Needle in a haystack

The audience will be drinking data from a firehose.  The savvy presenter recognizes this peril as an opportunity.

To capture attention—do something that stands out from the environment.  The opposite of getting attention is camouflage. Being attention-getting is not a quality; it is a contrast.

Trying too hard

Lots of people will be trying to stand out, and they’ll make the mistake of telling jokes, displaying cartoons on the screen, or trying to connect with the audience by telling stories about themselves.

Don’t do it.  The audience is content driven, results oriented, and time pressed.  They have limited space in short term memory.  Eliminate all extraneous information.

Not setting the scene

In an effort to get to the point, many speakers will forget to remind the audience of the back story—the space in which their molecule competes, and what the unmet medical needs are.

Your drug is the hero of a story.  It is stepping onto a stage to overcome important obstacles and bring health to sick people.  Set the scene so your drug looks like it has an important job to do.

Offending the experts

Analysts and other savvy investors may curl their toes in agony if you spend too much time on the big picture.

Set the scene quickly, then summarize in a fair and balanced way the achievements of your compound before you walk them through the data.

Using the word, “Robust”

The term “robust” has become a meaningless buzzword, especially in a scientific context.  Be the first presenter to dispense with using it.

Instead, make a statement that is meaningful, such as, “The data are promising,” or, “The data suggest…”

Going down rabbit holes

If you leave information on your slides that you don’t plan to talk about, you are inviting savvy listeners to drag you down into the weeds, which will choke your message with irrelevancies.

Unless there is an ethical reason that the audience needs to know it, keep it off the slide if it does not support your argument.

Not making an argument

There are some presenters who believe their job is to deliver information.  This approach leaves too much room for the audience to draw their own conclusions.

A good scientific presenter should make an argument for the quality of the study, the validity of the data, and the implications of his conclusions.

Blowing Q&A

It’s easier to make a slick presentation than it is to handle a room full of skeptical and insightful questions.

Brainstorm with colleagues to come up with all possible lines of inquiry, and practice responding to the most penetrating and damaging assaults.

Lack of conviction

Finally, your delivery stands guard over the material.  Great data poorly delivered at a high stakes venue is a huge waste of resources.

Rehearse, and where you falter, alter.

I am still holding my ground against Ford Harding.  We have been debating the relative merits of raising FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) in persuasive arguments, or GOG (greed, opportunity, and glory.)

For previous exchanges, please click on Fud, Gog, Ethics and Rhetoric and Fud in Public Speaking and Persuasion

Ford seems to think that GOG is better than FUD.  I think they work together, and that one is not better than the other.

I follow what the ancient Greeks taught.  Aristotle taught that speakers need to make three types of arguments in order to be persuasive.

The first is the ethical appeal:  you argue that you are a trustworthy source of information.  You do this by casually referencing your experience or expertise, and perhaps with some self-effacing humor.

The second is the intellectual appeal.  You argue by stating your point and then proving it with reasoning and facts, or you present your facts and reasoning and then conclude with your point.

The third type of argument is the emotional appeal.  You try, through stories, or humor, to arouse an emotion in your listeners.

Cicero, the great Roman statesman, thought the emotional appeal was the most important.  He said, “…tickling and soothing anxieties is the test of a speaker’s impact and technique.”

Ford, please note that he said, “… tickling AND soothing anxieties,” and Cicero was no slouch as a speaker.  He knew what he was talking about.  He seems to be saying that whenever we propose to an audience that they make a decision, we should bring up the pros and cons.

For instance, you might say that if the listeners don’t do what you recommend, A, B, C and D are the negative consequences they might expect.  However, if they decide to do what you suggest, you would argue that they could enjoy X, Y, and Z.

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, or anyone, that your reasoning should be fair and balanced.  Using FUD or GOG is ethically neutral.  One is not more virtuous or ethical than the other.  It is not our technique that makes us unethical, but our intention.

And by the way, most speeches, articles, plays, novels, and movies are structured in the same way.  They single out a problem, consider its implications, and explore solutions.

