Welcome back again to Converting Challenges Into Opportunities. Coming up with creative solutions based on systematic, rigorous, analytical methods, critical database thinking, is essential to your effectiveness and accelerating your career. And it will get you halfway down the field. To make your ideas and recommendations happen, get them across the goal line, so to speak, requires that you present it powerfully and persuasively to others. Who's support and input and approval you'll need to move your ideas across the finish line so that they're adopted. This final module four will focus on putting it all together. Taking what you have learned in the prior three modules, and focusing on getting the support and approval you need to put your ideas into action. The articles and videos that follow focus how best to communicate your analysis and ideas. The fact is whether you like it or not, is that whether your audience accepts your ideas is often less about the brilliance of the idea itself than how you present it. The decisions they make ultimately are emotional as well as analytical, because they're humans, just like we. The tips here include, one, tailor your presentation to the audience, their needs, questions, and concerns, it's not one size fits all. Two, keep it simple, it is tempting to get into the detail, especially since we know so much after all of the painstaking research. And we want to share it, and we're proud of our work and we want to show it. But, let's be clear, that is you focused and not they focused, that is, focused on your audience. Your presentation must be focused on what they're concerned about, which is likely to be what the data means to them and their goals. Three, be concise, it should pass the Einstein test. He said, if you can't express something complex simply, then you don't understand it well enough. Four, be clear on what is the core intention of your presentation or slide, in one sentence. And what is the primary takeaway you want your audience to take with them? Five, tell stories, a story is about a person with a problem that gets solved by your idea or product. It is personal and it draws people in, you see it all the time in presentations of all kinds. The blah blah sets in, but as soon as the speaker starts to tell a story, the more personal the better, people sit up in their chairs, and start to listen in a much more engaged way. That's the way we humans are. That is why almost every TED Talk for example, starts with the presenter telling a personal story that connects the audience to them and to the human importance of the topic. Six, use metaphors, I often use this with teams. Our team is like a blank because. And in the future it needs to be like a blank, because. They complete those using metaphors, and it's a much more full story that emerges from those metaphors that from literal descriptions. That tend to include only facts and not so much dynamics, or meaning, or emotions, or value. And finally, ask yourself continually as you plan and deliver your presentation, so what? What difference does this make to my audience? Why should they care? What is it about this point, what is it about this slide? What is it about the presentation that matters to them? Let's talk about storytelling a little bit. IDEO the design thinking firm in Palo Alto offers a course called, Story Telling for Business. It goes into practical detail, how to plan, prepare, and present a compelling business presentation, not death by boring PowerPoint. It includes this basic storytelling structure. I've also learned from workshops I've taken in improv comedy the same thing, and it's the structure of every classic gripping story from the times of the ancient Greeks, like Oddysseus on the Odyssey. And now to bring it back to the business setting, this is the presentation structure promulgated by the founder of the pre-eminent management firm, McKinsey and Company. It goes like this, situation complication, resolution, and what's the moral of the story? Situation, a person, once upon a time, this is the journey that brought us here. Complication, then this happened, there's this problem that came about. Resolution, that is then solved, until one day this happened, which is your solution, which is your idea, which is your way to resolve the conflict and the problem. And last but not least, is making it explicit for your audience what the moral or the meaning of the story is. So what that sounds like in your presentation are things like, what you need to know is x, or if I were you I would think y. What you need to take away from this is. That's the moral of the story and importantly, the action I need you to take is. So some tips for impact, in addition to that storytelling, is make it personal. The more personal, the better you're going to draw your audience in. Get emotional, it's okay to show emotion, to evoke their emotion, use anecdotes, those are stories. And make it visual, not just lists, include pictures, include dynamics. And at the close always ask for the audience to take action. Finally an important reminder you, about you as the presenter is offered in the classic research from the 1970s at UCLA. That showed that the impact of the message in terms of memorability and what people take away, is only 7% attributable to the words you say. I know that is shocking but it's true, and we need to realize that. It's 38% affected by your tone of voice, and 55% attributed to your body language, your face, your eye contact, your posture, your head, and gestures. So that puts the appropriate focus back on you as the presenter. It matters how you show up, believe in your message, and make sure that your posture, your tone of voice, is consistent with your words. How you show up and your state of being matters, the data and analysis will not stand for itself. Otherwise, you might as well send it off by email, but then you wouldn't get the benefit of being able to shape your audiences interpretation and impact and the moral of the story you want them to act on. At the end of all the readings and the videos, you'll find an assignment that invites you to choose a problem that you analyzed or that you want to analyze and solve at work. And apply the methods that you've learned from this course, that apply to your situation and interest. And put it all together into a persuasive presentation and you'll have the opportunity to get feedback from your other students, and provide feedback to your peers. This is a prototype for the purpose of deepening your learning and practicing, have fun.
