How to present to keep your audience’s attention | Mark Robinson | TEDxEindhoven

imagine it's Wednesday the 28th of August 1963 and we're in the United States of America specifically Washington DC now you are a primarily black or africanamerican audience and you're both angry and excited you're angry because people still discriminate against you based purely on your race there are signs up saying whites only no colors but you're also excited because today you're going to hear your hero the great Dr Martin Luther King come to speak to you so imagine you see him walk on stage and as he walks on a screen goes on behind him and he

says these Immortal words good afternoon everyone um I want to talk to you today about the fact that uh I have have a dream that uh one that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its Creed we hold these truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal and I've got some more slides on that later two that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of Brotherhood and I'm going

to show you that table later on in my presentation for those of you taking notes it'll be on slide 87 three uh we have to wait a few moments for this animation I got a bit carried away with PowerPoint there's so many features three that one day even the state of Mississippi a state sweltering with the heat of Injustice you can do all kinds of things on PowerPoint look at that get words going right across the screen oppression that one took me an hour and a half it's totally worth it we'll be transformed into an

oasis of freedom and Justice so let's March on Washington so why did I do this because I want to show you that even if your presentation has great content and this is widely regarded as one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century even with great content you can destroy your message simply by the way you present it and you can kill it Stone Dead with PowerPoint and yet this is how most of the presentations I see in the business world and particularly technical presentations happen I see very smart people standing in front of other

very smart people with just slides of text and often just reading it why do we do that isn't there a better way well yes there is and it starts by ditching PowerPoint now I have to tell tell you that I'm by no means a natural speaker in fact the very first presentation I ever gave was a complete disaster I was 13 years old at school in England here in the Netherlands of course it's different uh my daughter was just six years old when she gave her first presentation and she chose to speak about England so

she took some things with her to show her class she took uh a large British flag she took a mug with the Union Jack printed on the side and she took me along so that her school friends would know what an Englishman looks like now because my wife trains in presentation skills she taught us some techniques and was practicing with her in the runup to it and as a result her presentation went really well now compare that to mine when I was a 13-year-old first of all I was nervous who here would admit to being

nervous if you had to speak in front of such a large group that's at least 90% of you it's natural to be nervous well actually I was more than nervous I was terrified I was shaking and I went completely white maybe the topic I chose didn't help because I chose to speak on the locked SR71 Blackbird aircraft it must have meant something to me at the time there's worse things for 13-year-old boys to be interested in so I gave my talk and after a couple minutes when I finished the teacher said to me well that

wasn't very long can you you speak some more so I had to speak spontaneously in front of 30 unimpressed teenagers about the bloody Blackbird and so I left there thinking I would never be able to speak in front of a group now since then I've leared a few techniques which enable me to have more confidence when I speak in front of a large group and I want to share the two most important techniques with you today but before I do that let's agree what the problem is we know that there are many boring presentations in

the business world but why are they boring what's happening when you stand in front of a group or anyone stands in front of a group they have to keep audien's attention for a certain period of time now what happens naturally with any audiences they'll give you their attention at the start but just naturally people's attention will drop unless you're reading slides to them and then it just nose Dives and it doesn't matter what you're saying how good your content is cuz when it gets to hear nobody's listening anymore so what we need as presenters is

a way that when people's attention starts to drop we can pull it back again and that not just once but multiple times throughout the presentation how can we do that well I said I'll tell you two techniques that I use and the first one is hidden in this graph it's questions I ask questions throughout my presentation have you noticed you see how easy it is I could ask questions like this all the time and I would keep your attention wouldn't I but it would be annoying after a while wouldn't it see question I that's one

way I ask questions I ask question then uh I turn a normal sentence into a question just turn a normal sentence into a question format another way I can ask questions is when I ask a question and then answer it myself for example just now I said why are so many presentations boring and that gives me the opportunity to answer it it's a way to introduce the next topic and the Third Way is when I ask a question but then I expect an answer from you so just now I said who here would be uh

nervous if you had to speak in front of a large group now I'm not conducting market research I already know n the answer it's going to be at least 90% of people the only reason I asked a question is to keep your attention you see question marks are shaped like Hooks and all I'm doing is hooking into your brain and drawing your attention back to me as the presenter and great orators really great orators use tricks and techniques to keep people's attention one of the greatest presenters of all time one the greatest speakers perhaps the

greatest was a man who lived 2,000 years ago and he had crowds following him for days I'm talking about Jesus he used questions to keep people's attention questions like what are people saying about me who do people say that I am and who do you think that I am and by doing that he was keeping people's attention and getting them thinking but he's not best known for that what's Jesus best known for in terms of speeches he's most famous for the second technique which is telling stories now do you see how I use Jesus then

