How To Present To Keep Your Audience’s Attention: Mark Robinson (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Mark Robinson’s talk titled “How To Present To Keep Your Audience’s Attention” at TEDxEindhoven 2016 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Imagine, it’s Wednesday, the 28th of August, 1963, and we’re in the United States of America, specifically Washington, D.C. Now you are a primarily black or African American audience, and you’re both angry and excited. You’re angry because people still discriminate against you based purely on your race. There are signs up saying “whites only, no colours.”

But you’re also excited, because today you’re going to hear your hero, the great Dr. Martin Luther King, come to speak to you. So imagine, you see him walk on stage, and as he walks on, a screen goes on behind him, and he says these immortal words. “Good afternoon, everyone.”

“I want to talk to you today about the fact that I have a dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. And I’ve got some more slides on that later. Two, that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood, and I’m going to show you that table later on in my presentation. For those of you taking notes, it will be on slide 87.”

“Three, we have to wait a few moments for this animation. I got a bit carried away with PowerPoint. There’s so many features. Three, that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of…”

PowerPoint’s Pitfalls

“Injustice.” You can do all kinds of things with PowerPoint. Look at that.

You get words going right across the screen.

“Oppression.” That one took me an hour and a half. It’s totally worth it. “We’ll be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice, so let’s march on Washington.”

So why did I do this? Because I want to show you that even if your presentation has great content, and this is widely regarded as one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century, even with great content you can destroy your message simply by the way you present it, and you can kill it stone dead with PowerPoint. And yet this is how most of the presentations I see in the business world, and particularly technical presentations, happen.

I see very smart people standing in front of other very smart people. With just slides of text, and often just reading it. Why do we do that? Isn’t there a better way? Well, yes there is, and it starts by ditching PowerPoint.

Overcoming Public Speaking Nerves

Now I have to tell you that I’m by no means a natural speaker. In fact, the very first presentation I ever gave was a complete disaster. I was 13 years old at school in England. Here in the Netherlands, of course, it’s different.

My daughter was just six years old when she gave her first presentation, and she chose to speak about England, so she took some things with her to show her class. She took a large British flag, she took a mug with the Union Jack printed on the side, and she took me along. So that her school friends would know what an Englishman looks like.

Now, because my wife trains in presentation skills, she taught her some techniques, and was practicing with her in the run-up to it, and as a result, her presentation went really well. Now compare that to mine when I was a 13-year-old. First of all, I was nervous. Who here would admit to being nervous if you had to speak in front of such a large group? That’s at least 90% of you.

It’s natural to be nervous. Well, actually, I was more than nervous. I was terrified. I was shaking, and I went completely white. Maybe the topic I chose didn’t help, because I chose to speak on the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird aircraft.

Learning from Failure

It must have meant something to me at the time. There’s worse things for 13-year-old boys to be interested in. So I gave my talk, and after a couple of minutes, when I finished, the teacher said to me, “Well, that wasn’t very long.”

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“Can you speak some more?” So I had to speak spontaneously in front of 30 unimpressed teenagers about the bloody Blackbird. And so I left there thinking I would never be able to speak in front of a group. And since then, I’ve learned a few techniques which enable me to have more confidence when I speak in front of a large group.

And I want to share the two most important techniques with you today. But before I do that, let’s agree what the problem is. We know that there are many boring presentations in the business world. But why are they boring?

What’s happening? When you stand in front of a group, or anyone stands in front of a group, they have to keep the audience’s attention for a certain period of time. Now, what happens naturally with any audience is they’ll give you their attention at the start, but just naturally, people’s attention will drop.

Engaging the Audience with Questions

Unless you’re reading slides of them, and then it just nosedives. And it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, how good your content is, because when it gets to here, nobody’s listening anymore. So what we need as presenters is a way that when people’s attention starts to drop, we can pull it back again.

And that’s not just once, but multiple times throughout the presentation. How can we do that? Well, I said I’ll tell you two techniques that I use, and the first one is hidden in this graph. It’s questions.

I ask questions throughout my presentation. Have you noticed? You see how easy it is? I could ask questions like this all the time, and I would keep your attention, wouldn’t I?

But it would be annoying after a while, wouldn’t it? That’s one way I ask questions. I ask questions, and I turn a normal sentence into a question. I turn a normal sentence into a question format.

Different Question Techniques

Another way I can ask questions is when I ask a question and then answer it myself. For example, just now I said, “Why are so many presentations boring?” And that gives me the opportunity to answer it. It’s a way to introduce the next topic.

And the third way is when I ask a question, but then I expect an answer from you. So just now I said, “Who here would be nervous if you had to speak in front of a large group?” Now, I’m not conducting market research.

I already know the answer. It’s going to be at least 90% of people. The only reason I ask the question is to keep your attention. You see, question marks are shaped like hooks, and all I’m doing is hooking into your brain and drawing your attention back to me as the presenter.

Jesus: The Master Orator

And great orators, really great orators, use tricks and techniques to keep people’s attention. One of the greatest presenters of all time, one of the greatest speakers, perhaps the greatest, was a man who lived 2,000 years ago, and he had crowds following him for days. I’m talking about Jesus. He used questions to keep people’s attention. Questions like, “What are people saying about me? Who do people say that I am? And who do you think that I am?”

And by doing that, he was keeping people’s attention and getting them thinking. But he’s not best known for that. What’s Jesus best known for in terms of his speeches? He’s most famous for the second technique, which is telling stories.

Now, do you see how I use Jesus, then, as a bridge from one topic to the next? You may have heard of some of his stories, stories like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son. And these are stories which exist in our culture, even 2,000 years later.

