The Presentations Japan Series

The largest meeting venue in the office complex was big enough to handle hundreds of people and it was packed. This presentation involved all the senior heads of the Department going through their strategies for the coming year. One after another, we took to the stage and spoke about our areas of responsibility. I was one of the five who spoke. My turn came after a particular colleague who was a numbers wiz, a brainy technical expert. He didn't like the way I presented. He went around telling other colleagues I was all style and no substance. I just laughed when I heard that flat earth comment.

Over the years. I have heard versions of the same idea. These comments weren't necessarily being directed at me as a put down by a sharp elbowed thrusting colleague, but toward the activity of presenting in general. There's a fundamental misunderstanding of presenting in play here. Of course, the material has to be high quality, valuable, and insightful. That is a given. If you don't have that basic requirement covered then what on earth are you doing presenting at all? Instead, you should be sitting in the audience, listening to people who know what they're talking about and be kept away from the dais.

My evil colleague at the all team presentation was reacting to the flagrant contrast of his pathetic presentation skills on stage with mine. There was nothing wrong with my content, my substance, because I was representing the Department and so the materials were reflecting the results gained and the plans for the next year. What he didn't like was being upstaged by someone who could command the room, engage the audience and deliver clear messages in a professional way. Nothing he could ever be accused of, so he went for the personal down to assuage his own inadequacies and perceived loss of face.

As we climb the ladder of our career growth, we will be placed in situations where we have to represent our team or company and make professional presentations. It is almost inescapable. If we cannot even grasp the importance of mastering the nitoryu（二刀流） or two sword method of going into business battle with both high quality content and high quality delivery, then we wouldn't be moving very far up the totem pole within our organizations.

I was coaching a senior executive in a multi-national organization. Recently when I asked for the three most important things to be gained from the one-on-one training, the first mentioned was quality content. Uh oh! I had an alarm bell go off in my head because quality content has to be a given. I asked to see the slides to be used for the presentation to the big boss. Uh oh! On the first slide there was lots of content. In fact, a veritable forest of content hiding all the key messages. The other slides were all the same, overwhelming amounts of visual stimulation diluting the points which we were meant to absorb.

I suggested that each of these slides be broken up and the same information be spread over three slides. If there was a need to show, a build or a contrast, then only show the left slide of the slide at first. Then grey that information out and bring up the middle of the slide and so forth and so on. In this way, we funnel our audiences' attention to just the section we want to highlight and cut down the distraction. This executive was open to the advice and actually told me what I was looking at was the "slimmed down version of the deck." My mind boggled, wondering what the original looked like.

While my mind was under assault from this revelation, another bomb was dropped. Today, all of their presentations are being done online. Okay, fine, however, this executive's colleagues, who are also senior leaders in this massive organization, do not switch on their own cameras when they present. That little morsel just stopped me in my tracks. What?

I get it. Because you are presenting slides, the platform relegates you to a tiny box on screen and does the same to your audience. Does that mean though, as a leader in the organization, you lead by turning off the camera? Getting people who are working at home engaged during business calls is tough enough, without fostering a no camera culture of hiding. There is a slippery slope here to the wondrous joys of multi-tasking in the background of calls and no longer paying attention to what is being said or shown during the session.

Yes, we are trapped in a tiny box, but we have to do our best with what we have. We need to look at that camera lens, get the lens right up to eye height and use 20% more energy than normal to work in this visual medium. These are absolute basics. And beyond that, we need to be using gestures and even more energy to engage the audience.

Let's master nitoryu presenting and be strong on content and delivery quality. No matter the limitations of the medium we are employing. If we are leaders, we have to set the pace and the standards. There are no excuses.

Clubhouse is a new app that enables audio discussions with people who share a similar interest, coming together from around the world. The conversations are not retained and the content disappears each day. There is no distribution of the content either, because of that removal function. Unlike say a written blog which can sit on your website continually adding value to your brand. Also, there is no repurposing capability, because there is only one format and that is not transportable. Your written blog can become a podcast or the script for a video. Nevertheless, you are live, unfiltered and global all at the same time. We are putting our personal and professional brands out there for all to calibrate, evaluate and conclude about. Because it is new, we may be blind to the position we have inadvertently put ourselves in.

What is biggest problem with Clubhouse? It is what people are saying and how they are saying it. Because it is an open mic situation, some people reveal they are babblers. Maybe the isolation factor of so many people working at home is driving this need to just talk, talk, talk. For the listener though, the impression is this person is not smart, clear, concise or considered. Would you want to connect further with them or do business with them? Probably not.

