Common Ground

On Trust

Great post at Trusted Advisor which brings together ten great pieces about trust.  The Straight Talker's Manifesto is all about how to earn your audience's trust, and so win permission to communicate your message.  It rather assumes, though, that the message is worth having - that most often the intention is a genuine desire to engage rather than patronise or manipulate on the part of most professional communicators. 

It assumes that trust is still possible between relative strangers in a business setting.

I'm not 100% sure that it is. 

Rule 5: Work the Channels

You now face unprecedented competition for your audience's attention.  And just as attention spans have decreased, the range of information channels has proliferated.  So rather than listen to you, your audience could be Google chatting with friends, downloading the lunchtime news, replying to a handful of texts and plugging into their favourite podcast.

Your audience is used to processing information from multiple sources simultaneously.  This is the era of the over-stimulated brain.

You have two options. Carry on showing up with your hour of finely wrought argument backed up by two tons of bullet points.  Or accept that variety is the spice of presentations as well as life and maybe get people to start listening to you.

Howard Gardner came up with his theory of multiple intelligences over 25 years ago.  He identified 7 distinct human capacities:

• Musical
• Kinaesthetic
• Logical
• Linguistic
• Spatial
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal

Use them: consider the following:

• Music, before and after your presentation
• Props to hand around to the audience
• Images (not text) on your slides
• Case studies for group discussion
• Thinking time

Rule 4: Participants Not Spectators

Fortune Magazine recently ran a cover story on Generation Y in the workplace.  It's headline was "Manage Us? Puh-leeze."  A similar response is in store for any presenter who tries to lecture these Y-ers.

Generation Y matters, because it is almost certain to contain the talent you are most desperate to hire.  Increasingly, it will constitute an important segment of your client base.  So it make sense to understand how to communciate with that precocious generation born in the era of Thatcher and Reagan.

Generation Y is responsible for the explosion in popularity of blogging, the vast majority of votes cast in TV shows like Pop idol and the proliferation of websites like YouTube and Facebook.

The common theme is user generated content.

Today's audience expects co-billing with the presenter.  Throughout popular culture we are experiencing the rise of the audience as auteur, not spectator.

So once again the successful communicator will have to surrender the mantle of the expert and find ways for the audience to interact directly with the material.  This could be through breakout groups, case studies or keypads. Why not ask the audience some questions rather than endure those painful silent seconds waiting for them to ask you?  Anything to ensure the audience gets to shape (some of) the content.

Just about the only context in which the hour long monologue reigns supreme is in politics.  Avoid.

Rule 3: Design Matters

There are two aspects of design that you need to take seriously as a professional communicator.  One concerns aesthetics, the other functionality.

Let's take functionality first.  The chair you are sitting in was (hopefully) designed with your butt in mind.  The software I'm using was designed to produce this text.  What about your presentation?  I'm always amazed to be often greeted with a shrug when I ask coachees what the point of their presentation is.  Be clear about the purpose of your presentation - this is your core message.  "Begin with the end in mind" say NLP practitioners.  Nowadays software designers begin with the end-user in mind.  So should you.

Next, let's take the aesthetics of communication.  Look at what is hot in today's marketplace and generally there will be some presentational lessons to be learned.

For example, Nintendo's Wii is the current gaming phenomenon - it outsells its competitors two to one, depsite its inferior graphics.  Why?

Because people like the look.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Wii's revolutionary controller, outlined the rationale behind the product to Fortune magazine:

"We were losing out to the TV remote.  So we thought: what kind of controller can we create that won't make people afraid to touch it?"

The Wii looks different to its competitors in that it doesn't glorify the complexity of its own technology - it conceals it.  It looks so simple that a whole new generation - the over 60s - have been persuaded to try gaming for the first time.

Takeaway for you: the look of things matters.  Specifically, simplicity is compelling. Simplicity, as a design principle, encourages engagement and trust.  (For lawyers, this is largely counter-intuitive.)

Here's a presentation that models the kind of aesthetic I'm talking about:

Rule 2: Authenticity Rules

First there was sleaze.  Then there was spin.  Finally there was Iraq.

The result has been a disintegration of trust in the spoken utterances of politicians, which has morphed slowly but surely into kneejerk distrust of any public pronouncement.

Your audience has developed a preternatural ability to detect fakery.  There is zero tolerance for corporate ventriloquism these days.  So if you have the temerity to speak words which you don't fully own - ones formulated for you by your PR agency or HR team - then pack a parachute.  You are certain to be shot down.

