Most business speeches are very definitive. We did this, and it worked for us and you could do the same and also get similar results. Usually, we are asked to speak because we have had good results and have rich experience in our industry. The hosts believe that others will be interested in hearing what we did, so that they can take lessons from it and they will be able to pull a crowd. The problem is today we are in the Age Of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.
If what we are offering doesn’t sound valuable or sounds dubious, then the audience loses interest immediately and lunge for their phones to hit the internet and escape from us. Once upon a time, listeners would sit there politely and absorb what we were saying and wait to reach judgement. Now we have to win them over from the very start.
They are also more sceptical than in times past and are constantly on the prowl for fake news. No wonder though, given the barrage of scams and fake information hammering us every day. I constantly get fake emails trying to get me to click on something that will allow them to take over my computer and clean out my bank account. The fakes have become more and more sophisticated and sometimes I have trouble telling if they are real or not. I have had to ring my bank or my credit card company to check that what I have received is legit or not. They are now that realistic. Little surprise people are on guard.
This combination of short attention spans and cynicism about what we are telling them makes it very much harder to advance our arguments when we are speaking. One approach is to use a couple of simple tools. One is the rule of three and the other is recency.
Basically, audiences cannot take in more than three points and remember them, so to prove our arguement, we should assemble the strongest three points we can come up with. The way to use these three points, though, is not to just list them and explain what they mean. This Age of Cynicism demands that we offer more balance. We should list the pros and cons associated with each point we are making. So as we go through them, we offer the pluses and minuses for each point.
I remember when I was an undergraduate student doing Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, we had a guest lecturer come in to talk about the causes of the Battle Of Sekigahara. Tokugawa Ieyasu won that battle and set up a dynasty which lasted for hundreds of years and it was a major turning point in Japanese history.
He started by going through a long list of the usual explanations for the events leading to the battle, and it was all very convincing. I was sitting there in the front row busily making notes. He then proceeded to pull down each of these standard arguments and replace them with his own interpretation of events. It was a powerful intellectual example of providing balance and therefore becoming much more convincing than if he had just rattled off what he thought explained the situation.
We should do the same with the points we are making in our talk and provide balance. This invites the audience to observe that we are not being dogmatic and that we are considered and looking for fairness in our argument. It is very disarming. We don’t present a static target to be attacked because we are demonstrating our intellectual flexibility.
Additionally, the recency phenomena is a key contributor to being believed. We all tend to remember best what we heard last. So, of the three points, the strongest recommendation should come last. We do the same thing with the pros and cons for each point. Finally, we offer the last point as our strongest recommendation for the audience. They heard this last, so it has the impact of being the most memorable argument and therefore more likely to be accepted.
Is running it last cheating? No, we are just adapting our order to best suit human psychology to have the best shot at convincing the listeners of our argument. We have shown balance by going through the pluses and minuses and we just order the points in a way which is the most convincing and effective.
So next time you give a talk, consider how you can introduce more balance in the argument you are making. If you do, the chances are much higher that you will be believed and well regarded as an expert in your field. This will advance your professional and personal brands.