Being highly articulate and thinking on your feet while live is a bigger ask than giving a prepared talk. There is no opportunity to rehearse the content and the delivery. Being a live platform, Clubhouse precludes that facility. When you write something, you may be very credible and authoritative, but in a live environment you don't have anywhere to hide. If you can't get to the point or your point is a bit pointless or mundane, then judgments kick in and your personal brand can take a hit.

There is also no visual aspect to support what you are talking about. In formal presentations you can show things on stage or refer to slides on screen, to help drive the key information you want to get across. Now we are down to just voice, so how expert are you at painting word pictures. Most speakers are scanty in accessing the word picture opportunity when presenting.

Clubhouse also needs storytelling skills. These have to be concise, because otherwise you become too long winded and hog the limelight. Nobody is going to appreciate that and your reputation suffers accordingly. High interest gripping stories packed with vivid word pictures, filled to the gunnels with value would be the way to go. Using the variety in your voice options, including modulation, pauses, and word highlighting, add to the ease of following what you are saying.

How many people with all of these skills have you heard on Clubhouse so far? Hiding amongst or blending in with equally hopeless speakers on Clubhouse isn't the answer. What should we be doing? Make sure your Clubhouse profile is done well. Get a good photo of yourself so the people can see what you look like. Make it a professional look in business battle dress if you're a professional. Or something groovy if you're a pony-tail, black Armani, t-shirt creative.

You have a lot of space to write about yourself. So when people check you out, you want to come across as an expert or authority in your field. We want to connect with experts and winners, not wannabes. Make sure the first three lines are really powerful, concise triumphs of marketing, because that is what appears in the feed.when your name comes up on screen.

Be very cautious about which rooms you participate in. Find your topic of interest, and then see if there are regular gatherings of other folk with a similar proclivity. Listen to the quality of the contributions first and decide if this one is a keeper or not. You might have to spend some time sorting through the dross, but there is no shortcut available as yet. If you can find a group of like-minded people who have something worth listening to, then keep attending.

Eventually the host will invite you to elevate to speaker status. Part of that decision is based on your profile and your regular interest in the content. When you get asked to speak, start strong with a confident voice, be polite and thank the host and the other participants for this chance to talk. Being complimentary of comments from some of the other prior speakers is also a good idea. This shows community, humility, and consideration.

Having mapped out in front of you the key bullet points you want to cover, also set a timer in front of you for three minutes. This makes your contribution punchy, valuable and concise. It will be evaluated highly because of the "please, no fluff " rule. If you find yourself suddenly waffling, then stop speaking and give someone else a chance to contribute. You usually get more than one chance to speak, but don't overdo it. No one wants to listen to some thrusting blowhard, who loves the sound of their own voice. Go into Clubhouse with a plan just as you would with any presentation.

The difference with this medium is you can crash and burn globally, rather than just in front of a limited room of 50 people face to face. It is still your personal and professional brand out there at risk though. So take steps to eliminate or reduce that risk factor.

This pandemic will blow over soon and we can all get back to normal. What will that "normal" look like though in the presenting world. CFOs have pulled their green eye shades down and sharpened their pencils and realised the company can save a truck load of dough by attending business and industry conferences virtually, rather than in person. I am on the Board of the International Dale Carnegie Franchisee Association. Normally (that word again!) we would travel to our Owner's Meeting in some pleasant locale and gather the faithful from around the world in June. We had to do it virtually last year and had the biggest turnout of participants ever and saved a fleet of truckloads of money for the Association and the Franchisees.

Will we do them virtually now? That is a good question and like a lot of organisations, is a hot topic under discussion. Companies won't be so keen to spend big money on internal meetings anymore, because the economics is unassailable. Face to face won't necessarily go to zero and the perfidious online platforms will continue to plague our lives into the future. The term "hybrid" is getting tossed around with expansive abandon, as we explore constructs such as some people online and some in the room arrangements.

How do we present in these situations? There are people in front of us and people beaming in from their homes, workspaces, cafes, the beach or wherever takes their fancy. As the presenter are you in the room or online? Are there multiple presenters, so there is a mix of presenter locations underway? The complex business of presenting is only going to get even more complex.

This is really the Age of Distraction and those beaming into the sessions are completely free to escape from us with no compunction, shame, accountability, or grace. Bosses worried about leading people without line of sight, once the great diaspora to our homes took place. They should be more worried about company meetings being held online and how much engagement is going on with the troops. The bottom line is it is not only not going away, it is about to become more diabolical. Technology will evolve, but the burden on the presenter just escalates exponentially.