as a bridge from one topic to the next you might have heard of some of his stories stories like the Good Samaritan or the prodical Sun and these are stories which exist in our culture even 2,000 years later you see stories are memorable you can go much further back for example to Greek mythology stories like the wooden horse of of Troy and who has heard of the expression Trojan Horse right just take a look around now you see the trick even works when you know about it that was my own trojan horse in this presentation

so stories are powerful because they keep people's attention and they are memorable and because they are memorable memorable you can use them to help your audience remember things for example a few moments ago I told you two stories the first was about my daughter when she was at school just shout out the answer what topic did she speak about England that's right and when I told you about when I was a very nervous 13-year-old what topic did I speak about Blackbird aircraft you see this is completely useless information but because but because I put it

in story format you remember it it stays in your mind so stories are very powerful to keep people's attention and to help them remember details now whenever I tell audiences or people about the power of Storytelling I always get the same objection and I heard it recently when I was speaking at a company that hires software staff and all their software staff need to go through something called the software introduction course and I was speaking to the presenters of this course and I was telling them about storytelling and one of them raised this objection I

heard all the time he said well listen I can't tell stories I've got a technical presentation and before I could respond two other people spoke up one of them said well my topic is software architecture and I tell the story of how we came to have the good architecture we have today and then someone else said well my topic is software version control which sounds like the most dull topic on planet Earth and he said and I tell a story of what happened when we didn't have good version control that we released version one to

the customer we later found out it had a bug so we released version two to fix that def effect and when we released version 3 with lots of new features that first bug reoccurred and I left there thinking if you can tell stories on a software introduction course you can tell stories anywhere the problem isn't that we can't it's just that we're not used to it it's like a muscle we've never used it's like Kiana Reeves in The Matrix okay so here's a spoiler alert when when comes out of the Matrix he realizes that he's

never used his muscles before and he has to learn over weeks and months to use them and that's the same with storytelling at the start it's hard but with practice you'll be including them naturally in your presentations so how can you use these two techniques I'm going to show you now a very simple format which if you use will make your presentations more clear more focused and much more memorable you simply ask and answer four questions the first question is what is the problem what is the problem that you're addressing with your presentation whether it's

in your company your department your school wherever here's a great opportunity to tell your first story story of how you encounter this problem and then you can tell us why it's important to you and while you say this you can also say why it's important for us because if there's one question that every audience member has on their mind during every presentation it's this what's in it for me you're there talking all this time taking a half an hour or an hour of my life I'm never going to get back why should I listen to

you always tell people why they should listen that's why for example I just said using this simple format your presentations will become more clear more focused and much more memorable always tell people where they should listen to you second question what's the cause why did this problem occur here's a great opportunity to tell your second story a story of how you got to the bottom of this problem and really investigated it and found out what's going on third question what are possible solutions and here's an opportunity to tell multiple stories you say we tried out

solution a and that completely failed because and then we tried out solution B and tell the story of how that seemed to work better and so on and then finally what's your chosen solution or recommended solution depending on the content context and if you've already implemented this you can tell the story of how it's affecting your original problem how it's solving it and this whole format forms a story a story of how you found a problem how you investigated it how you tried out different solutions and how you came to the format that you're recommending

the solution you're recommending and this simple format works for different kinds of presentations it works for management presentations it works for technical presentations and to my surprise it even works for Ted Talks because I didn't realize this until right at the end of my preparation but my talk actually follows this format because I started with the problem boring presentations with Martin Luther King trying to work out PowerPoint then I told you the cause we don't know how to keep an audience's attention then I told you possible solutions questions and storytelling and I've got one format

which includes the lot so apparently I'm following my own advice which is a happy coincidence I'm a software engineer and in the software world we call this eating your own dog food which is why they don't let us write slogans [Music] anymore so why am I telling you this it's because I also have a dream a dream based on a conviction that all of you are unique and all of you have a unique message within you but sometimes you don't know how to share that message so it stays locked inside and that's a tragedy because

if you can share that message everybody wins you win because you get a spotlight put on yourself and your ideas and you gain the kind of self-confidence you can only get through effective public public speaking and the world can win we can win because we get to hear and potentially Implement your ideas so I have a dream that one day all of you will be able to stand up and speak out that unique true message within you in a way that keeps your audience's attention from the first word to the last and in so doing

you'll all live up to Ted's Creed to share ideas worth spreading thank you that was great so I have a question yes it's a fast learner yes yeah what do you do after giving how do you leave the stage after giving a great presentation how you give a presentation it's always good if you give a presentation it's always good to have a planted question someone who comes on with a question that you already know about so when you want when you finish your presentation uh the best way to finish is just to say thank you

and then everybody knows that it's finished but if you are in a situation like this where you're expecting Applause you can encourage that I did four things in the very last second did anyone spot what it was I said I said thank you very much I took a little bow I clapped my hands together and then I took a step back and in that vacuum you all started applauding so that's probably a good place to end thank you very much