Getting a Squirrel to Focus on Presentations

Don't Just Inform, Transform Your Audience

Patricia B. Scott

• Publisher: Uhmms
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780986124839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Réunions et présentations

Are you tired of getting that glazed over look from your audience when you are giving your slide presentation? They don't seem interested, or they try to skip ahead in the handout, or worse, they cut your time short. Do they seem easily distracted and not really engaged? This book provides a simple framework and toolbox to apply to any presentation. Often, you don't get as much time to prepare a presentation as you would like. The Walnut Presentation Strategy TM provides a handy shortcut to guide you to the most important elements of a successful presentation. W - "What's in it for me?", A - Align your perspective, L - Limit your scope, N - Navigate, U - Unleash your creativity, T - Take action.

Chapter One: What’s in it for me?

Jerry Seinfeld told the Wall Street Journal, “There is no such thing as an attention span. People have infinite attention if you are entertaining them.”¹⁸

I will modify that quote a bit, since most of us are not as entertaining as Jerry Seinfeld. There is no such thing as an attention span. People have infinite attention if you are providing relevant information. If it is all about them, they love it.

As you begin to prepare your slide presentation, one strategic piece is the most important: relevance! Audience engagement is all about finding out how to link your slides to how the message will benefit the audience.

Remember our squirrel analogy? The squirrel is able to focus for such a long time on the walnut because the walnut is so needed by the squirrel. It is essential for survival. If you can determine what your audience needs and then fulfill that need, you will have their attention. You have to make sure that what you choose to put on your slides is relevant to the needs of your audience. If you can do that, they will focus only on you.

Your audience can really only focus on one thing at a time, so your slides have a lot of competition. It is not that your audience is being lazy. It’s that their brains are hardwired to quickly decide whether the information you are presenting is relevant and worth focusing on, or whether it is just noise to be ignored. That’s why it’s easy for something they think is more important to get their limited focus.

Our brains have the ability to efficiently filter information. It has to, or we would quickly be overwhelmed by the information coming into us from all five senses. The brain has to decide what to focus on and what not to. The part of the brain that is the filter, the RAS (Reticular Activating System), works by determining relevance.

Shift around in your seat for a moment.

Don’t exert yourself, just move around a bit.

Now that you are reading this and focusing on it, do you feel your clothes? Do you feel the shoes on your feet or your pants on your legs or your shirtsleeves on your arm? Before you read this, did you feel the same sensation?

Odds are that unless your clothes are tight, pinching or poking, you didn’t notice them a moment ago. Why? Were you numb a moment ago? Of course not. The level of sensation you are now experiencing is felt 100% of the time! So why don’t we feel our clothes all the time? It is a matter of relevance. Your brain doesn’t think your clothes are important right now, so the brain ignores those signals.

It would be impossible to take in information from all five senses with equal weight all the time. So our brain has to filter and judge, so that only the most relevant information gets scrutinized and becomes the focus. It is the same thing with messages. Relevant messages gain focus; irrelevant ones become noise.

This phenomenon is very well known and in scientific circles is referred to as selective attention, or inattentional blindness. You might be familiar with the “gorilla experiments” where the audience is asked to focus on something specific (like counting the number of times someone jumps a rope or passes a basketball); during the exercise, unexpectedly but completely obviously, a gorilla walks across the screen. You would think that everybody would notice that gorilla, but very few do.

In an early study, well cited in academic circles,¹⁹ researchers showed participants two superimposed video images of two teams of guys — one team wearing white shirts and the other black — each passing a basketball. Some of the study participants were asked to focus only on the guys in black shirts and count how many times the basketball was passed. After a while, the image of a woman with a large white umbrella was superimposed over the scene. Not only did she walk diagonally across the scene, but she actually “passed through” one of the players, and with the precise timing of the images, it seemed as if at one point she actually “kicked” the basketball.

Those participants who casually watched the tape and were free to focus on anything they wanted inevitably noticed the umbrella woman, and virtually all who saw her smiled, laughed or made spontaneous comments once she entered the screen.

Of those participants who were instructed to focus their attention only on counting, only 21% of them noticed her. They were so busy focusing that they became “blind” to everything else. Those in this group who did notice the umbrella woman were prone to miscount and miss the main target.

Because of the RAS, the brain can really only focus on one thing at a time, and the most relevant thing wins.