Humans like problems because problems resemble puzzles, and we love puzzles.  We derive great pleasure from solving them, and grow as a result.

FUD gets our attention on the problem.  GOG drives us toward a solution.

They are the one-two punch of human growth and accomplishment.

On June 20th in the Wall Street Journal, in response to the media coverage of Tim Russert’s untimely death, Peggy Noonan wrote in her Declarations column, “When somebody dies we tell his story and try to define and isolate what was special about it–what it was he brought to the party, how he enhanced life by showing up. In this way we educate ourselves about what really matters.”

“In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn’t. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn’t, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. [...] That’s what we talk about in eulogies, because that’s what’s important.”

Reading this, it struck me that we could say the same thing about public speaking. We make a show of admiring speakers who are clever, rich with data slides, equipped with approved platform behaviors and polished texts. But in the end, what we really like in speakers is character.

Character traits that appeal to audiences are varied, but certainly confidence is one, tempered, we hope, with humility. Genuine interest in the audience is another, or at least an empathetic understanding of their needs and concerns.

Finally, I myself like speakers who appear to be authentic, true to themselves, not working too hard to please me, but are nevertheless skilled at holding my attention.

Think about this. When a speech or presentation is over, which do you remember the longest: what the speaker said, or the impression the speaker created?

Decision makers rarely undertake an important project without first hearing the project leader explain it to them. They are listening for two things–grasp of the material, and the requisite character needed to overcome the inevitable obstacles any large project will encounter.

When a presentation is over, and listeners gather to discuss it and pass judgment, the speaker’s expertise is the dimension they consider overtly. But deep down, their decisions are informed by their perceptions of the speaker’s character.

Ford Harding has lifted his pen to engage with me on a subject of profound importance to sales professionals, leaders, and anyone who seeks to influence others. That subject is the emotional sea on which all decisions float.

FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is one current in that sea. It drives most of us away from the shoals of risk, hardship, pain and loss.

GOG (greed, opportunity, and glory) is another current in the sea. Its siren song calls us to risk our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor in pursuit of objectives that may or may not work out.

I will address Ford’s recent comments in this posting, but first I must clarify my position and then I must make the case for the role of emotion in business decision making. I think Ford and I are using a kind of shorthand in discussing this topic, and some readers might be concerned about the difference between logical persuasion and emotional persuasion.

My position: I am not the champion of FUD and the enemy of GOG. I strive to be the wise master of both. However, I am of the opinion that mankind is more motivated by the fear of loss than the hope of gain. What gets our attention, on a daily basis, are problems. Most people and organizations will not change until the pain of change becomes less than the pain of the status quo. Alcoholics don’t stop drinking until they hit rock bottom. They do not get sober because they suddenly decide to be good little boys and girls. They get sober because they are avoiding the dire consequences of their drinking.

In his book, Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes the following:

“One of the most annoying songs in the often annoying history of popular music begins with this line: “Feelings, nothing more than feelings.” I wince when I hear it because it always strikes me as roughly equivalent to starting a hymn with “Jesus, nothing more than Jesus.” Nothing more than feelings? What could be more important than feelings? Sure, war and peace may come to mind, but are war and peace important for any reason other than the feelings they produce? If war didn’t cause pain and anguish, if peace didn’t provide for delights both transcendental and carnal, would either of them matter to us at all? War, peace, art, money, marriage, birth, death, disease, religion—these are just a few of the Really Big topics over which oceans of blood and ink have been spilled, but they are really big topics for one reason alone: Each is a powerful source of human emotion. If they didn’t make us feel uplifted, desperate, thankful, and hopeless, we would keep all that ink and blood to ourselves. As Plato asked, “Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?” Indeed, feelings don’t just matter—they are what mattering means. We would expect any creature that feels pain when burned and pleasure when fed to call burning and eating bad and good respectively, just as we would expect an asbestos creature with no digestive tract to find such designations arbitrary. Moral philosophers have tried for centuries to find some other way to define good and bad, but none has ever convinced the rest (or me). We cannot say that something is good unless we can say what it is good for, and if we examine all the many objects and experiences that our species calls good and ask what they are good for, the answer is clear: By and large, they are good for making us feel happy.”

