Common Ground

Low Expectations

Neat post from Seth Godin about word of mouth springing from expectations. 

People's expectations of any kind of corporate communication - especially the "bog standard" presentation - are SO low that your attempt to raise the bar could literally make your career.

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: