Too often, our communications miss the mark. Bland, unengaging messaging, (often wrapped up in a highly forgettable Powerpoint) not only fails to stick in an audience’s mind, it fails to move and motivate people to take action. And that’s the real problem. Whether it’s an external customer or an internal audience, it’s painful to finally get to ‘make our pitch’… only to fail to secure the action we want.
But that’s the reality with most of today’s communication. Survey data consistently shows that about 75% of business presentations are rated as mediocre or worse by their audiences. Even more troubling, in our ongoing survey of sales organizations at Oratium we find that while companies on average rate the quality of the solutions they sell at 8.1 (on a 1-10 scale), they rate their sales messaging at a mere 3.9. It’s tough to get customer meetings these days. It’s tragic to deliver a 3.9/10 message when you finally do.
At both the individual and institutional level, we often have a great story, but we just don’t know how to tell it well.
What’s going wrong? While it’s true that defaulting to building mind-numbing PowerPoint decks does play its part, PowerPoint is not the problem. The real reason is deeper and far more interesting. It’s all about the brain. Simply stated, the human brain is wired in very particular ways with respect to how it wants and needs to consume information. When communication aligns with how the brain works, it succeeds. And when it does not, it fails. It’s as simple as that.
For practical purposes, there are six key ‘rules’ relating to how the brain consumes information, and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that the typical slide presentation tends to violate all six. All those years you’ve suspected that bulleted slides CAN’T be the right answer…? You were right.
So, what are the most significant aspects of brain wiring that relate to communication, and more importantly, what must we do in response? Let me lay out just three.
1) It’s all about Ideas
The single most important – and transformative – thing you need to understand is that the brain operates at the level of ideas. Your brain is ‘reductionist’: if you walk out of any meeting or presentation and later explain it to a friend, you won’t cite much data or detail. You will unconsciously and instinctively boil it down – reduce it – to a small number of ideas. That fact is simply critical to effective communication, because what it reveals is that to be effective, the communicator must also operate at the level of ideas, giving the audience exactly what their brains want to consume, and will remember.
Hence: the ultimate goal of your communication is this: Powerfully Land a Small Number of Big Ideas. (And, yes, THAT is the big idea.)
How do you do it? Well, first you have to identify your big ideas, which feels incredibly hard, but which is relatively straightforward when you know the key. The key lies in thinking through the action you want from your audience. Let me explain. In human beings, action is preceded by belief. We take action when we believe certain things about that action. (Example – Think about your most recent car purchase. What were the beliefs that lead you to that particular car?)
So, if action is preceded by belief, then the most important and powerful question in communication design becomes: “What does my audience need to believe in order to take the action I want them to take?” Answer that question and you have your big ideas.
2) Simplicity Rules
Almost all presenters wildly overestimate the capacity of their audience’s brains. As amazing as the human brain is, it allocates surprisingly little of its horsepower to processing new information. In fact, if you imagine that your brain has a total processing power equivalent to the U.S. economy, about $17 trillion, you may be surprised to learn that only about three dollars are allocated to “working memory”, the part of the brain that deals with new information. This is why “fire-hosing” never works, because as good as your motives might be for packing in too much, when you overload people’s mental circuits, they simply shut down and switch off. It happens all the time. I’m sure you’ve been there.
The answer here is that you must intentionally work to keep your argument within your audience’s mental bandwidth, and there are two ways to do this. The first is to manage down the quantity of your material, which you do by reversing your normal behavior. Namely, instead of packing in everything you can in the name of completeness, you must pull out everything you can in the name of simplicity, while still leaving your argument intact. How? Ask the question: “does my audience really need to know this?” If they don’t, take it out. Be ruthless. I love the quote from French writer Antoine de St Exupery. “The designer has achieved perfection not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” That’s it!
Beyond quantity, you must also reduce complexity. Most communicators work within their own field of expertise, but when the audience doesn’t share that expertise, it’s incredibly easy to confuse them with ‘insider’ terms and irritating acronyms. It happens all the time, and it’s a big deal, because people do not act on what they don’t understand. The solution here is to conduct an intentional simplification round. Take one tour through your material looking only for complexity. You won’t spot it if you are proofing or editing.
3) Comprehension lies in a Logical Narrative.
Finally, think about any book you’ve read. Chapter 6 made sense because chapter 5 created the context for it. But if you had read the same book with the chapters out of sequence, it would have made no sense at all… despite being exactly the same content. This is one of the chief causes of communications failure. Without a logical structure there’s no context for each unfolding idea, and context creates comprehension and memorability.
Curiously, the ancient world provides the remedy for this mistake. Greek writers would often structure their arguments based on answering the “Natural Question” that their readers might have. (Hemingway did the same thing) I.e., if you assume that each point in your argument will raise some thought or question in the audience’s mind, if you answer those questions as they arise, you cannot help but create an audience-centric narrative flow.
We recently helped a CEO with an important “change in strategy” presentation to her internal team. The original design placed the company’s new organizational structure late in the presentation. However, we helped her to see that the instant she told her employees that “We have a new strategy” the question in the room would be “Yikes – do I have a job?” Hence the new organizational chart was brought in much earlier to answer that burning question, and a far better structure for the presentation was created.
You should do exactly the same: look at each point you are making and ask, “what question does this raise?”…. and then answer that question. Do that and you will create an elegant, audience-centric structure.
So, focus on big ideas, strip everything superfluous away, and create a logical narrative flow. These three rules are emblematic of the bigger idea. Build communication that aligns with the way the brain works. I guarantee, you will be happy with the results.