After a year of everyone being on Zoom, Teams, WebEx or whatever, do I see people mastering the medium? Sadly, I don't. I still see people who are still placing their laptops on the desk in front of them, rather than raising the height of the camera to eye line. I found the box set of the Harry Potter movies I bought many years ago for my son is the perfect height for elevating the camera and elevating my ability to release audiences from peering up my nostrils.

Do I see people engaging with the camera? Or with the faces arranged about five to 10 centimeters below the camera on the main screen? Everyone is looking at the faces on the screen when they are talking, rather than talking to the camera. Yes, it is perplexing to have that gap. Yes, it is a flaw in the tech, because your brain automatically directs you to the faces rather than to the lens. It means though that when we are in the presenter role, we have to override our brain and keep telling ourselves, keep looking at the lens, keep looking at the lens, keep looking at the lens.

True, we can't see the reactions, but that is not so different to presenting when the stage is flooded with lights and the audience are in a deep pool of darkness in the distance and you can't see anyone's face.

The other basic thing still missing, even after everyone has become a veteran of online meetings, is energy in the presenters. The screen mediums rob us of about 20% of our on-screen presence. So, we have to at least ramp things up by that factor, to just tread water. Given people are easily prone to multitask in the background, we need to lift our energy even further to engage them. Do I see people doing this after 12 months of experience? No, they babble on in a flat dull voice, with no presence and little energy. The presenting role is set to become even more fraught. If we haven't even mastered the basics, how are we going to handle substantially greater complexity? Time is short. "Tech waits for no man". We have to shift our mindset and shift it right now.

As presenters we want to inform, persuade, entertain or motivate our audiences. Most B2B business presentations fall into the "inform" category, because the organisers don't take too kindly to presenters "selling from their platform". They want us to get up there and bring some value to their audience by providing data, experience and insights. Grabbing the mic to flog your widget will see you blacklisted as a presenter for that organisation and through word of mouth, probably many others, as you are considered an idiot sans common sense.

Telling people useful stuff is fine, as far as it goes. However, there is always too much information for the size of the time we have, so we are constantly chopping bits out to make it all fit into forty minutes. The danger here is that we become captured by the elegance of the data, the rarity, the precision or the raw value. Why are we telling the audience this information in the first place? This basic concept starts to erode in our consciousness as we start building slide after slide, packing them to the gunnels with useful information.

Storytelling is a powerful way to convert data into memory and impression. Our listeners will remember data bound up in stories much more easily than a trail of disparate numbers. Stories also help persuade audiences of what we are saying. Also, they tend to recall us as someone they would welcome listening to again. Stories alone won't take us as far as we want to go.

If we want to really reverberate with our audience, we need to get them going much deeper than they would left to their own devices. People enter the venue at a low ebb. They are sitting there passively waiting for the performance to begin. As the speaker we have to lift their energy stocks right up and get them involved in our talk. Audience passivity has to be replaced with engagement. We have the usual toolkit for that. We can get people to voice their agreement with ayes or nays. We can have them raise their hands to signal their opinion to the question. Or we can give them handheld bats with "Yes" on one side and "No" on the other and have them wave these about in response to our question.

Rhetorical questions are good to get people thinking about what they believe and why they believe it. We can switch it from rhetorical to real, by calling on individuals in the crowd whom we know, to speak up. "I see Suzuki san sitting there, who I know is a real expert in this area and we have enjoyed some great debates in the past. So Suzuki san, how do you see this playing out from your perspective?".

There is always a tension in the air when a question is posed. Are we supposed to answer this or is the speaker going to take care of that.? Not knowing which keeps audiences concentrated on what we are saying, which is precisely what we all want.

We can also add pertinent questions after supplying some rich data and key information. Most business talks are laden with apple pie is good and motherhood is admirable statements. We state the unremarkable in our advice and everyone listening just forgets it immediately. If we want to have impact, we have to push the audience further in their thinking. We need to make what we are saying as relevant as possible to that audience.

If we say something bromide like, such as, "culture is very closely linked to team performance" then the audience will be absorbing this and nodding in agreement and forgetting it straight afterward. It is much better to challenge the audience. So, we say the same thing and then we add the bear trap, "Can you say you are fully satisfied that the current culture in your organisation is producing the highest possible levels of team performance?".

Now we have exposed the gap between the actual and ideal situations. We all sign on for the ideal situation of course and agree that it is ideal, but so what? We need to go after the audience members further and push them to action by challenging that big gap we have exposed. We can rub salt into the wound and say, "If you are not completely confident in the current culture delivering out performance, what are the three things you can do today to start fixing that issue?".

