What's Your Message

by Cam Barber

  Key point about uncertainty

  The anxiety you feel before and during a presentation is a direct reflection of the amount of uncertainty you carry. The secret is to deal with the *causes* of anxiety, rather than trying to put band aids on the symptoms.

  PRINCIPLE 2: MESSAGE TRANSFER IS YOUR MEASURE OF SUCCESS

  Have you seen the movie Pulp Fiction? If you have, you might recognise the character named Butch, a boxer (played by Bruce Willis) who has double-crossed a crime boss, who is now trying to kill him.

  He meets up with his girlfriend, who, following Butch’s instructions, has packed their belongings to leave the country and make their escape. While looking through the possessions his girlfriend grabbed from their apartment, Butch notices his watch is not there.

  Earlier in the movie it was convincingly demonstrated (in a hilarious scene with Christopher Walken) that this watch, handed down from his grandfather, to his father, to him, was the most valuable thing he owned. Money could replace everything else, but nothing could replace the watch - and his girlfriend had forgotten it.

  Your listeners can’t read minds

  Butch is furious. He’s a boxer and appears aggressive. He throws the television across the room, screams at his girlfriend, and then, just when you expect him to get more violent, he stops, swallows his anger and says:

  “No, it’s not your fault … it’s my fault. I didn’t communicate to you that the watch is the one thing that was really important. How would you know that? You’re not a mind reader.”

  Butch had asked for 10 things to be done, and 9 of them were done perfectly. So his girlfriend could argue she got it 90% right. But this measure fails to reflect the communicator’s intention.

  As he drives back into mortal danger to get his watch, Butch punches the steering wheel and shouts to himself in frustration; “There was only ONE THING I needed you to remember – the other stuff was unimportant”. (Butch did finally get his watch back, but only after risking his life and leaving a trail of destruction.)

  Whether we like it or not, the person delivering the message has the responsibility for what the listener receives. What should Butch’s message have been? Perhaps something like,

  “Whatever you do, don’t forget the watch!”

  Maybe it should have been repeated to ensure its importance was conveyed. But the message was lost in all the other instructions he gave his girlfriend.

  You might point out that his girlfriend should have paid more attention. Maybe. But that won’t change the result. As leaders, managers and team members, if we don’t make ourselves accountable for successful message transfer, we lose. Blaming the audience when they miss the point doesn’t get us the result we need. Just an excuse to justify our communication failure.

  Most presenters don’t know their message

  If there is one thing to be absolutely certain about every time you give a presentation, it’s that message transfer is your measure of success. Nothing else matters if you fail to get your message across.

  Not your gestures;

  Not your slides;

  Not the speed of your delivery;

  Not your tone of voice or use of pauses;

  Not how you stand or how much eye contact you have;

  Not the way you look.

  While all of these have some impact on the effectiveness of your presentation, you can get away with being imperfect if you have a clear and relevant message.

  If this seems obvious (especially since I hammered this idea in the first half of this book), think about the presentations you have seen. Did the message stand out so clearly from the details that you wanted to repeat it to others?

  In my experience I would say that most speakers don’t know their message. Over the years I have asked thousands of people, just before they are about to speak: “In one or two sentences, what is the message you want to leave with your audience? Give me the exact words.” Most are unsure, or respond without real clarity. The message is usually in the presentation somewhere, just lost in the detail.

  This is a great pity, because they are smart people - intelligent, talented, and have great ideas to share. They just haven’t worked out how to share them - and this stifles their effectiveness.

  So, what’s your message?

  Key point

  Messages are the doorway to your ideas. They bring information to life. Yet most speakers don’t kown what their message is! The main reason is they’re too close to the subject. We call this the Closeness Problem (and that’s the next principle…).

  PRINCIPLE 3: WE ALL HAVE THE CLOSENESS PROBLEM

  Has someone ever given you directions and used these words ‘…you can’t miss it!’ (we all have).

  But can you miss it? Usually, the answer is yes. Easily and often.

  This disconnect between the giver and the receiver of directions occurs because the giver has a clear and complete picture of all the surroundings, yet their words don’t convey their full understanding. So there is a gap between what the giver knows and what the receiver hears.

  This classic cartoon from 1976 shows a cop, who lives in a town, giving directions to someone from out of town. So, he’s a subject matter expert, speaking to someone who doesn’t know as much about the subject. This is a bit like a business presentation, where a subject matter expert is speaking to an audience that craves clear information. When you speak in public, aren’t you usually the ‘subject matter expert’ speaking to those who are interested in the subject? So, as you read the story below, see if you notice the similarity to many business presentations.

  Imagine this. You’re in a new town and need to find the cafe you’ve agreed to meet your friend at. You seek help from a local police officer.

