussions, interaction, and active participation). It’s a distinction that every presenter should keep in mind.

Sometimes a presentation is all about presenting information. You just want your audience to know something — a new procedure or policy, the latest test results, the status of a project. And sometimes you want them to learn how to think — how to conduct an experiment, how to analyze data, how to select the best option.

You have to determine your goal — do you want to communicate information or help people think – before selecting the tools and methodology you use.

Martin Shovel at Creativity Works has a great post, well worth reading on the limitations of PowerPoint. (The comments are equally thoughtful and worth reading.)

Why does PowerPoint Presentations that Changed the World rank so high on the list of books that will never be written? Perhaps the clue’s in the title.

PowerPoint has been with us for over twenty years but during that time it has gained more of a reputation for sending the world to sleep than changing it.

Great orators, past and present, have managed to get by quite nicely without it – preferring instead to weave their magic with words alone. Would Nelson Mandela’s statement at the opening of his trial have been more powerful, or Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech more moving if they’d been delivered as PowerPoint presentations? I think not.

What PowerPoint can’t show you.

I seem to be the only person who differentiates presentations from speeches. (Read “What’s the Difference between a Speech and a Presentation?”). But if you buy into my distinction, I would say that PowerPoint may be effective — when used effectively — in presentations. It’s often counterproductive in speeches.

What do you think?

(Warning: this post is more philosophical, less practical than most of my posts.)

Stories are the single most powerful element of most speeches. There are many ways to think about speeches and about their uses. Here are my ruminations about three types of stories.

Individual Stories

These are the typical stories we tell all the time. They’re narratives of a particular individual or group of people involved in a sequence of events resulting in a change of some sort.

Think for a moment of The Biggest Loser. It’s a TV series on NBC about a group of overweight contestants attempting to lose the most amount of weight to win the title “The Biggest Loser.”

Each contestant has his or her own individual story. The NBC website says as much in advertising the latest season:

Their individual stories are compelling, from a firefighter (Allen Smith) whose health and job are at risk because of his weight to a military wife and mother of four (Tracey Yukich) who has always put others first. Viewers will also meet a remarkable woman (Abby Rike) who endured the worst tragedy imaginable – losing her husband and two children in a deadly car crash – and who now gets a second chance to restart her life.

The individual stories that we tell in our speeches are like the stories told on The Biggest Loser. They are rich in specific detail and in emotional engagement.

Overarching Stories

Sometimes people talk about the story of a presentation or speech, and they’re clearly not talking about a specific story. (I most frequently hear technical presenters and sales representatives referring to “story” in this way. They talk about getting their story down or, if they’re giving a team presentation, about telling the same story.)

I think what they’re talking about in such cases is the overarching story, the recurring or dominant theme that informs the whole speech.

Back to The Biggest Loser. The overarching story of the series, now in its eighth season, is — as far as I can tell — transformation. By making changes in their diets and exercise routines and by coming to terms with their personal issues, contestants have the chance not just to lose weight but to transform themselves.

What the series promotes — in addition to commercial time and, now, a series of books, DVDs, appliances, fitness equipment, protein supplements, and countless other health and lifestyle based products — is hope. If these contestants can transform themselves, there’s hope that we can do it too.

The individual stories of contestants like Allen, the firefighter, are unique, but they all tell the same overarching story.

In a speech we tell individual stories. And our speeches, if they hold together at all, tell an overarching story. During his presidential campaign, for example, Obama’s overarching story was change.

Grand Stories

Grand stories, sometimes called metastories, are the underlying structures or the archetypes of both the individual and overarching stories we tell.

I would say that America’s predominant grand story is self-creation: through our hard work and individual effort, we make ourselves into the type of people we choose to be. We are defined — in our minds — less by our physical limitations, our histories, our socio-economic standing, our families and societies than by our own efforts.

The overarching stories of The Biggest Loser (transformation) and of Obama (change) are variations of America’s grand story (self-creation.)

Application

What does all this mean to speakers?

First, I can’t overstress the value of telling stories in your speeches. If you’re not already doing so, find a way to incorporate at least one individual story in every — or in almost every — speech you give.

Second, be attentive to the overarching story your speech is telling. If your speech doesn’t hold together, it may lack the unifying theme of an overarching story.

Third, tie your overarching story into a grand story in order to increase its evocative power. If your overarching story is in harmony with the audience’s grand story, your speech will resonate with them. It will ring true to them.