We allow a very pregnant pause to engage the audience in self-reflection and deep thought about available solutions. By emphasising three items, it makes the whole process much more concrete. The stage is now set for us to be the 5th Cavalry, coming over the sand dune to the rescue and tell them what we found worked best for us. If we had just given them our three things straight up, the impact would have been negligible. Now they are all ears, because the three things they came up with on their own were all pretty lame.

How we package stories makes all the difference in being considered valuable and memorable as a speaker. Challenging audiences in the right way is also a real skill and it needs careful planning. Time for all of us to get planning.

Year Two of the pandemic puts a lot of stress on organisations. I was watching a television news report last night on an Inn that is closing. This particular Inn is well known in Japan, because it featured in the hit comedy movie series "Otoko wa tsurai yo!" – "It is hard being a man". This "Otoko wa tsurai yo!" series reached 46 movie releases, so it is a legendary franchise here in Japan. The Inn has been running for 231 years and the owner is the 8th generation of his family to run the Inn. The pandemic has finished them off and all the staff are out of a job, through no fault of their own. My wife was crying watching this news report because in Japan longevity, continuity, loyalty, predictability are highly respected. I am sure many people shed a tear to see 231 years of history end. There will be many working in other companies who are also worried whether their firm will suffer a similar fate. This is the time to have that Town Hall to assure everyone the firm will make it out the other side of Covid-19 and there is a plan.

Get them altogether, if you can, with social distancing or do it online if you can't, but do it. Now busy bosses may be inclined to not put in the time preparing for this presentation, thinking it will be okay if they just wing it. If you are a staff member watching the presentation and you feel your President couldn't be bothered to prepare properly and is just winging it, how are you going to feel about the stability of the company or the quality of the plan?

We have a long way to go with this pandemic and there are many tough months ahead. This is the time to assure everyone it is going to be okay, that we can come out the other side of this mess. Why are we going to be okay? That would have to be the central question. It is on that basis of making it clear that the whole presentation should be designed. We need to take this conclusion and prepare two closes, one for the initial end of the presentation and another for the end of the Q&A.

Now that we have the central thesis fixed, what is the evidence that it is true. We need to assemble the data, facts, evidence and proof that we will survive Covid-19. There will be various elements of the business that will drive the outcome so we need to talk about those. We also need to play the Devil's Advocate and explain how we are going to deal with the problems that may arise. We need to present a strong Plan B ready to go.

Finally, we need a powerful opening for the talk. We won't have a problem with getting people's attention, as we may do with a public talk to an unknown audience. The team are all ears to find out what their future holds. What comes out of our mouth has to be reassuring, positive, credible and convincing. This needs very careful design because this is where we grab or lose our audience. If we don't get this right then what follows may be ignored, discounted or silently mocked.

Having done all of this design work we are now ready for the next stage. Now we start assembling the visuals to support our contention, that we are going to be okay. We have to choose only the most powerful pieces of proof, because we have limited time to be able to maintain everyone's full attention. Make sure the visuals are zen like in their clarity and simplicity. Resist the temptation to pile everything on to one slide.

We need to think through what are some of the likely questions which will be asked, to make sure we are ready to handle those well. Trying to think of an answer to a tough question on the fly is not recommended. We can pretty much guess what people will ask and be ready with our answers. We are going to listen to the question, apply a cushion – a short statement that says I heard you, without agreeing or disagreeing with the question. We are buying valuable thinking time now, so that what comes out of our mouth next is considered and articulate, rather than a bumbling series of ums and ahs, as we struggle to compose an answer.

Once we have pulled our talk and the Q&A answers together, we need to allocate the time to rehearse it. We need to know how it sounds when we explain it and how the elements link together to bolster our arguments. We need to measure how long it will take to get through it, to make sure we are keeping on time. We need to practice handling some of those hot questions before we get them for real.

This is probably the most important talk anyone of us will give in our careers and this is why the professional basics for giving presentations are so important. If you are fumbling, if you are struggling, then that is your fault. You should have already completed proper presentation training. The best time for this was yesterday and the second best time is today. When the stakes are high, you have to be able to rise to the occasion. Preparation is everything.

I listen to some podcasts on writing, trying to better educate myself on the craft. I was hopeless at English at school, so the rest of my life has been a remedial fix in that department. Fundamentally, these podcast authors are aimed at fiction writers, rather than non-fiction scribblers like me. A lot of what we do in business on our dog down days may seem like we are living a fiction, when the numbers are not there or the results are dragging their sorry backside along the ground. Despite these self-recriminations about our situation, we are in the non-fiction storytelling business for business purposes, not for winning literatary or public oratory awards. What are some of the elements we need to consider when deciding, "right, time to get a bit more serious about storytelling in my presentations".

