Every Speaker Must Respect The Power Of A Potato

Bored audiences will get up and walk out of your speeches. How would you keep the attention of 400+ engineers who were attending an industry dinner event that they didn’t really want to be at on a weekday evening? I recently had the opportunity to be the master of ceremonies at such an event – great gig, tough crowd.

The banquet’s master of ceremonies (MC) last year had tried very hard, but had ended up not being able to hold the crowd’s attention and they had started to leave before the event was even half over. This year’s planning committee presented me with a challenge: find a way to keep the audience in their seats until the end of the event. It turns out that a single large baking potato was a key part of my solution to this problem…

Not A Speech, But Rather A 3-Act Play

Two weeks before the banquet was to be held, I had a meeting with the planning committee. The banquet is an annual event for all of the engineers involved in transportation in the Tampa, Florida area. I had been asked to be a co-MC for the event in order to help make it a success. The trouble was that I know next to nothing about the transportation industry.

The other MC knew a lot about the industry having worked in it for over 25 years. This was a perfect pairing – his smarts and my creativity held the key to our potential success.

The planning committee wanted to focus on the future of transportation in Florida. Since this was not a typical speech, there wasn’t a speech to prepare. Instead I was looking at creating a play with three acts: an opening, then a second act after the banquet’s first speaker, but before its second speaker. Finally, there would be a third act that would close out the evening.

The Initial Plan: Potatoes Everywhere

Never one to be at a loss for ideas, my initial plan to the team was to propose other forms of transportation that people may not have thought of: catapults, rocket launchers, etc.

I took my plan one step further and proposed that we get someone to come up from the audience, put an apron on them, and then have them try to carry as many potatoes as possible across the stage. They would end up dropping some and we could say that a better transportation system was called for.

I had other ideas that involved the same potatoes: have planning committee members stand on one side of the stage and try to throw them into a bucket held by another committee member. Lots of potatoes were going to get hurt doing all of this.

In the end, the planning committee flatly rejected my potato idea. The possibility of someone getting hurt was just too great and it was sending a negative message about the transportation solutions that are currently being planned for Tampa. Sadly, I think that they made the right decision.

The Next Plan: Jet Packs

The clock was ticking and we were starting to run out of time. We went back to the drawing board and my co-MC did a web search and found all sorts of images of future transportation systems from the 1940′s and 1950′s covers of Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics magazines. A new idea started to emerge.

Instead of saying anything negative about Tampa’s current transportation plans, how about if we came up with our own vision of the future of transportation? Make it so outlandish so that everyone knows that it’s not a real plan, but incorporate all of that futuristic stuff that everyone has always believed is coming.

I thought that this was a great idea – with one addition. I wanted to have it all lead up to one thing: a proposal for a jetpack based transportation future. Hey, everyone loves jetpacks and engineers especially love ‘em. The planning committee agreed and one of the members even agreed to build a mock jetpack for us to use.

What This All Means For You

So how did it all turn out you ask? The evening was a smashing success. The audience was riveted to their seats – they had to know how this 3-act play was going to come out. Not a soul left before we told them that the show was over.

My co-MC did a great job of reaching out and drawing the audience in using his deep knowledge of the transportation industry. The three-act play did its job by hooking the audience’s attention in the first act, extending the story in the second act and building up to a big finish in the third act.

The crowning point of the evening was when my co-MC brought out the Jetpack model and put it on and announced that the event was over and he was leaving to go home. That was what the audience had been waiting for!

Oh, and the potato? I had brought one to the event as a backup just in case things didn’t go as planned. We ended up setting it on the podium and not talking about it, not moving it, not doing anything with it. It drove the audience mad with curiosity: why was the potato there? What were they going to do with it? Talk about holding an audience’s attention!

What have you done that has helped to hold your audience’s attention during one of your speeches?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just like a cheesy pick-up line, the first words that come out of your mouth when you are giving a speech will determine if you are going to get lucky with this audience.  How are you going to score?

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Audiences need to learn to pay attention!