_____

Ford, I take this to mean that our careful reasoning and efforts to be logical about any important decision –from making an investment, to building a bridge, to figuring out how to land a new client–is ultimately floating on a sea of feelings and emotions, and that we are constantly striving to minimize our FUD (negative emotions) and maximize our GOG (feelings of pleasure.)

If we are sales professionals, leaders, or public speakers, we need to consider all the tools of persuasion at our disposal. This consideration of tools and techniques makes us rhetoricians practicing the art of rhetoric. We are obliged to use the tools of rhetoric when considering a decision for which there is no clear answer–a decision about which reasonable men can disagree.

FUD and GOG are rhetorical tactics which we can use to persuade an audience. You write that fear tactics are despicable, and then wisely mention that GOG tactics can be equally deceptive. Let me remind you that the techniques of persuasion, like many other technologies, are neither inherently good nor evil. They can be used to advance noble or pernicious purposes. “What makes a man a sophist is not his faculty but his moral purpose.”

As for your Venn diagram example, in which you describe the two overlapping circles of FUD and GOG, and argue that where downside risk is high, the use of only FUD is appropriate, and where the upside is larger, it is only appropriate to use GOG, and only in the middle, where they both overlap, is it appropriate to use both, I have to disagree. All upsides have risk, and all downsides have solutions.

It seems to me that Plato, quoted above, is saying that we undertake projects in our lives to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. In other words, to get rid of FUD and grab hold of GOG.

Furthermore, if we are successful business leaders, as soon as we make a decision to pursue GOG (greed, opportunity and glory), we have a whole new set of FUD calculations to make, such as, “What if I’m wrong? What if the future is not like the past? What if, what if, what if?”

It is up to the speaker, the salesman, and the leader to explore these what ifs, and thereby help his audience to the best decision for them. Reasoning and logic will play their parts in the drama, but FUD and GOG will always be the co-stars.

FUD is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.  I first heard the term when consulting at Gartner.  I was working with the analysts in preparing for a Gartner Symposium, and several of them used FUD at the start of their talks to engage the listeners on an emotional level.

For instance, they might have said, “While e-mail may be the killer-app of first generation internet programs, it could very well become the mass murderer of the second generation as it hurls armies of hackers, worms, viruses and spam against the the gates of your corporate security infrastructure.”

I made that up.  But something like that.

Fear-based arguments are common and valid, in my experience.  Our lives are built around the fear of pain and the hope of gain.  Every story we have ever enjoyed in novel, play, film, or ballad is about a person who had a problem (and had FUD) and struggled to make it go away.

In fact, FUD is what makes drama dramatic.  If we don’t have FUD when the pretty young thing all alone in the house on a dark and stormy night hears a sound downstairs and gets out of bed in her nightgown to see what’s happening, then the story doesn’t work.

We have to care about the girl, and we have to be afraid that something might jump out of the closet, hatchet raised.

What if a CIO heard a noise in the middle of the night, and it was her phone, and she heard that a hacker had broken through her security system at work, the one she touted and convinced the company to buy, and she had to get dressed and drive into headquarters and face the embarrassment of a crisis that higher-ups were likely to blame on her?

Those CIOs in the audience listening to the Gartner analysts are human beings motivated by the same things that everyone else is motivated by–the fear of loss, and the hope of gain.  I’m not a CIO, but if I were, I’d be worried about making bad decisions, not looking good when my systems aren’t successful, spending too much, spending too little, and taking too much time to get things done.

We know that humans are interested in their own problems.  We talk about our problems most of the time.  They’re  number one in the conversation hit parade.  If we talk to our listeners about their problems, they are much more likely to listen.  If we demonstrate a firm grasp of their problems, and the consequences for them if they don’t solve the problems, they are more likely to respect us and trust us.  So reminding them of their problems might not be a bad strategy.

There is evidence in social science that it is not wise to use FUD arguments on people who are already in a state of high anxiety.  But there is also evidence that we retain and value information when it is linked to our emotions–any emotions, positive or negative.