It stands to reason, then, that the concept of “multitasking” must be a myth. We know that it is not physically possible for the brain to fully focus on two things at the same time. When you feel as if you are multi-tasking, you are actually switching back and forth between tasks very rapidly. While we feel we are being extraordinarily productive, cognitive scientist David Meyers asserts that multi-tasking is “highly inefficient and can be dangerous to your health”²⁰ by causing the brain to try to resolve too many conflicting demands. This is why driving while distracted can have such devastating consequences. If you are talking or texting on a cell phone while driving, one or the other must suffer.

This need to multi-task can also give you chronic stress and actually slows you down. Multi-tasking is a myth, and when we try to do it, we become 10 IQ points dumber and 40% less efficient.²¹

Many of my clients think that multi-tasking is just another skill to be learned and that if they do it frequently enough, they will do it better than the statistics above indicate. Unfortunately, that is a false assumption.

A study of 262 Stanford students in 2009 revealed that those who most frequently multi-task performed the worst in switching among tasks, filtering information that is not relevant and using their working memory efficiently. Even worse, when these frequent multitaskers were given only a single task to focus on, they did poorly on that as well. Multi-tasking just doesn’t work.²²

If we need our audience to truly focus on what we want to say, we know that it must be relevant to them. How do we figure out what is relevant to them? Consider asking yourself these types of questions, based on an article written for the Harvard Management Communication Letter by Mary Munter.²³ The answers will help uncover your statement of relevance for the audience.

What motivates them?

Who are they?

What do they care about?

What do they know?

How much background vs. new information do they need?

What do they feel?

How interested are they in the message?

What is their bias?

Where do they stand on the issue?

How much information do they need? (not “how much can I provide?”)

Relevance is the only thing that will get the RAS to focus on your presentation and not let other temptations distract your audience. This statement of relevance is often called a WIIFM statement. High relevance will help the audience stay with you and engage with your message, and will make your presentations more powerful. Presenting is all about the audience.

Remember also that you need to be concise. Get to the most important thing! Elevator pitches — the words you use to sell your idea to someone in the time it would take for an elevator ride — used to be the short version of what you want. It would force you to get to the point. Now even the elevator pitch is too long. The days of the hundred-slide “comprehensive” decks are over. Here’s what we want to know: What is the bottom line? What does it mean to me? Aim to be concise and immediately relevant, so that you can break through audience distraction in the first eight seconds.

Remember that the first thing you say (in the first eight seconds) is the most important part of the entire presentation. If you are not relevant, you are noise, and the audience will not listen to the rest of your message.

Think about your slides. Is the WIIFM — or “What’s in it for me?” — the first thing you say? Is the WIIFM specific to your audience? For example, if you present to the operations team, the WIIFM might be efficiency. But if you present the same data to the sales team, the WIIFM might be profit. The audience will dictate the WIIFM.

Recently, one of my clients was preparing for her talk to the sales force at her company’s annual plan of action meeting. She asked me to help her with her slides. She had decided that she wanted to begin her 20-minute talk with a 10-minute overview on how hard her team had worked and all the obstacles they had had to overcome to bring this new tool to the sales force. I had to remind her that her audience probably didn’t care about her process or struggle. They simply wanted to learn how to use this new tool to increase their business. She wanted the focus to be on her, but the audience always wants the focus to be on them.

So if you want to have your message heard, it is your responsibility to help the audience focus. Don’t display data that the audience doesn’t need. Don’t talk about yourself or your process unless the audience needs to know about that. The presentation must be relevant to the audience. The fact that audiences have short attention spans makes this even harder. Relevance — “What’s in it for me?” — is the key to audience engagement.

Chapter Two: Align your perspective

Successful communication occurs when not just facts, but meaning is shared.

If all you do is present facts to your audience, without telling them how to interpret them, you will never find a shared meaning. So if your perspective is not closely aligned with the audience’s perspective, a shared understanding simply is not possible. If you merely present facts with no sense of context or organization, even if your audience completely understands the facts, they would leave with many questions: So what? Why is this important? What am I supposed to do with this information? How does this relate to the challenge we are currently facing?

This alignment of perspectives is called a frame. Very early in your presentation, you must frame your data and arguments so that you can lead your audience toward your conclusion. As a communicator, it is your job to lead the audience. The frame helps provide context to the facts and makes it easier for the audience to understand where you are going.

In communication, a context-free information exchange rarely ...