Recency is a simple concept to understand. It basically means that we are all simple beings and we tend to remember best what we heard last. Given this is so simple, you would think that presenters would be masters of the wrap up. Not so. I am always amazed at how often speakers allow the final impression to crash and burn through neglect. What do I mean by neglect? They are missing in action when it came to the planning of the final impression and they are also underperforming in the delivery of the last section of their talk. So often the voice mouthing the words of the last sentence just trails off and dies a slow death.
If we understand the importance of recency and the critical nature of determining our final impression, then we will carefully plan for it. Often, the speakers are trying to stuff too much material into the time allotted, so you see that pathetic mad rush at the end. They start apologising and begin skipping through the slide deck like they have been snorting cocaine, because they have grossly miscalculated the time. As audience members we feel totally short changed and cheated. Some of those final slides looked very valuable and we see we are not going to get what we came here for, because the speaker was so inept.
They manage to complete the catastrophe by allowing their final sentence to just trail off into oblivion, as they suck all of the energy out of the room, dribbling out the finish. The end is a massive anti-climax and the whole presentation lands with a massive thud, as it fails on so many levels.
The planning process has one hugely significant contingent and that is the accompanying rehearsal time. This is when you discover you have too much material for the time you have been given to deliver the presentation. It is painful to cuts bits off the flesh of the corpus of the talk, but you need to be surgical about it and trim, trim, trim until you get down to presenting only the richest residue.
The planning process also allows you to work out what you need to say after the end of the Q&A. Remember, the Q&A is a street fight – there are no rules. Anyone in the audience can take the whole talk off topic with their dubious question. Suddenly the recency is at risk of being disconnected from what you have been talking about and the final impression is focused on their question. Everyone has forgotten all about the main body of your talk. Your message has potentially been supplanted by something irrelevant to the topic.
We need to have decided our key message right at the start of the planning and that becomes the frame around which we build the talk conjuring up the most powerful and relevant evidence. In the last five minutes we do a couple of things. We reiterate our key message and we do this slowly, being in no haste, because we have rehearsed and we have allowed enough time to finish in a relaxed and professional manner. We take our time and we again try to connect this message to the audience and how it will help them. We try to draw out its relevancy for their work. We might be throwing down a challenge to the audience to institute what we are suggesting and attempting to get them to take specific actions after this talk.
We are purposely slowing down the pace, talking slowly and employing pregnant pauses to allow the listeners to digest and contemplate what we are saying. Contrast this with the mad rush through the slide deck by the disorganised speaker who is in a mad panic
to run faster off the cliff, because they didn’t plan and didn’t rehearse. Instead, we are relaxed and in perfect control, as we lull the audience into a psychologically safe place, before we lower the boom.
As we get to the completion of the talk, we start to inject energy, conviction and power into our voice and body. We start to build to a crescendo, combining body language, eye contact, voice and gestures. This is a combination of all the tools available to us, which accentuates our message and our final impression. Our audience buys belief, confidence and commitment and our job is to make sure this is the final impression they have of us. None of this is left to chance. We plan it, we rehearse it and then we deliver it with a flawless execution. It doesn’t come across as canned though and instead seems a spontaneous eruption of passion for our message. Start with the intention to finish like this and your talks will be so much more memorable than others. Your personal and professional brands will soar while others will just disappear from collective memory. People will remember you and will remain impressed well after the event has finished.
