Getting through the noise: speaking for attention and understanding
When planning any oral interaction—private or public—you must keep in mind that your goal is to communicate with your audience. We talked about this with writing, and the same thing applies to spoken communications.
Say it clearly the first time
In fact, the focus on audiences’ understanding is even more critical with the spoken word than the written. When you are unclear in writing, your audience has a record (the document) that they can study or reference later. But when you are speaking, there isn’t a record of what you have said (unless you are being taped, which is fairly unusual).
It is also the case that oral presentations are usually time-limited, so you may have to move fairly quickly from one topic to the next. Thus your only opportunity to communicate your message to your audience is that little window of time you have with them when you are actually addressing that portion of the message. Unlike with the written word, when you are speaking you have to be clear the first time, every time.
Not everyone will hear what you’re saying
In the limit, of course, this is impossible. You cannot hope to communicate your message, and only your message, to every member of every audience every time. Your audience is comprised of individuals with individual histories, vocabularies, and lives. Some of them won’t be paying attention during a key point—perhaps their phone rings. Some of them won’t come away with the sense of urgency that you hoped to communicate, because they reacted differently to the phrase “significant concern” than you wanted. Some won’t be interested in your topic and so won’t devote their full attention to your content, despite your best efforts.
There is not much you can do about these problems other than to be aware of them and design around them as much as possible.
Your ups and downs will impact your effectiveness
It is also important to remember that from moment to moment you are a different person and that your effectiveness as a speaker will naturally vary with each talk as well. Some days you’ll be “up” while other days you’ll be fighting not to let the audience know that there are a million things you’d rather be doing. This too will affect your ability to communicate your message to your audience.
Steps to minimize risks to your message
You can take some steps to minimize these risks to your message.
1. Shoot straight: You can avoid dependence on specialized vocabulary and shades of meaning—at least those that imply one thing to you but might imply something quite different to others—by describing a problem and its consequences to your audience.
Rather than just identifying a software design problem as a “significant concern” you can go on to say that the likely impact of this problem is a delay in getting product to market before Christmas. In this way you empower the audience to individually substitute their own phrase—“crisis”, “emergency”, “disaster” and so on—for yours, and in so doing they can better internalize your message.
2. Get to the point: You can help avoid inattentiveness by making your presentations short and to the point, and by not reading the implications of slides to your audience in great detail. I find a highly graphic slide with almost no text goes a long way toward capturing the audience’s attention (this is partly because in technology this slide approach is very rare). We’ll talk more about this later.
3. Prepare: Finally, you can help minimize the effect differences in your personality and style have with each presentation by being familiar with the material and comfortable in the venue.
