How To Get Your Message To Stick w/ Everyone!

How many times has this happened: you've got an important message to get across, you work hard to put together the best presentation that you can, you practice-practice-practice, and then when you finally deliver your Pièce de résistance you can clearly see that some folks in the audience are getting it while others have tuned you out. Dang it! What can you do to reach everyone?

You've already learned how to connect with your audience. Now it's time to find a way to get your message to stick. The good news here is that it's not your fault. What's going on is that you are trying to communicate with a group of adults and they all have different learning styles. However, we all have our own personal style by which we learn and too often we assume that that is how the rest of the world learns also. Hmm, sure sounds like we've got to figure out how adults learn. My buddy Lenn Millbower is an expert in this area and he refined his tactics while working for Disney so you know he's got to be good. At the root of what Lenn teaches is that us adults fall into four basic groups of learning styles (see if you can pick yours out):

1. Act / Think: "Lab Style" - this is where much of an IT audience ends up. These folks like to test the new information by solving problems, being objective, seeking results, experimenting, and tinkering.
   
   
2. Act / Feel: "Playground Style" - this type of learner really likes to try out the new information that is being taught. Doing things like acting, sensing, deciding, applying, and then connecting ideas all help to make what's being taught "stick".
   
   
3. Reflect / Feel: "Cafe Style" - you'll find this type of crowd down at your local Starbucks if you don't do something to hold their attention. They like to talk about your information once you have shared it. This includes sharing, relating, discussing, seeking attention, and working in groups.
   
   
4. Reflect / Think: "Lecture Hall Style" - yep, this is the "old school" style that we all grew up with. For some, it works the best. It is based on thinking about what is being taught. Your audience then likes to listen to experts, explore principles, analyze ideas, theorize, and of course read.
   
   

These four groups are at the heart of the 4MAT approach to teaching. I can hear you now: so I've got an audience made up of four different learning styles, how am I supposed to reach out to all of them? It sounds like I really need four different presentations. No you don't. Instead, what you need to do is to make sure that you present your main points in four different ways within the same single presentation.

That's right, rotate through each of the four learning styles so that you make sure that you get through to your audience. Real quickly, let's look at an example. Lets say that your company has just bought another company and you are in charge of merging the two sets of billing applications that the two companies currently use. If you were giving a kick-off presentation to both company's IT departments, then you'd want to do the following: clearly define the problem that integrating the multiple billing systems presents and ask the audience to think about how they'd tackle this problem (Lab Style), show how combining billing systems will streamline the new company's ordering process (Playground Style), divide the audience up into groups in order to create a list of the top 10 issues that will need to be tackled (Cafe Style), and have someone who has done this type of IT project before say some words about what to watch out for (Lecture Hall Style).

If you can work these four different approaches to presenting the same material into a single presentation, then you'll have solved the problem of getting your message to "stick" with everyone in your audience.


Tags: 4MAT, adult learning, connecting with your audience, stick

Learning How To Present Better From Others

Although giving presentations is only one way that we communicate, we sure seem to do a lot of them. We've talked about how to create great presentations that work. Additionally, there are many talented folks out there who have spent a lot of time thinking about how your slides should look so that your presentation has the greatest impact. Here are a few presentations that they have put together that (1) look beautiful, (2) tell us all how to do a better job putting together presentations:

• Death By Powerpoint: 61 slides that talk about how to make a presentation and not to bore your audience to death. Alexei Kapterev is a Russian presentation & design consultant who has put together a great presentation that talks about how to build a presentation that includes how to add significance, structure, simplicity, and rehearsal.
  
  
• Enhancing Visual Effects In PowerPoint: 76 slides that provide a brief guide to some visual effects for Presentations using PowerPoint. Lots of good info about using matching colors, adding color to your text, composition (the rule of thirds), reflections, etc.
  
  
• Brain Rules For Presenters: 131 slides based on 3 of Dr. Medina's book "Brain Rules". The points covered are fairly basic; however, we all need to be reminded of them over and over again. The presentation itself looks fantastic.
  

The web has a lot more helpful information; however, remember you are the one who knows your audience the best. Simply taking the time to understand what they are looking for will help you to create the presentation with the most lasting impact.


Tags: basic rules, color, presentations, structure, web resources

Welcome To The Passive Aggressive Games!

Thanks to millions of years of evolution, we are all pretty good at recognizing situations in which we are called on to compete. Our communication skills are tuned to allow us to make ourselves heard in these situations and to get our point across. Which is why we all seem to do such a poor job when we are faced with no competition, but rather opposition. Oh, oh. What to do now?