You must write your own presentations, regardless of whether you are the world's greatest wordsmith.  Richard Branson certainly isn't - in fact I don't think his presentation skills have improved one jot in all his years in business.  This is central to his appeal - he's not slick, but then the age is signally sick of slick.

Own the words you speak, and the way you speak them.  One way of doing this is to make them up on the spot.  If you have no script then you clearly haven't hired a scriptwriter.  Notes - of any kind - denote an amateur communicator or, worse, an inauthentic one.

If that is too scary, then find other ways to introduce some spontaneity.  Read and respond to your audience's reactions.  Speculate.  Go off-piste.

By conveying that this is a work in progress, not a finished product, you will be letting the audience know that the material is authentically yours.

Next time:  Design Matters

Rule 1: Insight Rocks (Information Sucks)

Most presentations are doomed before they start because presenters think their purpose is to inform.

But information is the world's most devalued currency.  There's more of it in circulation than any of us can handle - and you want to give people more of it?

Painful but true: there is no information you can present to your audience that they can't find out for themselves.

[Read that again - its implications are enormous, particularly if you trade in intellectual capital]

So you must treat your information as nothing more than raw material which you will mould, sculpt or weld together for your audience. Show us what we can't see, tell us what we can't hear.  What does your information mean.  [We all heard the stats about global warming for years, but it took Al Gore to show us why we should be as concerned about them as those paddling polar bears...]

To render raw information meaningful, you will need insight. Insight means having the ability to step back from your material and see it afresh, from the audience's perspective.  It means seeing what is not apparent (yet) as well as what is.  It means communicating your findings in the language of the chat room not the text book. 

Empathy.  Imagination.  Humility.  When did you last find that combination of traits on show in your lawyer, your FD or even your doctor?  That's because most professionals have yet to come to terms with the democratising impact of the world wide web.  No-one can base their reputation on what they know anymore, because we are all experts now.

It's not your information but what you do with it that counts.  Amaze us with it.  Inspire us.  Surprise us.  Just don't inform us.

Information + your interpretation = insight

Information - your interpretation = crap I've already forgotten

Next time: Authenticity Rules 

The Straight Talker's Manifesto

The word itself is an anachronism.  Why do we still talk of "presenting"?  Nineteenth century diplomats may have had to present their credentials at court; the same approach is unlikely to resonate for the ipod generation.

Instead of setting out to present, why not excite, stimulate or inspire instead?

Over the next couple of weeks I want to present a five point manifesto for transforiming the conventional and often mind-blowingly dull business presentation into something fit for its 21st century purpose.

For purpose it certainly has.  In an age where everyday communication is increasingly derisory - a bleep in your pocket, a buzz in your ear - a presentation ought to feel like the real deal.  You and your audience are, for once, together, same time, same space.  Genuine engagement should follow.  But most presenters are like the archetypal embarrassing parents, showing up with their bunch of scratched 45s hoping to impress an increasingly tech-savvy, sophisticated audience.

If you want to make an impact, if you set out to persuade, if you really want to engage hearts and minds when you speak, then you need to understand how a mixture of technology, politics and the emergence of generation Y have profoundly changed the rules for communicating with an audience.

We'll start tomorrow with point 1 - why insight rocks...and information sucks. 

McCartney's Mandolin

Writer of some of the most famous songs ever.  Former member of the world's greatest group.  Multimillionaire.  Wrong side of 60.  You'd sit on your laurels, right?

Not Sir Paul.

"I (just) bought a mandolin," he tells the current issue of Uncut magazine.  "It isn't tuned like a guitar so I didn't know my way around it. But the feeling of picking my way through and finding the chords was magic.  It was like I was 17 again."

There's plenty in that, isn't there, about life, love and the meaning of success?

Authenticity - How To Fake It

1. Look around for a while and see how stuff gets done round here
2. Work out how best to "fit in"
3. Try your new mask on for size
4. Plod along, happy in the knowledge that you look and sound like a "real" lawyer/teacher/consultant/manager etc
5. Ignore that dull ache in the back of your head most days when you look in the mirror
6. Serve time

Rule of One

Excellent reminder from Seth Godin about clarity and focus.  Nothing puts people to sleep like me opening up my two-page shopping list of Stuff I Need To Get Off My Chest.  Whether it's a sales call - have a clear objective, meet it & get the **** off the phone - or a presentation, having one clear point that you address in some depth wins out over the scattershot approach.  Used to be the Rule of Three.  Now it's the Rule of One.  Best presenters aren't necessarily the most charismatic - but aren't they nearly always the most ruthless editors of their own material?