Confessions of a Public Speaker (9 page)

Even if you must have a boring title because your boss forces you
to, don’t use the boring title at the beginning. Choose a working title
that you think your audience really wants to hear, or that strongly
represents what you have to say. Status presentations, where people give
updates on their work, are a tragedy because everyone hates how boring
everyone else’s is, but refuses to do something smarter in their own
presentations. If you call yours something like, “The good, the bad, and
what we’re doing about it,” the conciseness of your presentation and the
value of the meetings in general would improve dramatically.

Here’s
a better example. Say I agree to give a lecture
entitled “Creativity for beginners.” I have already set
myself up to fail. How can I possibly say everything a beginner needs to
know about creativity? And why would the audience care to know everything?
That would be boring and take forever. Good lectures are never
comprehensive because it’s the wrong format to do so. I might as well read
the dictionary to someone for six hours—it would be just as ineffective.
People really want insight. They want an angle. A good speaker or teacher
finds it for them.

A better title would be, “How to be creative in doing boring work”
or “Green eggs and brainstorming: how to learn creativity from reading Dr.
Seuss.” Even if I used a worn-out, beaten-to-death generic title like,
“Instant creativity in five minutes a day,” from the moment I started
working on the presentation, I would know what the value is for the
audience. I’d be cleanly defining what I am covering and what I am not
covering. This sets up any speaker on any topic to succeed. By slicing the
topic in a specific and
interesting way, all thinking that follows will be easier,
more fun, and more likely to be relevant to the people who show up.

But speakers don’t like interesting titles because, well, I’m not
sure why. For some it’s a reflection of their general fears of speaking.
The craving for safety is so strong that they’re compelled to follow the
same recipe that’s put us to sleep a thousand times. They put in all the
facts, jargon, and diagrams they can manage, never really intending to
clearly say anything (in the hopes of preventing anyone from asking a
decent question). Consider a talk titled, “Risk management 101.” For those
who remember college, 101 courses were boring. They’re often designed to
put people to sleep rather than excite them. And worse, intro college
courses are generally taken because they are required, not desired. Naming
a talk “ 101” in the hopes of making it
attractive, denies how boring most 101 courses in the history of the
universe have been for students.

Take a simple title like, “The five biggest questions and answers
you have about X.” I’m convinced you could find any reasonably intelligent
person, drop him into any organization in the world with the assignment of
making this presentation, and he’d do a decent job. Even if he knows
nothing about X, he can research people in the appropriate audience, find
out their questions, seek out good answers from experts in the company,
and present them. It’s always possible to do some kind of research on the
people likely to attend
a presentation, and it makes sorting out what direction to
go in more substantiated than just guessing. If you think of a
presentation as a kind of product, customer research makes sense. There’s
no law stopping you from studying the kind of people you expect will
listen to you and aiming your material at what they want to hear.

You can rip off any of the following
titles and be well on your way to a stronger
presentation:

With an interesting title, even one you’re not sure you can live up
to, the work shifts to possible points that just might fulfill what the
title is promising. Grab a piece of paper and brainstorm by listing all
the thoughts you have on the topic, even the strange, half-baked
ones.

Let’s assume I chose the title, “How eating cheese will save your
life.” (Even though this is a bizarre topic, one I’ve never thought about,
it’s a useful exercise to show—without even doing much research—how easy
it is to develop the seeds for an interesting talk.) My list might look
something like this:

With a
title and list in hand, you now have a
strawman
: a rough sketch of what your talk might
cover and the points it might make. Show it to coworkers, friends, or even
potential audience members, and ask them how to make the list better. If
you have no friends and all your coworkers hate you, do some web searches.
Flesh out your list; add more questions and ideas. Don’t worry about how
to support the points, answer the questions, or even whether you entirely
agree with them. Just make a big, long, and most important of all,
interesting list. A dozen is good, 15 is brilliant, and 20 makes you a
rock star. In all cases, put the list aside, pat yourself on the back, and
go have a beer. That’s right, walk away and do something completely
unrelated to your talk or your list.

This sounds ridiculous since you’re probably overdue for your slides
or you waited too long to read this chapter (in which case you should
switch from reading this book to drinking beers). But if you want your
talk to be good, you must let your list breathe. Get some distance so that
when you return to it, you can critique the list not like the person who’s
proud to have just written down some points, but like the smarter, less
patient guy who will be in your audience. Review, improve, and
repeat.

Eventually, reorder the list from top to bottom in terms of
how strongly you feel about each point. You might find that two cancel
each other out or one is really a subpoint of another. Perhaps you’ll
realize there is a better title than the one you started with. Fine,
change it. You should know much more about your topic now than when you
started, so reflect that in the position your title takes.

With enough
effort, you’ll settle down to a list of five strong,
interesting, reasonably aligned points, as well as a bunch of weird,
mangled, half-baked stuff. If there’s a cliff in quality between the good
stuff and the half-baked, draw a line to make it clear. In my wacky
example, my list for “How eating cheese can save your life” would look
something like this:

With this simple
outline, good things will happen. It’s a foundation of ideas
that supports whatever else you do. It is now impossible to eat the
microphone. Whatever slides you make, images you use, or movies you show,
there is always a simple, clear structure for what you’re doing and why.
As your talk develops, the outline might change, but you will still have
clear points to offer. So, if during your presentation you get lost, your
laptop explodes, or your notes become incomprehensible, fall back on the
outline. You can still give some amount of value just by running through
the outline and making your points.

Some people resist outlines because in our modern age they seem
rigid, low-tech, and old-school, restricting ideas to the tyranny of
two-dimensional hierarchy. They think it’s cooler to use less constrained
forms of organization like mindmaps or storyboards. Good books like Garr
Reynolds’s
Presentation Zen
(New Riders) and Nancy
Duarte’s
Slide:ology
(O’Reilly) advocate such
things. Try different ones to figure out which creative process works best
for you.

But there must be an outline of points supporting whatever you put
into your talk for this reason: all presentations are narratives, and all
narratives are a sequence of points. Even if your points are made by
images, stories, or puppet shows, they must be linked together in a
narrative to provide value to the audience. And that narrative must
reflect the promise offered by the title. An outline like the previous
example is the simplest narrative structure to work from. It’s easy to
remember. You can even use that outline in your slides, showing your
audience your plan as you go.
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And even if you spend 20 hours building an amazing slide
deck, but someone in the front row runs off with your laptop right after
slide #2, you can fall back on the outline. It won’t be great, but you’ll
be OK. It’s much harder to fall back on a storyboard,
a mindmap, or just about anything else, unless you’ve used
those approaches to arrive at something like a simple
outline.

I usually present with slides. I love using images and movies to
make points, but I never worry that these things won’t work. Having
thought clearly through my points, even if I lose the specific way I had
hoped to present them, I can still offer them to my audience. If I’m
fluent in my research, I can offer those anecdotes naturally. In effect,
by working hard on a clear, strong, well-reasoned outline, I’ve already
built three versions of the talk: an elevator pitch (the title), a
five-minute version (saying each point and a brief summary), and the full
version (with slides, movies, and whatever else strengthens each
point).

It’s no surprise that speakers who work without slides use simple
outlines or short lists to keep to their points. Mark Twain, Winston
Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt all used a short outline of five or six
points—often with just a few words per point—to help them recall their
hour-long speeches while giving them. If you do enough thinking in
advance, all your brain needs is a little list, and most of the speaking
will take care of itself (see
Figure 5-1
).

Figure 5-1. This is not a police photo. When I speak without slides, as I did
here for Ignite! Seattle in 2006, I often use one folded Post-it note,
listing my five points.