The Power of Stories

You see, stories are memorable. You can go much further back, for example, to Greek mythology, stories like the Wooden Horse of Troy. And who’s heard of the expression “Trojan Horse”? All right, just take a look around now.

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You see, the trick even works when you know about it. That was my own Trojan Horse in this presentation. So, stories are powerful because they keep people’s attention and they are memorable. And because they are memorable, you can use them to help your audience remember things.

For example, a few moments ago, I told you two stories. The first was about my daughter when she was at school. Just shout out the answer. What topic did she speak about? England, that’s right.

And when I told you about when I was a very nervous 13-year-old, what topic did I speak about? Blackbird aircraft. You see, this is completely useless information. But because I put it in story format, you remember it. It stays in your mind.

Overcoming the “I Can’t Tell Stories” Objection

So, stories are very powerful to keep people’s attention and to help them remember details. Now, whenever I tell audiences or people about the power of storytelling, I always get the same objection. And I heard it recently when I was speaking at a company that hires software staff.

And all their software staff need to go through something called the software introduction course. And I was speaking to the presenters of this course and I was telling them about storytelling. And one of them raised this objection I heard all the time. He said, “well, listen, I can’t tell stories.”

“I’ve got a technical presentation.” And before I could respond, two other people spoke up. One of them said, “well, my topic is software architecture. And I tell the story of how we came to have the good architecture we have today.”

And then someone else said, “well, my topic is software version control.” Which sounds like the most dull topic on planet Earth. And he said, “and I tell the story of what happened. We didn’t have good version control.”

Storytelling in Technical Presentations

“We released version 1 to the customer. We later found out it had a bug. So we released version 2 to fix that defect. And when we released version 3 with lots of new features, that first bug reoccurred.”

And I left there thinking, if you can tell stories on a software introduction course, you can tell stories anywhere. The problem isn’t that we can’t. It’s just that we’re not used to it. It’s like a muscle we’ve never used.

It’s like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Okay, so here’s a spoiler alert. When Neo comes out of The Matrix, he realizes that he’s never used his muscles before and he has to learn over weeks and months to use them. And that’s the same with storytelling.

At the start, it’s hard. But with practice, you’ll be including them naturally in your presentations. So how can you use these two techniques? I’m going to show you now a very simple format.

A Simple Presentation Format

Which, if you use, will make your presentations more clear, more focused, and much more memorable. You simply ask and answer four questions. The first question is, “what is the problem?” What is the problem that you’re addressing with your presentation?

Whether it’s in your company, your department, your school, wherever. Here’s a great opportunity to tell your first story. A story of how you encountered this problem. And then you can tell us why it’s important to you.

And while you say this, you can also say why it’s important for us. Because if there’s one question that every audience member has on their mind during every presentation, it’s this. “What’s in it for me?” You’re there talking all this time, taking half an hour or an hour of my life I’m never going to get back.

Why should I listen to you? Always tell people why they should listen. That’s why, for example, I just said, “using this simple format, your presentations will become more clear, more focused, and much more memorable.” Always tell people why they should listen to you.

Investigating the Problem

Second question. “What’s the cause?” Why did this problem occur? Here’s a great opportunity to tell your second story.

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A story of how you got to the bottom of this problem and really investigated it and found out what’s going on. Third question. “What are possible solutions?” And here’s an opportunity to tell multiple stories.

You say, “we tried out solution A, and that completely failed because…” and then “we tried out solution B,” and tell the story of how that seemed to work better, and so on. And then finally, “what’s your chosen?” Solution.

Or recommended solution, depending on the context. And if you’ve already implemented this, you can tell the story of how it’s affecting your original problem, how it’s solving it. And this whole format forms a story. A story of how you found a problem, how you investigated it, how you tried out different solutions, and how you came to the format that you’re recommending, And this simple format works for different kinds of presentations.

Applying the Format

It works for management presentations, it works for technical presentations, and to my surprise, it even works for TED Talks. Because I didn’t realize this until right at the end of my preparation, but my talk actually follows this format. Because I started with the problem, boring presentations, with Martin Luther King trying to work out PowerPoint, then I told you the cause, we don’t know how to keep an audience’s attention, then I told you possible solutions, questions, and storytelling, and now I’ve got one format which includes the lot.

So apparently I’m following my own advice, which is a happy coincidence. I’m a software engineer, and in the software world we call this “eating your own dog food,” which is why they don’t let us write slogans anymore. So why am I telling you this? It’s because I also have a dream.

A dream based on a conviction that all of you are unique, and all of you have a unique message within you. But sometimes you don’t know how to share that message, so it stays locked inside, and that’s a tragedy. Because if you can share that message, everybody wins.

Unlocking Your Unique Message

You win because you get a spotlight put on yourself and your ideas, and you gain the kind of self-confidence you can only get through effective public speaking. And the world can win, we can win, because we get to hear and potentially implement your ideas. So I have a dream that one day all of you will be able to stand up and speak out that unique, true message within you, in a way that keeps your audience’s attention from the first word to the last.

And in so doing, you’ll all live up to TED’s creed to “share ideas worth spreading.” Thank you. Thank you. That was great. So, I have a question. Yes. He’s a fast learner. Yes.

What do you do after giving, how do you leave the stage after giving a great presentation like that? If you give a presentation, it’s always good. If you give a presentation, it’s always good to have a planted question, someone who comes on with a question that you already know about.

Leaving the Stage with Style

So when you finish your presentation, the best way to finish is just to say “thank you,” and then everybody knows that it’s finished. But if you are in a situation like this, where you’re expecting applause, you can encourage that. I did four things in the very last second. I forgot what it was.

I said, “thank you very much.” I took a little bow. I clapped my hands together. And then I took a step back.

And in that vacuum, you all started applauding. So, that’s probably a good place to end. Thank you very much.