Like most leaders, you can probably give any number of presentations in your sleep about your organization and the solutions it offers. You know how to clearly and fluently articulate your points, and (hopefully) you know how to avoid the catastrophic problems caused by an excessive dependence on Powerpoint.
But that doesn’t mean your message won’t be forgotten.
The last thing any leader can afford is to be forgotten. When we present, our goal is to drive action. We want customers to buy, bosses to back or fund our cherished projects, or team members to support a difficult change. But those decisions are rarely made in the meeting itself — they are usually made afterward, and sometimes many days afterward. Yet, research consistently shows that only about 10% of a presentation’s content is remembered a week later. We absolutely need our ideas to stick, because "retellability" may be the most important driver of any message’s success.
Making that happen isn’t rocket science, but, as it turns out, it does involve brain science. Our brains are wired in very specific ways regarding how they want and need to consume information, and that wiring has a huge effect on whether communications stick or don’t. It's because we don’t understand these principles very well that many of us have, to date, gotten it all wrong.
As Western executives, we’ve been taught to build thorough, rational arguments, supported and undergirded by compelling facts and data. Here’s the problem with that: The most rational argument is also probably the most forgettable. Why? Because the brain operates primarily at the level of ideas. The brain does not do well at the level of facts and data, which are not particularly sticky in the human mind.
At the risk of slightly oversimplifying with the help of an oft-told myth, fact and data are primarily processed in the so-called “left” brain. While they are critical to rationally support an argument, they don’t drive a message’s “stickiness." In general, the stickiness you are looking for comes from lighting up your audience’s right brain. Right-brain — or more accurately, whole-brain — engagement is critical to memorability and hence retellability.
So how does one engage the whole brain? You have five available tools.
Storytelling
If you ask a person to tell a story while in a functional MRI machine (which identifies active areas of the brain), you would see multiple areas of the brain light up as the person describes the various sights, sounds and smells. And neuroscience has recently learned that if you later put a second person in the same MRI machine and play them an audio recording of that story, exactly the same areas of their brain light up. We often think about trying to “connect” with our audience or “get on the same page.” In a surprisingly real way, storytelling serves to do exactly this.
The bottom line for business and sales presentations: Don’t just give the data on the problem you’re proposing to solve -- create the story of how this problem messes up somebody’s day. The visceral story of Andy being called in, yet again, at 3 a.m. to deal with a plant problem will be remembered long after the data on unplanned plant stoppages has been forgotten.
The Right Visuals
When audiences only hear information, they recall only 10% of that information three days later. However, when a presenter pairs a relevant image with that same information, audiences retain 65% of the information three days later. A visual — correctly used — can powerfully complement any point or help an audience visualize a narrative.
But, all too often, visuals are not used correctly. The barrage of complex slides is one obvious example. Just because you’ve projected something does not mean you’ve used visuals properly. (And neither does adding stock photos to spice up an otherwise lousy, bulleted slide.)
To succeed, visual aids must, above all, teach or illustrate an idea. You should use a single visual image to do so and take it down once it's no longer relevant. Finally, you should use only a small number of visuals, or you will create dilution and fatigue.
Artifacts
Humans assign particular value to the sense of touch. When we can touch and hold things they become more real and more meaningful to us. Used well, the right artifact can create an unusually lasting impression on your audience.
The Power Of Contrast
Antithesis is a fancy word for contrast, meaning the setting of one idea against another. But what few realize is that it’s like catnip to the brain. Our brains love to chew on contrasting ideas, which makes antithetical ideas incredibly sticky.
Whether it’s “Give me liberty or give me death,” or “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” or, famously, "To be or not to be," notice that it’s the antithesis that causes these ideas to endure.
Metaphor And Allegory
The use of metaphor is simply the creation of a specific type of visualization, where your big idea is presented in a different, parallel form. The “left” brain will not understand the connection of the metaphor to your idea, so what does it do? It reaches over to the “right” brain, or the part of your brain which makes connections, for help. Because you’ve now planted the idea in two places, it sticks more deeply.
Allegorical stories work in the same way as allegorical images. Imagine the big idea that you want to land in your presentation is that “Overconfidence will be our downfall.” You can make the point literally, but imagine you choose to briefly recount the story of the Soviet ice hockey team coming into the 1980 Winter Olympics. Their stunning downfall, remembered to this day, is a perfect illustration of the dangers of overconfidence.
Yes, data matters. But engage the entire brain, and your message will be both deeply memorable and far more likely to drive your audience to take the action you want.
