One consistent issue which often pops up within companies requesting our training is achieving persuasion power with colleagues, bosses and subordinates. Being unable to convince others to follow your requests, ideas and suggestions is highly frustrating. Often the issue is how the topic is approached. In this “time is money”, no patience, miniscule concentration span, twenty four/seven scramble, people drive you to get to your point. If you are giving a presentation the big boss might bark out “Story, get to the point”. We are taught at business school to start with the punchline and get that into the Executive Summary, right at the front of the document. That is fine except it is ineffectual when presenting in person.
The punchline may be an excellent idea – “let’s increase the marketing budget by $1 million to fund campaigns to coincide with the end of Covid”. The problem though is that the punchline is naked and has no protection attached. As soon as we offer a statement, we suddenly transform our neutral audience into a raving band of doubters, sceptics, naysayers and critics. Fair enough too, because we didn’t land the punchline properly. Comedians don’t start with the punchline. They set it up, they build the mental pictures for us so we can see the scene in our mind’s eye. They plug in plenty of context, add interesting characters, nominate a location and secure the build up in a temporal frame for us.
When the punchline is unveiled it is congruent with the set up, makes a lot of sense and we laugh. Why on earth serious, well educated business people would imagine they can just throw the punchline out there, with no context, background, proof, evidence, data and statistics is a bit of a mystery. But they do just that and then get cut to ribbons by the baying crowd of non-believers.
Our communication skills have to be good enough that briefly, we can build the basis for the punchline. If we do a good job, the members of the audience are all sitting there thinking “we should fund a campaign to coincide with the end of Covid”, before we say anything about it. The lead up has been so well constructed that given the background, the best way forward occurs to everyone as the most obvious thing needed.
We have to keep it brief though. Storytelling is a big part of this, but these are “short stories”, not War and Peace tome like equivalents. If we labour the point or go too long with the background, some grumpy attendees are bound to tell us “get to the point”. So we need to have enough context, supported with tons of evidence, which draws out the needed next step. When we explain what comes next, everyone feels they already thought of that answer by themselves. This is guaranteed to get agreement to the proposal.
The way we get to the structure of the talk is to start with the action we want everyone to agree to. Having isolated out the action we investigate why do we think this? What have we read, heard, seen, experienced something, which tells us this is the best solution. There must be a reason for what we are recommending. All we need to do is capture that information and add in the people they know, a place they can see in their mind, put it all in a time frame and definitely add in data, evidence and proof to back up what we are saying.
We start with the background and then we reveal the punchline but we don’t stop there. Recency is powerful, so we want to control what is the last thing our audience hears. We top it all off with stating the benefit of the action. The action/ benefit component must be very short. There needs to be one clear action, so that everyone can understand what we need to do. Also, while there may be many benefits, we only want to mention the most powerful one. If we keep piling on the benefits we begin to dilute their power with too much detail. Clarity must be the driving ambition here. If we put it into mathematical terms then 90% of the time we speak should be devoted to providing the richest context possible and 5% each for the action and benefit.
If we are doing a good job then by the time we blurt out the punchline the audience will be thinking “that is old hat, I knew that, that is obvious”. If we can engender that reaction then we have done our job well. Brief but powerful, clear and convincing - these should be our objectives.