  “Go straight.” He points. “At the lights, turn left. Walk until you see a red building. Go right, walk a little way and the cafe is just around the corner. You can’t miss it.”

  You thank him and head off, taking the first left at the lights. Heading down the next street, though, you realise there are a number of buildings that could be called ‘red’. You go right after the reddest building.

  As you look ahead, you see a couple of lanes intersecting with this road, and cafes on, or close to, every corner. Uhm, which corner was he referring to? (Think about it, whenever you’re standing on a corner, there’s usually another corner close by, isn’t there?). And what did he mean by ‘just around’ the corner - 5 steps around the corner or 50 steps? Mmm, maybe you can miss it after all.

  The closer we are to an issue, the harder it becomes to see the perspective of someone else

  The police officer has the closeness problem. Actually, we all have the Closeness Problem. That is; the closer we are to an issue - the more experience we have, the more we care, the more research we’ve done about it - the harder it becomes to see the perspective of someone else.

  In the police officer’s mind, a bunch of details were ‘obvious’ to him but that turned out to be not so obvious to you. He delivered his message with what he believed was clarity … but it wasn’t clear to his audience. Now imagine we asked him how his ‘presentation’ went, based on the traditional performance view of public speaking.

  “It was perfect. Flawless!”, he might say. “I spoke with confidence, didn’t forget anything, had good eye contact, no ums, no mistakes, had open gestures and strong body language.”

  But, none of those traditional measures help our out-of-town mate reach his destination. So, what do we care about…? Message transfer!

  Lack of awareness about the closeness problem is one of the biggest problems with speeches and presentations today. It’s the reason most speakers don’t deliver a vivid message to their audience. They think it’s clear, but it’s not. They assume their listeners will get the obvious point, but they don’t.

  Acknowledgement: T and W Fleet

  * The famous ‘Tree Swing Pictures’ (above) have been around since the 1960s and now come in several variations. They illustrate the c
hallenges of seeing the world from just one perspective.

  The expert’s dilemma

  The closeness problem is one of the biggest hurdles we face as we try to construct that holy grail: a clear, easily recalled, transferable message. Whether it’s our local knowledge, the expertise we have around our job, or the perspective we have from our position in the organisation, we all have a blind spot that makes it very difficult to separate what we know from what others know. We can’t ‘see the wood for the trees’.

  Put another way, the longer you have known something, the more difficult it becomes to remember what it was like not to know it. We need to be better at looking at the world from the audience’s perspective.

  Look at the problems this causes. According to a Louis Harris study, ‘less than a third of employees say that management provides clear goals and directions’. However, in a Forum Corporation survey of Fortune 500 executives, 82 per cent believed that ‘everyone who needs to know’ understood their corporate strategy.

  In other words, leaders think that everyone understands their message, but they don’t.

  “They’re all idiots”

  I did some consulting work for a sales director who was complaining about the performance of his merchandising team. We were chatting about the idea of ‘once we know something, we forget what it was like not to know it’. Then his face changed. The penny dropped.

  “I now realise that we just assume our merchandisers will get it,” he said. “We forget that they don’t have the training, experience or exposure to the product that we do. So when they don’t get it, we call them lazy. The reality is that the fault lies with us. We haven’t made it clear enough for them.”

  The great thing about this was that by seeing the world from the listener’s perspective, the sales director was well on the way to solving his problem. It was now simple to design training based on his new perspective.

  Your ability to craft a vivid message depends a lot on learning to step into the shoes of others. Oh, and by the way, if you think the closeness problem doesn’t affect you, then you probably have it worse than most. The reality is that misunderstandings are normal. That’s right, normal.

  All words are vague

  There is an interesting little book called Why Didn’t You Say That in the First Place? by Richard Heyman. He outlines a field of research called ethnomethodology – the study of people’s methods for making sense of each other using language.

  The key finding of their research is that misunderstandings are normal. Commonplace. We should expect them. If you don’t expect ambiguous communication and have the skills to manage it, your life will be frustrating, and you won’t even recognise the cause.

  For example, in a fist thumping speech, a CEO urges his staff to improve ‘service’.

  He says, “This company is built on service and will continue to thrive if we all focus on service. Is that clear? Now, I think everyone knows what they need to do to improve service, so go out and do it!”

  What happened next? No one was quite sure what to do, but the heads of marketing and sales started arguing for more money to add people and technology, thinking they had approval from the CEO to spend like drunken sailors, because that’s the way they perceived they would improve ‘service’. But the CEO didn’t want to add staff or increase budget, he thought he was simply asking for a change in attitude. This led to misunderstandings, wasted effort and ultimately great frustration.

  Almost any word can be interpreted multiple ways - ‘Leadership’; ‘Quality’; ‘Productivity’; ‘Value’. All of these can have different meanings across different departments and up and down the levels of a single company, let alone across different organisations.