Welcome to the one percent club of presenters, who actually incorporate stories into their business presentations. Usually getting into the top one percent in any professional field is diabolically difficult, but here we have an open field in front of us, devoid of worthy competitors. They have all stayed at home. That is the type of field I like play in.

Now are we going to tell a deadly boring or basically dull story? Are we going to lose our audience's attention? Are we driving them to their phones for escape to the internet, to get away from us. Have we forced them to search for something more interesting, better suited to while away their time?

What would make for an interesting business story? We need personalities to come to life in this story, preferably people the audience already knows. These might be executives in the company or people from the rank and file. Something happened and they were involved. We need to describe them in such a way that the listener can visualise that person in their mind's eye, even if they don't know them. We need a location for our central characters in this story. Where are we? Which country, which city, which building? We don't need a riveting recounting for the fans of Architectural Monthly, describing the building in deadly detail, but we need some remarks to set the scene. Are we in a massive skyscraper, are we downtown, are we in a restaurant? What season are we in? Is it blazing summer now or deep snowy winter? Just when are we experiencing this incident? How long ago was it?

We need drama. Yes, I know there is a lot of drama in business and we are up to our armpits in drama on a daily basis, but that is what makes it so appealing. People know about their own dramas well enough, but they are superbly curious about yours. Maybe yours is worse and that puts their regular meltdowns in perspective. Maybe your drama is a dawdle, compared to what they are being served up every day, "you were luuucky" they think. Check out Monty Python's Four Yorkshireman skit, for a humorous masterclass on great one upping someone else's problems.

Something bad is going to happen, unless something else happens instead. This is the fare we get fed from television and movie action dramas all of the time, so we know the format. The damage will be great to the firm, an individual's career, the survival of the business, etc. Even if you have some great news to relate, set it up from some bad news dramatic context. No one really relates to perfect people. We can't identify with those who are blessed with great everything and glide through business, untouched by any blood and gore. We want to hear about the struggles and eventual success. We need a tale of hope, a saga of eventual success, an overcome all odds story of ultimate triumph.

At the end we want a punchline that teaches us something. Give us some guidance on what we should do, genius ideas on what we could do, hints on the possible. The climax has to be soaring, elevating, buoying us up, encouraging us to bear the pain of the present. We all want hope for the future in these grim times. Obviously, the delivery has to match and we need a crescendo call to action at the end, something to have people leaping out of their chairs and punching the air, ready to run through fire. Okay, I got a bit carried away there. I have never seen that happen to date in any business presentation. But we do need a finish that becomes a start for the rest of us, a trigger to go forward, bursting with a lot of heart.

Let's tell our business story so well, that everyone remembers the point we were making and they remember us, as someone they would enjoy to hear from again.

Presentations have become tediously monochrome. The speaker speaks, the audience sit there passively taking it all in. After the speaker's peroration, they get to offer up a few questions for about 10 to 15 minutes or so and then that is the end of it. With the pivot to online presentations, the fabric of the presentation methodology hasn't changed much. We sit there peering at the little boxes on screen, hearing a monotone voice droning on. We listen to enquiries from others submitted beforehand or we may actually get an open mic opportunity to ask our questions directly, although that has been rather rare. We may be directed to the chat to make our question known to the organisers. The formula is basically the same and has been the same since our antediluvian origins.

Why can't speakers vary their presentations to sometimes include more interaction? Why does it always have to be the same format? Obviously, we have to pick our moment to go off piste. The audience composition, the topic of the talk and the organiser's latitude for doing something different, will be factors for consideration. One of the tricky aspects of asking questions of your audience is getting people to contribute and to do so in a way that they can be heard by everyone. The obvious answer is to have a team of your people armed with handheld mics, which they can ferry at warp speed to the individual asking the question. Here is a word to the wise. You should choose who you want to question, but also allow some free styling as well. Events where the guests are seated at round tables are great for this and long rows of schoolroom type seating are not.

We are not switching the presentation to a continuous dialogue with the audience – that is a different type of presentation altogether. I am talking about livening up a standard presentation with more interaction with the audience. The reason you select the people is because it allows you to control the affair more closely. It is also more surgical. You know who is in the room and there may be some people who are very well informed, articulate and confident. That type of individual would be a prime target.

