One Minute Pause no 20

I did a course in comedy last year, conquering my biggest fear. It is taught by a bloke called Logan Murray, and it’s very good.

Dedicate 6 weekends and you learn how to do 5 minutes of stand-up in front of a live audience (http://snipurl.com/com_course).

Logan had a saying that he used to help take the pressure off us as we were preparing for the big night:

“Try and relax - remember that on this planet we are only all just a bunch of monkeys walking around and telling each other stories.”

It worked to take the pressure off: it’s hard to get too nervous when things are taken to that base level.

Maybe you could remind yourself of this next time you’re going into a presentation.

But enough monkey business - the real point of today’s OMP is that introducing the human factor into your presentations is a powerful way to increase audience interest.

I find a lot of corporate presentations these days very sterile.

Here’s an example featuring David from a smallish food manufacturer, from last month’s Open Workshop:

“Morning all - I’m here to talk today about why we must all cut spending by 15% in the next three months. The presentation will go for 30 minutes - save your questions till the end please.”

Hardly riveting stuff.

We played around with his presentation, and injected more of the human factor:

“Hi everyone. You’re probably thinking - here’s another presentation by management telling us to live on carrots and water for the next 90 days. You’re probably sick of hearing this type of presentation. Well, I’m not too thrilled about it either - it’s not a part of the job I dreamed about in the sandpit as a 6 year old.”

“So, I’m going to show you the numbers for 30 seconds, and then I’m going to ask you for your ideas about where the business is going and how to smooth out the current bumps so I never have to do this presentation again. The best idea wins a piece of carrot cake.”

David agreed that the second approach was much more human, and he later fed back to me that everyone bought into his next presentation and came up with some good ideas, not just to cut costs but to achieve a higher revenue margin on some product lines.

Best of all he sensed that everyone was in it together, rather than him telling the same tired story.

The human factor is often overlooked in corporate presentations, but I’m plumping for its return.

We all love getting an insight into other people’s lives.

We all like to know that the presentation is delivered by a real, live person rather than a faceless corporate cog.

We like to know a bit about what makes you tick, a snippet of your life that we didn’t know.

So, to increase audience interest and retention of your message, you could try in your next presentation to inject a little bit of your human factor: a hint of your daily life, a bit about what you find interesting or a short story explaining your unique take on things.

This will make the other monkeys much more likely to warm to you and give your presentations a higher chance of success.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 8:29 am and is filed under One Minute Pause. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.