So what is opposition? Opposition is what happens when the group of people that you are trying to communicate with are just dead set against what you have to say. If you show up in a situation where you are going to be telling your team about a great new documentation system that the company has mandated that everyone will start using, you will encounter opposition if nobody that you are talking to wants to do documentation in the first place -- it's not that the new system is a bad idea (although it might be), it's just that everyone rejects the idea of doing documentation.

What's funny is that although in technical fields we struggle with how to deal with opposition, the folks who work in politics deal with it on a daily basis. Our elected officials are forced to deal with opposition everyday and so they have developed effective ways of dealing with it. We could learn a thing or two from them:

• Co-opt The Other Side's Issue: this is one of my favorite approaches. Don't go head-to-head with the oppositon. Instead take a careful look at what's motivating their position: why doesn't your team want to do documentation? If you show respect for their underlying issue and then go ahead and propose a different way of solving it, you'll basically cut off the oppositon at the knees. In our documentation case, if you show the team that offshore developers do a poor job of native language documentation and by doing a good job of documentation their work they will be able to keep more jobs onshore, then you've accomplished your co-opting.
  
  
• Redefine The Issue: Initially an issue may start out as a tug-of-war. In order to solve this problem, if you redefine it in such a way that it is no longer a tug-of-war, then you can win the other side over. In our documentation example, the issue could start out as a "the company is telling us to do more work". This could be redefined as "Other companies have created products that interface with our product. In order for them (and us) to be successful, they have to understand how our product works and so documentation is needed." All of a sudden, what was something that was being created for the faceless company becomes a tool for specific small business owners.
  
  

If you can become skilled at learning to distinguish opposition from competition, then you will have a hard-to-find skill that you can start to use proactively. Do a little bit of research on the group that you will be communicating with. If there is strong opposition to what you will be discussing with them, it will probably come out quickly. Look for ways to co-opt or redefine the issue and you'll have accomplished half of your job before you even open your mouth.

I Hear Your Body Talking...

So you've been given the chance to talk to the big people. Or maybe to important customers. Or maybe just to a group of new hires, it doesn't really matter -- you can blow any of these opportunities if you aren't aware of what your body is saying. In fact, in certain circumstances, if you don't really believe what you are talking about, your audience will know it because your body language will be screaming "don't believe me -- I don't believe what I'm telling you right now!" In order to avoid getting drowned out by yourself, make sure that you listen to what your body is saying.

We've all heard the expression "Appearance matters". Well guess what, it really does. Thanks to about 50,000 years of evolution all of us have developed an acute ability to size someone up before they say a single word. Guess what: when you take the stage to start a talk to a group, they have already formed an initial opinion of you. As you start to talk you will either confirm or refute this impression. So let's talk about what you need to do to make your body talk a powerful part of your communication skills:

• Stand Up Straight Young Man (or Woman)! This is the simplest thing to do -- stand up straight and adopt a stance that exudes confidence, power, and energy no matter how you are currently feeling. If you look like you are in control, then everyone will believe that you are.
  
  
• No Chicken Dancing! Our arms and hands are amazing parts of our bodies. However, during a presentation if we are not careful they can put on a show all by themselves and that will end up distracting everyone who is watching us. The right thing to do is to keep them loosely dangling by our sides. Note that although this sounds simple, it is sometimes the hardest thing in the world to do!
  
  
• Turn Off The X-Ray Vision: Eye contact is an important part of any presentation. Its how you make contact with the audience and it can be a very powerful tool. However, avoiding looking at people in the audience or, even worse, staring down specific audience members can cause onlookers to become completely distracted and forget to pay attention to what you have to say.
  

There's a lot more to understanding what your body is saying. Your goal should be to make sure that your audience is not getting mixed messages from what you say and what your body is saying. If done correctly, your body language can help turn you into a powerful communicator.


Tags: appearances, body language, communication, eye contact, stand up straight

I Want To Be Just Like Steve Jobs

Well, at least I sure would like to be able to give a speech like he does. Just in case anyone has been living under a rock for the past week or so, Steve Jobs rolled out the next version of the iPhone at the WWDC 2008 conference. Steve, as always, did a great job of giving the Apple corporate pitch. Clearly he has a nature skill for giving a great speech. We may never be as good at public speaking as Steve is; however, we sure can learn from him. Here are five quick tips from Steve to you:

1. Benefits NOT Features: This is where Steve is at his best. In his speeches he spends his time talking about the experience of using the product, not how the product was implemented. Instead of talking about the 30GB memory size of an iPod, instead he'll talk about the 7,500 songs that it can carry, or the 25,000 photos that it can carry, or the 75 hours of video that it can carry.
   