We have five arrows in our question quiver. If we want a yes or no answer then the Closed Question is ideal. It might be regarding a fairly macro question, that would have relevancy for everyone in the audience. "Should Tokyo continue to pursue the holding of the Olympic Games this year?", would be an example. In this case, we can ask the entire audience the question. We can ask for a show of hands as to whether they agree with the point or not? I have been to some events where two sided paddles have been distributed to each seat beforehand, with one side saying "Yes" and the other "No". A simpler method is just ask those who agree to raise their hands, then after that, ask those who disagree to raise theirs. Everyone can clearly see the survey results immediately in real time.

The Open Question cannot be answered by a "Yes" or a "No" and requires an actual answer. "What do you think about ….", "How do you feel about …?". This is why selecting your interlocutor is a good idea. If you select one of the punters at random, you may be putting someone on the spot. Next thing they are spluttering away lost and wholly embarrassed. They will hate you for it forever.

If only you are selecting the people, then there is the suspicion you are using sakura or stooges in the audience, whom you have cunningly planted beforehand. So it is also wise to open the floor up as well to those brave and informed enough to offer their opinion. Don't worry if no one goes for it, you have at least demonstrated your embrace of true democratic ideals of free speech.

If the opportunity presents itself, we can ask a Follow-Up Question to take the discussion down a few more layers for deeper insight. Often people will give a high level answer and it is more interesting to get them to go further with their thinking, experience or detail. We have to be careful this doesn't become a dialogue though between some person in the audience and the presenter. The danger is everyone else is sitting there bored out of their minds and feeling excluded. Probably one of those follow-up questions per talk is about the right distribution.

From within these dialogues, we can take a person's viewpoint and Floodlight it to the entire audience. We can ask those who have had a similar experience to raise their hands. Now we have switched from the micro discussion between two people to a macro level of involvement of the whole audience. This is a good way of overcoming the feeling of exclusion by those listening.

We can also go the other way and Spotlight a question. Someone made a point and we can then call out someone else in the audience for their experiences. We have to be careful we don't ignite a war of words between the members of the audience. Rather than call for their opinion or views or evaluation of the previous speaker's comment, we should ask what has been their experience. This will keep the potential fireworks contained for the most part.

One thing to note is when we ask people for their comment please have patience. Once we ask the question, don't expect an immediate answer. People process these issues at different speeds and so if there is a silence, let it hang there for at least 15 seconds. Don't jump in unless you have to, in order to allow that person to gather their thoughts and respond. If they are obviously lost, then rescue them and give them a question which they can easily answer to save face. We need to select people carefully and if it is not the best selection, then we have to have a Plan B.

Questions have potential to engage with our audience and create more interaction. We must plan it carefully though, because it could lurch into a train wreck. Planning and good preparation are the keys.

Many people break the rules of presenting, usually unknowingly. They have Johari Window style blind spots, where others know they are making mistakes, but they themselves are oblivious and just don't know. This is extremely dangerous, because when you don't know, you keep hardening the arteries of your habit formation. It is diabolically difficult to break out of those habit patterns once formed because you become comfortable with sub-standard performance. On the other hand, breaking them for effect, is very powerful and can be a tremendous differentiator in a world of mainly tedious presentations.

There is an old saying that "to break the rules, you need to know the rules". Presenting is the same. Breaking them unwittingly or in ignorance is not the same thing as a conscious, well informed, professional choice. Let's take some rules and break them on purpose.

The "berserker stage fiend" is the presenter who wears a furrow in the stage as they pound across from left to right, over and over again throughout the presentation. This is normally derived through a combination of heightened nerves and low self-awareness. They are not tuned into how much all of this pointless striding backwards and forwards, is diminishing the power of their message. Moving with purpose is fine, but incognisant hyperactivity is not.

We can however, for effect, suddenly explore dynamic activity on stage to drive home a point. For example, if we were to relate the story of the leadership teams' panic over the nail biting 90% drop in revenues, thanks to lockdowns caused by Covid-19, we could suddenly start pacing furiously across the stage. We mimic and then exaggerate the emotions of that moment. We move on stage in this way with the intention to demonstrate the sheer scale of the dilemma and the psychological impact it was having on the leaders. We wouldn't be doing this throughout the whole speech. That would engender an audience meltdown. For a minute or two, it is a dramatic re-enactment of the fear, frustration and sense of doom's arrival, that everyone was feeling. Together we bring forth a dialogue of distress, fusing it with the frantic on stage pacing movements.

