Stop Presenting Start Activating

Nancy Duarte must be the only person ever to turn a PowerPoint presentation into a major motion picture (Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth). About a decade ago, when Lisa Kay Solomon and I interviewed the Silicon Valley communications guru for our book Moments of Impact, she made a stunning comment that has stuck with me for years.

When we asked Nancy “when have you felt that a presentation was too short?”, her answer was emphatic: “I have never heard anyone complain–anywhere–that a presentation was too short. Never.”

Imagine that: Nancy has spent decades toiling in the fields of professional presentations at the highest levels and yet finds that it’s virtually impossible to make a presentation too short. It’s a staggering observation–one with major implications for your next talk.

Why do most people find most presentations too long? It’s pretty simple: almost nobody likes to sit and listen to someone else speak for long chunks of time without interaction. Despite this obvious fact, it happens all the time.

Nobody likes to sit and listen to someone else speak for long chunks of time without interaction

In this piece, I invite you to consider a major shift in mindset for your next talk of 30 minutes or longer: from the mode of “presenting” to one of activating content with your audience. The difference is huge–and far more effective.

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Your memory is terrible (and that’s a good thing)

I have a “stupid consultant trick” that I play at the beginning of some talks to demonstrate the extreme limits of our short-term memory. I tell the audience that we’re doing a word-retention exercise and to listen quietly without writing anything down. I then say six, pretty random words very slowly. Then I ask them to get into pairs and answer a bunch of unrelated questions, such as “name three teachers you had in high school” or “what are three vacation destinations that you’ve enjoyed.”

After four or five of these questions–which take a couple minutes to answer–I ask how many of the words from the beginning the audience members can recall. The average number of words retained is four out of six. The point is clear and visceral: by distracting them with a few easy questions, I’ve managed to erase one-third of the content from just a couple of minutes ago. Imagine, then, how much information from any presentation is retained a day or two later–after many more meaningful “distractions” from life and work have occurred.

Many people complain of having poor memories. Why can’t I remember the name of that guy at the party last night, or where I put my car keys? While our memory limitations frustrate us at times, they are a good thing on balance. Our brains are ruthless prioritization machines, constantly “pruning” less important information in order to save space and energy for what really matters. If we remembered everything that happened around us, we’d lose the plot line quickly.

Despite this hardwired reality, most presenters cram way more information into their talks than our brains can handle. For this reason, neuroscientist John Medina has developed a “10-minute rule” for his lectures, using an approach that’s won him teaching awards.

“After 9 minutes and 59 seconds,” Medina explains in his fascinating book Brain Rules, “the audience’s attention is ready to plummet to zero.” At this point, something drastic needs to be done to keep students engaged. That something is what Medina calls a “hook”: an emotional, highly relevant interaction that connects the last “chunk” of content to students’ real lives, prior knowledge, or issues that they care about.

For the past decade or so, I’ve followed Medina’s guidance religiously–never speaking for more than 10 minutes at a time, making sure to check in with audiences with a hook that connects what I’m saying to what they care about. When done well, this approach always works.

Unless your storytelling skills are on a par with Ira Glass, Medina’s rule applies to you, too, and you should consider injecting an interactive “hook” every 10 minutes–or less.

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Active learning beats passive

A big part of the reason why Medina’s rule is so important is that people don’t learn by listening passively to information–they learn by engaging actively with it in contexts that matter to them. While this may feel like an obvious insight, it’s one that too many educators and presenters don’t take seriously.

People learn by engaging actively with information in contexts that matter to them

Carl Wieman is a Nobel-prize winning physicist who has devoted the past couple of decades to challenging the standard lecture-based approach to teaching science. In his research, graduate students with clipboards wait outside lecture halls and grab unsuspecting undergrads to quiz them on the material that they just covered. The results are staggering: even top students at top schools retain shockingly little information from lectures that just happened minutes ago. They may as well have slept in.

Wieman doesn’t just gather data to annoy his peers; he also provides a host of better practices to spark active learning. While his work doesn’t reference Medina’s 10-minute rule directly, his tactics are very consistent with it. Basically, he advocates delivering one clear “chunk” of content at a time, and then inviting students to engage with it directly, either through small group discussions, quick problem-solving exercises, or large-group clicker activities.

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A standard format can set you free

If you go to the Louvre museum in Paris, you’ll see hundreds or more of the greatest works in Western art, in a myriad of styles and media. Seen from another angle, though, you’ll also see something incredibly monotonous: room after room of rectangles.

Why did so many of the great masters choose to paint on the same geometric shape? Why didn’t Picasso paint on circles, Frida Kahlo on trapezoids, or Van Gough on parallelograms? Did they lack imagination and creativity?

No, they did not: these artists and many more embraced standard formats as a platform for creativity. Moreover, this phenomenon occurs in nearly all forums. Most popular songs are three minutes long (give or take 30 seconds) with predictable chorus/verse transitions. Most best-selling nonfiction books are about 200-250 pages with 8-10 chapters. Most major movies are two hours long (give or take) and follow a three-act narrative structure. And so on.

Successful talks also have a powerful, standard format–it’s just that most presenters don’t use it!

This format is laid out in the book As We Speak, by Peter Meyer and Shann Nix. Here it is–with my own amendment to follow Medina’s 10-minute rule and Wieman’s research findings:

1. Ramp: an anecdote or story that grabs interest and suggests what’s to come
2. Roadmap: a brief description of what you will be communicating
3. Point of Discovery #1: a chunk of content that’s 10 minutes or less to make one clear point, leading to an Interaction “hook” for audience engagement: what does this mean for you?
4. Point of Discovery #2: same as above
5. Point of Discovery #3: same as above
6. Dessert: a closing anecdote or story that ties in a bow the three key points of discovery

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Own the close!

The attentive reader will note that this article is structured in the format above, including the check-in questions for reader engagement after each of my three main points of discovery (all indicated by header titles). How meta is that?  ; )

One of the worst practices in many presentations is holding audience interaction (a.k.a. “Q and A”) until the very end. This is terrible in part because by this time people have already forgotten what the speaker said at minute 7 or 13 or 22. But the main reason this common practice is so bad is that it leaves a huge part of the impact of your talk to chance.

From psychological research, we know that the end of an experience plays an outsized role in how it is remembered later (a phenomenon known as “peak-end bias” in behavioral economics). If the last audience question is a boring clunker or a tedious statement masquerading as a query, then that’s how your show ends–with a whimper.

When you follow the above approach to activating content well–grabbing their interest, delivering a few specific, strong insights, and truly engaging folks along the way in what they mean for them–you’ve earned the right to have the last word. At this point, instead of taking “one last question” and hoping it’s a decent one, stick the landing yourself with a strong closing statement that ties the experience together–and maybe even leaves them wanting more.