   
2. Practice and Then Practice Some More: Steve's a CEO of Apple, a board member of Disney, and probably still runs Pixar. You'd think that he'd have a team of speech writers create his speeches and then he'd just grab it, scan it, and jump up on the stage and give it. Nope, it turns out that he spends hours upon hours practicing each speech. A 2006 Business Week article reported that Steve would spend at least four hours going over every slide and every part of a demonstration as he prepars for a presentation.
   
   
3. A Picture Is Worth...: Have you ever seen a picture or a video from one of Steve's presentations? There are either no words or very few words on the slides that are displayed on the giant screens behind him. There are certainly no lists of bullet points. Steve (and his highly paid set of presentation artists) understand that it's really his words that count -- the slides are just there to support his message.
   
   
4. Energy + Enthusiasm = Passion: Every time Steve speaks, it's clear that he loves being on the stage and talking to us. You can almost feel his excitement grow as he gets ready to share with us the next great thing that he has up his sleeves. His passion is contagious and everyone in attendance can't help but catch it.

I'm not so sure about trying to emulate Steve's trademark jeans & black shirt look for your next presentation. However, understanding how Steve is able to do what he does so well will point you in the right direction.

IM Etiquette: R U Good At It?

IM is horrible. Long live IM. Perhaps depending on when you were born, we all have different views of the value of Instant Messaging (IM). If you've ever worked as a part of a widely distributed team, then like me you probably realize that it's an incredibly valuable tool -- if used correctly. It turns out that that's the rub -- IM tools get installed on everyone's desktop and then we're all just left to our own devices to figure out the social rules associated with using them.

Perhaps it's high time for us to discuss some of the do's and don'ts around using IM. The don'ts are the easiest, so here it goes:

1. Don't copy/paste/forward IMs to other people not involved in the discussion: this is just poor form. An IM chat is assumed to be a private conversation between two or more parties. If you become known as a person who shares what was discussed in a private chat with others, then nobody is going to be willing to chat with you anymore for fear that you'll share that chat with others. Small exceptions can be made for very technical instructions or such. Otherwise, summarize the other chat in your own words.
   
   
2. If you don't want it to get around the office, then don't say it in a chat: as the flip side to rule #1, if you'd be embarrassed to see what you wrote in a chat on the front page of your local paper, then it's probably the wrong thing to put in a chat. The guys at Enron (yes, they all seemed to be guys) found this out when their IM records were put on the web as part of the lawsuits.
   
   

Let's wrap up with some do's:

1. Do check your spelling: it's just like you were told in 2nd grade -- spelling and grammar both count. If I have to work to understand your IMs, then I'm probably not going to take the time unless you are my boss.
   
   
2. Do sign off from a chat: just stopping typing is a lousy way to let the other parties know that you're done chatting. Instead, do like the police/truckers do -- clearly communicate that you are done talking: "over & out" is my favorite. "Goodbye" works just as well.

So what are your IM etiquette lessons learned?

How To Write A Speech

I was asked to give a speech for a local company's "high achievers" group a little while back. It had been quite some time since I had actually had to sit down and think long and hard about what message I really wanted to get across to an audience. This made me go do some research on how good speechwriters find ideas that really shine.

Everyone who writes speeches for a living seems to agree about one thing: just get the first draft done. There are countless stories about folks who get hung up on trying to write the perfect speech and who spend so much time editing word after word that they never complete the speech. Just let the words flow and resist the urge to edit. Once it's all out there, then you can go back and have at it.

Write for the ear not the eye. What sounds great on paper probably sounds stilted and awkward when read aloud. For example, we use a lot of contractions when we speak (can't, won't, shouldn't) but we don't use them as much when we write. This difference will show up as a wordy, formal tone in any speech. Solve this problem by reading your speech out loud and actually listening to how it sounds. Then go back and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

PowerPoint is not all bad. Dr. John Medina’s book Brain Rules discusses how audiences lose focus after 10 minutes, so shifting gears, telling a story, etc. every 10 minutes will keep them focused and awake. Another rule is that a combination of both auditory and visual stimuli make your message 6 times more memorable than auditory alone. What this means is that if you use it the way that it should be used (as a helper, not a crutch), PowerPoint can boost the impact of your speech. But be careful -- it's easy to go overboard. My favorite saying is "There is a reason that you never see PowerPoint used during an eulogy."

Writing a speech should be an adventure. Often where we think that the effort will take us ends up not being where we finally arrive. However, doing a good job of speech writing will pay dividends that will have a value that lasts long after the speech is done.