The "galactic black hole" presenter sucks all of the energy out of the room. They completely break contact with their audience. This time the desired effect is one of total despair, all hope lost, no solutions available and facing massive unforgiving defeat. The speaker drops all eye contact, stares at the floor about a meter in front of them and drops their chin onto their throat, so that they are looking downward at an accentuated sharp angle. The shoulders hunch over and the body energy is reduced to a minus number. The voice is frail, catching, weak, whispering but still audible. You definitely need a microphone to pull this one off. With this "in character" rendition of the replay of the horrific experience, we exaggerate for effect. This is not something we should sustain for too long or do too often. It works best as a single, short duration, audience undermine effort.

The "whoop and holler "presenter goes way over the top. Sometimes you will see comedians use this device. They employ the micro psycho rant, at top volume, to drive home the point. This energy rocket differentiates the point being made from all that has gone before. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism holding audience attention has become a zero sum game between the presenter and the punters' hand held phones. Either we keep them with us or they slip into the magnetic field embrace of internet access. For these reasons in telling the story, we might want to imitate on stage, an explosion which took place back at the executive suite. Or it might be the re-enactment of a big client meltdown of epic proportions. We become overly dramatic for dramatic effect.

Yelling at your audience isn't normal behaviour. We have to set it up and then move into character to pull it off. It has to be a crescendo. It peaks then subsides back to normality. But for those few seconds, we are going all out to flag the key message we want to bring to everyone's attention. Voice, gestures and body language are combiningg for the big combust.

Pacing like a frantic madman, ignoring completely or totally yelling at our audience are radical ideas in presenting. These pivots break the rules, but when required, may help us to break through to our audience. It will depend on the context of the topic, the audience and the event, as to whether these big guns would be employed. At least we need to have them in our armoury should we want to call on them. Choosing them with purpose and doing them without intelligence are divergent universes. We know the rules perfectly, but we choose to break them, on our terms and at our pleasure. When fully congruent with the points we are making, they work for us in ways others presenters cannot match in the major messaging stakes.

Bonseki is a Japanese art creating miniature landscapes, on a black tray using white sand, pebbles and small rocks. They are exquisite but temporary. The bonseki can't be preserved and are an original, throw away art form. Speaking to audiences is like that, temporary. Once we down tools and go home, that is the end of it. Our reach can be transient like the bonseki art piece, that gets tossed away upon completed admiration, the lightest of touches that doesn't linger long. Of course we hope that our sparkling witticisms, deeply pondered points and clear messages stay with the audience forever. We want to move them to action, making changes, altering lifetime habits and generally changing their world. In the case of a business audience, we are usually talking to a small group of individuals, so our scope of influence is rather minute. How can we extend the reach of our message?

Video is an obvious technology that allows us to capture our speech live and ourselves in full flight. How often though, do you see speakers videoing their talks? It is not like people are constantly giving public speeches in business. Apart from myself, I don't recall seeing anyone else doing it. You need to tell the audience this is for your own purposes and they will not be in the shot, otherwise you have to get everyone to give you their written permission to be filmed. You may get criticism about being a narcistic lunatic for wanting to capture yourself on video, but the only people who make that type of comment are idiots, so ignore them.

With video, instead of a standard business audience of under fifty people, you can broadcast your message to thousands. The video is also an evergreen capture which allows you to keep using the content for many years. Video has the added benefit that you can cut it up and create snippets to take the content even further. You can have ten videos sprung from the original. This again extends the ways in which you can use the medium. People have different appetites for information, so some may want to feast on the whole speech, whereas others want the digest or just the part on a particular topic of most interest.

Video has two tracks – the video and audio components and these can be separated out. Very easily you can produce the audio record of the talk. Everyone is a firm multi-tasker these days. I sometimes hear people pontificating that you cannot multi-task, blah, blah, blah. What nonsense. Walking, exercising, shopping and listening to audio content are typical multitasking activities. Busy people love audio because it saves them time and allows two things to be done at once. Now your audio content can be accessed by even more people.

Did you know that in August 2019 Google announced that in addition to text search they were employing AI to enable voice search too. This will take a while to roll out but this is the future and audio books have recently overtaken e-book sales. The audio track can become a podcast episode and be on any of the major podcast platforms. Also we can produce a transcript of the talk. There are transcribing technologies that are very good today which can reduce the cost and time of this exercise. Now we have a text version, we can project the value of the content further. It may go out as an email, a social media post or be reworked into a magazine article, or it may become a blog on your website.

Repurposing of content is the name of the game. The video and or the snippets can be sent out to your email list, put up on social media and always sit there on YouTube. The same can be done with the audio track. Now what was a simple, ephemeral interlude in a room of fifty punters, has developed a life of its own and is being pushed out far and wide. The same message and messenger, but a vastly different impact and duration. If our object is to influence, then we need to make sure we are supporting the effort to give the speech with the tools available to maximise the results.