Consulting is based on problem solving (i.e., the removal of FUD.)  Philosophy is built around problem solving.   Politics likewise.  For the client, the voter, the audience, beyond the FUD is a vision of a new and better reality.  But our credibility as speakers depends largely on defining, in vivid and human terms, the problem that your content solves.

Let’s not be afraid of FUD.  Used appropriately, FUD can turn a dry information dump into a compelling story about a person, a product, a department, or a company that prevents disaster and saves the day.

Public speaking is a talent before it becomes a skill. A talent is a latent ability, something that is dormant inside you. When you work at it, it becomes a skill.

If you do have a potential talent for speaking and you work at it, you are likely to receive encouragement and recognition for your talent, which then makes you want to continue, which in turn helps you get better.

However, if you don’t have a talent for speaking, but nevertheless work at it without receiving encouragement and recognition, you are likely to give up, and will therefore not develop the skill.

The hard thing is to persist in the face of discouragement.

Churchill passed out when giving his first speech in the Commons.

FDR bombed over and over again when he was a young Secretary of the Navy. His wife Eleanor thought he was hopeless.

Woodrow Wilson had terrible nerves and worked like a fiend to overcome his fear.

And our own Bill Clinton was booed for his interminable speech at the 1988 Democratic convention.

Yet he, and all the others, went on to become highly respected communicators.

I feel like quoting someone famous on the subject of persisting.

Emerson: “Move confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.”

Or the great Japanese folk saying: “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”

It’s the only way to sculpt talent into skill.

I just finished working with a client who had to prepare and deliver an after dinner talk to clients in a museum. Her firm planned to take the clients on a private tour of the museum, feed them dinner, and then she was to stand up and offer them a short talk on investment opportunities in the current turbulent markets.

We spent a few hours crafting the talk, and another couple of hours getting her to verbalize it. At the end of the rehearsal, it was still not right, but she had to go. It was Friday afternoon–the weekend called.

As we parted, I made a few suggestions.

1. Cut it. Your audience is primarily in their 60s and beyond. They will have been on their feet, drunk a few glasses of wine, and will be looking at their watches thinking of bed.
2. Say it aloud at least five times over the weekend (she was to speak on Monday night).
3. Don’t drink any wine until you’ve spoken.
4. Go to the museum tonight, or over the weekend, to see the room where the dinner will take place. Find out where you will stand, what the acoustics are like, and whether you need a microphone or a lectern.
5. Wear something red.
6. Keep it simple, upbeat, and story-like. Don’t drill down into an analysis of the investments.

A few days after the event, I called her. “How did you do?” I asked.

“I give myself a 7 out of 10,” she said.

“How come?” I asked.

“Well, it was too long, they couldn’t hear me, the room was horrible, I didn’t go to see the room over the weekend, I had to cut it on the fly, which made me nervous and look discombobulated.”

“Great!” I said. “Now you know. After dinner speaking is intense. It is intimate. Your audience is on top of you. The rooms are often not good for speakers. There’s noise in the room. The audience is tired and drunk. They want to be entertained–period. They want funny stories and they want them short.”

“It was intense,” she said.

“You’ve had an experience,” I said. And I quoted Mark Twain: “Good judgment comes from experience. And where does experience come from? Bad judgment!”

I told her not to be discouraged. Most people fail their way to success.

She said she was not discouraged, and looked forward to trying again.

She’s a trooper.

In a political revolution, insurgents quickly target the media outlets. Their reasoning? He who controls the language controls the thinking.

Now comes another study to suggest that insurgents may have it right. In this experiment, one group of volunteers was shown a shade of yellow on a strip of white paper for a few seconds. The group was then shown another strip of paper with several shades of yellow (including the first) and asked to identify the original color. In this group, 73% were able to identify the original shade of yellow.

A second group was shown the same shade of yellow, told to describe the color aloud, and then were asked to identify the original color from a strip containing multiple shades. Only 33% of the “describers” were able to accurately identify the original color.

