For the last two years I’ve had the privilege of being asked to follow VMware’s CEO Raghu Raghuram on stage at our customer conference – VMware Explore. Each time I’ve been asked to deliver something aligned to a theme for the event, but avoiding something that looks like corporate narrative.
It turns out doing this is a lot harder than you think !
So much of time in my professional career when I’ve been presenting on stage has been about evolving a story or narrative – taking something previously created and adapting it for a new audience, a new demographic or taking the approach to describing one problem and then applying it to something totally different. It’s very rare however that you end up starting with a blank canvas …. so how do you do it ?
For me the content development process can be broken down into three steps, and reflecting back on other stuff I’ve created in the past, it’s a well trodden path that I’ve gone down many times before
First – Write the take-aways of your audience
These become the anchors of your presentation, the goals by which you can test any slide, content or message. There is no point in presenting something to someone unless you want to drive one of three outcomes –
- Teach someone something new that they didn’t know before
- Challenge a Belief that you suspect they will be holding
- Drive a new action that wouldn’t have happened before they listened to you
I’d usually suggest that you come up with three takeaways to focus on, this ensures that you don’t end up with a presentation that is too myopic in focus (which limits the level of audience engagement) and if you end up with more than three, the risk is your presentation starts to become incoherent as you try to be everything to everyone listening.
Second – Break down how you will deliver those take-aways
I like to take time to break down a presentation into the elements needed to realise those takeaways – in a way this reminds me of how I learnt to write C++ code at University starting by creating a simple functional representation of what it was you wanted to achieve. By using those take aways as items to break down you quickly start to get to something that tells a story … which leads me onto the third and final point
Third – Remember to be a storyteller
There is a reason that as a child the stories that you were read had a simple beginning, middle and an end. It’s because it is a simple way for a simple mind to make sense of what you’re hearing. A presentation that starts with ‘Imagine if…..’ or ‘What would it mean to you if …’ is going to be far more impactful than one that starts with ‘I’d like to talk to you today about ….’.
The honest truth is that the creativity to be a storyteller is hard – and sometimes people can get it very wrong. To this day I can still remember conversations within VMware talking about creating content when I would express frustration that the company would mix up hat should be a character in a story, with what should be a chapter in a story. The two are very different
A chapter is supposed to be a defined section of a story, if you like it could be the encapsulation of the delivery of one of those take-aways that I talked about before. The chapter is self contained, and it’s unlikely that the contents of the chapter will repeat in another chapter.
And alongside that
A character is supposed to ebb and flow in importance as the story progresses – and crucially exists in more than one chapter.
In the past I have seen people try to create presentations where they have mixed up Chapters and Characters – with hilarious consequences. At VMware we would often end up breaking down a customer briefing into ‘Chapters’, one chapter for each of our products or solutions when in reality those products should have been characters in a story, the chapters of which represented the customer’s challenges and journey themselves.
Imagine mixing up Chapters and Characters in a children’s story – imagine a ‘Porridge’ chapter, a chapter on ‘Bed Sizes’ and a chapter on ‘Woodland Wildlife’. All the time you are trying to tell the story of LIttle Red Riding Hood, and you’re hoping that your customer can work out what the story is from your silo’d product chapters.
So focus on telling a story to get to your goal, don’t be afraid to position what you’re going to deliver as a story – people love stories. People lean forwad in a story, they engage in a story and most importantly they can REMEMBER a story, and then can re-tell a story (two things that are always important when you’re creating a presentation).
Many times I’ve listened to people present, and they sound professional and accomplished – but when you walk away you end up struggling to remember what they were actually talking about !
Conclusion
Focus on treating the attendees of your presentation as your customers, and ensuring that you understand what you want them to take away. Break those take aways down into consumable chunks that form chapters in a story. Ensure you have a clearly defined beginning, middle and end in your story and don’t be afraid to position it like that.
Finally, test your content – what you think is amazing, someone else will think is terrible, awful even. I’ve been lucky to have groups of people that I can pull together to test content on, and not been afraid to throw away ideas that to me made sense, but for some reason I couldn’t quite make them resonate with someone else.