This requires some planning and some expense. But as I mentioned, we are not leaping to our feet every month giving a public speech to a business audience. This is something we would be lucky to do two or three times a year. When you take that into account and consider how much we can leverage what we are doing, we get a lot more bang for our buck. We are going to give the talk anyway, so all the preparation is the same, yet the influence factor can be so much grander.

Rushing out the door to get to your talk and arriving in the nick of time is bad, bad, bad. You have cut it very fine. Breathless, you greet the hosts, who are looking suitably pale as they thought they had an event with no guest speaker. The shambles has started and now the odds are it will continue into your talk, as you battle with the tech. The laptop decides to throw a tantrum and not behave. The slide clicker won't cooperate and the microphone has developed a bad case of static. You become flustered and your equilibrium has been thoroughly turfed out the window. I have done all of these things, fortunately not all in one, at the same event but definitely accumulatively.

The worst delusion ever was when I had this genius thought that I could create my talk on the plane, flying from Osaka to Sydney overnight and then go straight to the venue from the airport. Man, I was so efficient too, arriving just in time for the talk. Mercifully, it was an internal peer presentation, so no clients were exposed to this total unmitigated disaster. I was cranky too because of no sleep on the plane. I turned into a bear, not a cuddly Koala bear, more a Grizzly bear in the Q&A, when someone had the temerity to question my thesis.

I learnt my lesson the hard way. Getting there early has so many advantages, so we need to prioritise that over the many competing tasks we are facing. It is a choice we can make and should make. Wouldn't aimlessly chatting with punters before the talk be a waste of my valuable time, you may be thinking? No. Arriving an hour before the gun goes off is advised. You have plenty of time now to stiff arm the tech into submission and make it behave. Check the microphone is working properly. Confirm that we can we get the slide projector to talk to the laptop?

If the organisers have breezily told you don't worry about lugging your laptop around and to just bring the USB, then don't listen. For some unknown reason, the slide layout can change depending on the type of laptop being used. That was news to me until it happened. Fortunately, I arrived early, connected all the gizmos and bingo the layout had gone totally crazy. I reworked the entire deck, while sweating profusely and got it done with one minute to spare. Whew, I was a wreck and we hadn't even started. But I was able to do it. Imagine if I hadn't gotten there early enough.

Getting there early also harks back to why you are doing this talk at all. You have plenty of other things to do with your valuable time. Presumably you are there to win converts to your message, fans for your firm and build your professional network, image and profile. Not too many speakers are there under duress. They may have been roped into giving this talk because they owe someone or feel some giri or obligation. That can happen, but it is extremely rare for most speakers.

Getting there early allows you time to work the room as the audience members are traipsing in. You are charm personified as you smile, exchange cards, chat, thank them for attending and create that all important positive first impression. The key here is to let them do all the talking. Your turn will come, so let them tell you why they are here for the talk, what interests them about the topic etc. In this way, you pick up valuable data on the topic and on the zeitgeist in the room. You are also winning over fans for your presentation before you even give it. It is rare that anyone can withstand this type of charm offensive before the talk, then suddenly turn into a Frankenstein monster at Q&A time and start savaging you. That scrum of the great unwashed are those who turned up late and you didn't get a chance to smooze them.

Don't be in hurry to bolt out of the room after you have finished either. Allow the time to spend chatting with those who have a big enough interest to stay back and engage with you. They will want to exchange business cards and build their network, so make time for them to do that. There will be those with a burning interest in the subject who want to ask a question of you directly and privately. There will be business groupies who like to meet big shots and by definition, being the speaker, you are a big shot.

You will have gotten a good sense of how things went by your observations of people's faces as you were in delivery mode, plus from the nature of the questions at Q&A. After the talk is over, you can also get a good gauge by how many people want to hang around in a long line to meet you. Don't rush off. Instead, allocate the time to be gracious with people who are also allocating their time to talk with you. The charm offensive has to go all the way, so don't try and be "efficient" and truncate it.

I have also found that if you are high energy speaker, a powerful and passionate presenter then the whole thing is draining. Also, if you are introvert like me, all of those people are wearing you out. I find being charming is really tiring. So don't forget to build in a bit of recovery time for yourself, rather than rushing straight back into the fray. Find a quite coffee shop and take a few moments to regroup and quietly reflect on how it went. This introspection is important and even better, take some notes and keep the record for review before the next event.