How do we account for this difference between the two groups? Scientists think that the language we use to describe our experience overwrites or distorts our actual experience. In the case of the “describers” mentioned above, they ended up remembering not what they had experienced but what they had said about what they experienced. And what they had said about what they experienced was not clear and precise enough to help them recognize it when they saw it again thirty seconds later.

Our own political parties fight over language. Should it be “global warming” or “climate change”? The “estate tax” or the “death tax”? “Starvation” or “calorie deficiency”? These word choices soften or sharpen the impact of what they describe, and thus have a profound impact on how we think about the underlying phenomena.

One of the functions of language is to help us extract and remember the important features of our experiences so that we can analyze and communicate them later. The New York Times online film archive stores critical synopses of films rather than the films themselves, which would take up far too much space and be far too difficult to search. Experiences are even more complex than movies, and were our brains to store the full-length movie of our lives, our skulls would have to expand.

So words have power, and savvy presenters use them carefully. For instance, avoid business jargon unless you want to be seen as talking much and saying little. Because we hear business jargon all the time (visions, missions, strategic objectives) it sounds to many of us like verbal oatmeal–its meaning is not clear–so the words have no snap, crackle or pop.

We should be careful to make concrete that which is abstract. Instead of saying, “We need to occasion customer loyalty to avoid competitive intrusion,” we should say, “Let’s get ‘em hooked on our cookies before the other guys start cooking theirs.”

The take away? Stick your thoughts into the minds of your audience with vivid language, as Martin Luther did when he nailed his theses to the door of the church.

If you don’t assert your story well, another story will prevail.

Cicero, the great Roman statesman and orator, said that he preferred tongue-tied intelligence to ignorant loquacity. That’s a convenient polarity, and one we’re familiar with.

We see the former occasionally when college professors make an appearance on national TV. They can look like owls with ruffled feathers blinking in the glare of daylight. We see the latter in religious and political demagogues, strutting across the stage belching clouds of rehearsed phrases in predictable cadence. We all prefer thoughtful speakers who have something to say.

But it’s not really a fair distinction. For instance, we can have tongue-tied ignorance and intelligent loquacity. An example of the former would be the poor unfortunate Miss South Carolina, who got nervous when asked why Americans couldn’t find their own country on a map of the globe.

And then we have Hans Rosling, a doctor, researcher, and inventor of the Trendalyzer, who is intelligent and loquacious. Substance, style, humor and surprise combine to make this guy one of the best presenters you will see.  If you have a few minutes, click on this gripping video.

Cicero was being a snob and had his tongue in his cheek. His witty remark only draws attention to his own erudition when he says that he prefers substance to style. And he was known as a great orator who had both, only he didn’t want you to notice his style. He wanted you to pay attention to what he was saying.

Style that is unrelated to substance we see as antique, grandiose, and phony. We worry that if we wave our arms around too much when we speak, people will think we’re imitating William Jennings Bryan.

So we choose a different style–one that is conversational and carefully moderated for the intimacy of our zoom lenses and lavaliere mics. We might like to think of it as “natural,” but in reality it is as much a style as any other. It is a behavior that we choose to achieve an effect.

19th Century orators waved their arms around and shouted over the rooftops because they wanted to be seen and heard. There were no video-magnification screens around the battlefield when Edward Everett spoke for two hours at Gettysburg before Lincoln got his chance. No microphones allowed him to give an intimate grave-side chat to the grieving throng. Horses were neighing. Dogs barked. The wind pushed his voice back into his mouth . To focus the eyes and ears of the audience, Everett needed to pump it up.

Let’s not be snobs and argue that we prefer substance to style. Such a stance often masks an inability or unwillingness to capture and hold the attention of others.

Instead, let’s say that style brings life, texture and nuance to substance.

Let’s say we prefer our speakers to be confident, to know what they think, and to feel the truthfulness of their thoughts as they speak them. The substance of style is the feeling of truth in the words being spoken.

I prefer intelligent loquacity to tongue-tied ignorance. I prefer style that brings substance to life.