  How much do you love jargon?

  Then of course there is jargon. Consider the following line from a radio executive pitching to an advertising agency:

  “Get on board with us because there is great synergy with your market, and our creative and resources will give you great cut through.”

  The words ‘synergy’, ‘creative’ and ‘cut-through’ are jargon. By asking a couple of clarifying questions his message became:

  “By committing to this six month proposal, you will reach more of your potential market than with any other media. Our creative team has devised a campaign to position your product as the number one choice to your tightly defined audience.”

  This statement now uses more specific language where there is less chance the words would be misinterpreted. Consider the difference between the words ‘creative’ and ‘creative team’. The first term, ‘creative’ could mean 1) the ads we produce, 2) the team that produces them, 3) our general creative vibe.

  However, ‘creative team’ can only mean one thing, so it sticks in the mind of the audience.

  Can you identify a term used in your industry or organisation, that could be interpreted in multiple ways? Or a word that you couldn’t really explain that well if someone said ‘What does ‘X’ really mean?’.

  Become a great translator

  While on holiday a few years ago I met Bill, who made his fortune building aquariums - big, commercial aquariums, worth millions of dollars, of the type you see at hotels in Dubai. When I asked him what his role was he said, “Basically, I’m a translator”.

  He shared a story about a meeting with a client and one of his technical people. The client had a vision for their aquarium - it would look fantastic, which would draw in the crowds. The technician knew the limitations of what could be done. Bill knew his job in the meeting would probably be to translate. The meeting went along these lines:

  Client: “We want the sharks swimming in a tube over the top of the customers. This will look spectacular.”

  Technician: “There are limitations to what can be done. It’s an issue of fluid dynamics. There needs to be sufficient water volume …” (he goes on with more technical stuff).

  Client: “Hey, we have $25 million to spend. We want the sharks in a tube.”

  Technician: “But the technical limitations, the fluid dynamics…”

  Client: “Just do it!”

  Bill: “If we build it like that the sharks will die.”

  Client: Pause. “Oh. I see… What do you recommend?”

  This story is a classic case of the closeness problem. The technician could only see the technical perspective, while the client could only see the marketing perspective. Think about the value Bill added by being a translator.

  This is the value you can add as a presenter. Look into the mind of your listener and ‘translate’ the information so they see the value you see - to ensure they get it.

  Key points

  We all have the closeness problem. To overcome it, you need to see yourself as someone who will translate that information into clear, tight messages. How?

  • By imagining yourself in the audience’s shoes;

  • By removing any terminology that the audience might find vague;

  • By making sure your message is not lost in a sea of data.

  PRINCIPLE 4: YOUR NATURAL STYLE IS THE RIGHT STYLE

  You might be thinking; with all this talk about messages, aren’t we forgetting about connecting with the audience? Don’t I need to engage my listeners all the way through the talk? Good question. Yes, that is important. And relaxing into your natural style is a great way to connect with them.

  About 20 years ago, I spoke at my first corporate conference. I was working for the biggest radio broadcaster in the country in a sales and marketing role. I had only been with them for six months and saw this as a chance to make a mark. It was a big deal to me.

  I had two talks to give. The first was the formal presentation, focusing on sales and marketing strategies. The second talk was ‘off the agenda’ – I’d shared an idea with my manager some weeks earlier and she suggested I explain the idea to the group at the conference.

  Just before the conference a few of us were offered the chance to attend a presentation skills
training course. I eagerly raised my hand. I wanted to be a confident and compelling speaker and I wasn’t there yet!

  Anxiety increased after the training!

  Unfortunately the course did more harm than good. I became more self conscious and more nervous after the course.

  As the conference got closer I diligently prepared my formal talk, trying to incorporate all the public speaking tips I had been taught. I worked hard. I practiced over and over, trying to control the gestures that the course told me were ‘way too frequent’. I worked hard to make sure I followed the presentation rules ‘just right’.

  In spite of the huge amount of effort I put in, my speech didn’t go well. As soon as I stood up I felt stiff, uncomfortable and inadequate. My anxiety levels started off high and got worse. I felt tremendous pressure to deliver something dramatic, yet I constantly felt I was forgetting some of the tips, that I wasn’t following the rules perfectly. The harder I tried and the more effort I squandered to ‘add impact’ the more disconnected I felt. It was a train wreck.

  Trying to remember all the rules - what to do with my hands, how fast to speak, how often to pause, and so on, cluttered my mind. I felt pulled in different directions. With all the mental noise going on in my head, I just felt lost. It was exhausting. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but people weren’t even polite. They were clearly bored. I came away from that first presentation beating myself up about all the things I’d done wrong.