What’s really going on here? It’s always been difficult to get people to remember & retain what has gone on it a meeting; however, now we seem to be having problems with people not being able to keep up with the flow of a meeting. According to author Cherie Kerr we may have the wrong focus. Outside of those folks who are deliberately doing other work during a meeting (BlackBerry anyone?), the people who are actually trying to participate often make the mistake of focusing on the goals of the meeting instead of what is being said right now.

The real goal of a meeting is achieve some sort of result. This can be an agreement, determine a next step, or reach a decision. That’s the end point. How you get there is the responsibility of the person who is running the meeting. If that’s you , then what you want to have happen is for everyone in the meeting to build on what has already been said instead of coming up with completely new directions for the meeting to head off in. Note that we’re not talking about Brainstorming sessions here, but rather normal business meetings.

By building on top of what has already been said, there will be a clear path from where you started to where the goal of the meeting is. Each discussion in the meeting will have a clear start, middle, and end as you lead into the next conversation. It will also quickly become clear if you’ve gone off the path and you’ll be able to bring the meeting back in line. Your participants will be more engaged because they’ll have a better understanding of where the meeting has been and where it is going.

This suggestion is not new. In fact the folks who do improv comedy do this all the time. Their skits flow from one character’s actions to another’s quickly. Hey, if it works for a 30 minute TV show, then surely it will work for your next business meeting!

Are you ready to keep your next meeting in line? Do you think that an incremental approach to conversations is the way to go or do you like a more open and free ranging approach? What works best in your life – leave a comment and let me know.

Tags: attention, focus, retention, meetings, groups, teams, training

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Ok, so you’ve got a big presentation coming up and you know that you want to make a difference and have the audience walk away with a good understanding of the complex info that you are going to present. What can you do to really make sure that you key points get hammered home? Setting yourself on fire halfway through the presentation or using trained animals both would be great, if impractical ways to accomplish this. How about two simpler ways that us technical folks always seem to forget as we pull together our presentations?

Audience Attention is drawn to LARGE differences that are perceptible.

Let’s say that you’ve got a slide that contains one of the key points that you want to make to your audience. There is probably other things on that slide (like a title?). You need to make sure that your key point, be it a number, a comparison, a figure, etc. jumps out at your audience. Background images, scrolling text, clipart, video clips, etc. are all swell; however, if they distract from your key point then they need to go away. Keep in mind that PowerPoint’s ability to have items join the slide via animation might be a good way to lead up to and introduce the key point.

People group elements into units automatically, which they then remember

The human mind is an amazing thing. We can quickly take in large quantities of information and rapidly make decisions about it. You can make this talent work for or against you in a technical presentation. Things that you place close to each other on a slide will automatically be considered to be related by your audience. A good example of this is labels and the thing that they are labeling. A bad example of this would be a graph that shows that both the price of copper ore and the price of apples have both increased by 25% in the past 6 moths. Both items would be shown closely together on the same graph and the audience would associate them. However, they really have nothing to do with each other (unless you are trying to talk about the cost of copper apples…).

Just a few things to consider when you are making that last pass though the big presentation that you’ve created — do your main points jump out or are they buried?

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Most of the time when we are asked to give a presentation, we spend a lot of time working on WHAT we want to say. Unfortunately we really should be spending more time on HOW we say it. In order to do a better job of this, it would probably be a good idea if we took a step back and spent just a moment or two thinking about what we’d like to accomplish by making this presentation.

If your goal is to get it over with, well then congrats — you will probably be successful in some fashion. However, if as long as you are going to the effort to prepare and present the info, you’d like to actually make an impact, shall we say change the world, then it would seem as though you should have some higher goals.

In his book Clear and to the Point, Stephen Kosslyn proposes that we have three goals in mind for every presentation:

1. Connect With Your Audience: If they can’t pick out how your presentation relates to them or their lives, then they just won’t care what you are talking about.
2. Direct and Hold Their Attention: You need to tell a story that is so compelling that they are hanging on your every word, waiting for your next revelation.
3. Promote Understanding & Memory: How you present your information should be easy to understand and done in such a way that when you are done and the slides are put away, your audience can still remember what you said and why it all made sense.

Whew! That doesn’t seem so hard now does it? Well, it actually is quite difficult to do well. Next time we’ll spend some time talking about simple ways to start to improve your presentations so that you easily accomplish all three of these goals.

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