Pasedena, January 31,1993. Michael Jackson performs at the Super Bowl. He suddenly pops out of the smoke on to the stage and strikes a dramatic pose facing right. He holds that pose for one minute and eight seconds, not moving a muscle. He makes one change and looks left. He holds that same pose for another 20 seconds before he takes off his sunglasses and then starts singing and dancing. Imagine a whole football stadium with nearly one hundred thousand fans there and a viewing audience of 91 million. You have to possess tremendous guts and self-belief to hold that monster crowd in the palm of your hand and stand there motionless for over a minute.
This is an extreme case and none of us would dream of walking up on to a stage in front of a business audience and just standing there motionless and not speaking for over a minute. It would be considered weird and we would lose credibility with the crowd.
What could we do though to build some anticipation for the things we are saying? Often, when we are nervous we speak too fast and too much, so there are no breaks to allow the audience members to digest what we are saying. It is like the rolling breakers in the surf, each one crashing over the top of the previous one. We crush our audience with our information, as it hits them in waves and overwhelms them.
I saw a demonstration of great anticipation many years ago at a business presentation. The speaker was not on the front of the stage when he was announced. There was a pause of around twenty seconds after that and then when we heard his voice he was nowhere in sight. The reason for that was he was at the back of the hall behind us and he started speaking out of our vision. People were craning their necks and looking around for the source of the voice. Slowly, he made his way to the front and continued his talk. It was quite effective to build some anticipation and to differentiate him from just about every other talk we had attended up the that point. It also worked in a business context and wasn’t considered weird or strange.
Usually, when the speaker is announced they head for their laptop on stage and start playing around with it, to get the slides up. Once the slide deck is visible they start their presentation. No anticipation going on here, only annoyance on the part of the audience for the delay in getting proceedings underway.
What if we switched things up a bit and made sure we were not the one doing the mechanics on the slide deck? We can get someone else to organise that for us and make our way straight to the center of the stage. In this way we are creating our first impression as a professional. Rather than starting immediately, we could hold the audience in anticipation of what is to come. Not for over a minute, like Michael Jackson, but 15 seconds is quite a long time to hold them there before we start.
When we do this, our opening has to be a blockbuster because we have built the expectation by driving up the tension from the beginning. A very mundane greeting such as thanking the organisers for the chance to talk will not suffice. We need an opening that is so powerful, that the audience is now fully concentrated on us and are eager to hear more of what we have to say. It could be a quote, a statistic, and fact or a story. Whatever it is, we have to make sure it really connects with the audience. The worst thing to do is build up audience expectations and then let bring everyone down.
Doom and gloom is a great content piece and superior to hope and a bright future. We are more moved by fear than we are by gain, so appealing to everyone’s risk averse nature is a good place to begin. For example, we hold the crowd for 15 seconds than unleash, “In the next ten years the very fabric of Japanese society is going to be torn and shredded”. At about the ten second mark, they are wondering what is going on and why we are not starting straightaway. That pattern interrupt followed by such a brazen headline, will have the whole room hungry for the explanation.
It depends of course on the theme of your talk, but look for something seriously gloomy and scary to kick things off. That “fabric of Japanese society” start could lead into a talk about the breakdown of cultural harmony here as poorly educated foreigners from third world countries flood in to fill the jobs Japanese can’t or won’t do. We could talk about consequent rising crime, the spread of drugs, intra-foreigner tribal violence and a whole host of other scary topics.
During our talk, we can slightly elongate our pauses for effect. Great comedians are known for their comic timing. They have memorised their script and their talent is in the art of the release of the punchline. We have to take a page out of their book and look for the pause, before we lower the boom with our release of the various punchlines, we have arranged for the topic. Some major ramification or danger sign or new development or whatever we are focusing on for the presentation.
Generally speaking, we need to be hitting some high point every five minutes in the talk to keep the audience with us. That means being able to use pauses and hitting key words or phrases like a maestro. The pause creates the vacuum for the key word or phrase to fill. If there is a pause both before and after, it really lift the power of the word or phrase we have chosen. Those variations in tone and strength is what creates the interest on the part of the audience, to keep listening to us. A monotone delivery or a single constant voice strength delivery are too boring to keep the crowd with us.
We can learn from Michael Jackson’s guts and adapt the idea to our business world. We grab everyone’s attention and we keep the delivery in a business context which only adds to our personal and professional brands.
