The Bond team triumph again – by thinking like magicians

The new James Bond film Spectre is magnificent in many different ways, but one reviewer has chosen to focus in a negative way on one of the fundamental reasons for its success.

Sam Mendes' film spends more time making sly references to Bond’s past glories than coming up with fresh ideas, said the Evening Standard on Friday.  Maybe the reviewer hasn’t been listening to Daniel Craig’s careful explanations of the strategy for re-booting the franchise, and he certainly seems to be ignorant of some important principles of the workings of effective communication.

My own take on these principles is the ‘Rules of Magic’ – techniques that the best magicians deploy instinctively and which prove every bit as effective in the world at large. Bond films follow many of the Rules of Magic – perhaps most obviously Firsts & Lasts are remembered (Rule 13), but the key here is Rule 3: Communication can only be effective when it builds on what the audience already knows. So when I am helping people to create and deliver business presentations I am constantly urging them to build in familiar reference points that spark meaning in the minds of the audience, so that the main message can be built upon that meaning.

From a personal and professional point of view I was therefore delighted to find Spectre liberally sprinkled with familiar reference points. The challenge was to build a new story on top of these iconic elements and that was both achieved and aided by a sharp juxtaposition of the old and the new.

I would love to tell you more about these delightful moments but I am not going to for two reasons. First I don’t want to spoil the surprises and second, I’m actually writing under an embargo here. I was very fortunate to be invited to a preview by my friends at Aston Martin. Funnily enough, the Evening Standard makes no mention of what continues to be Bond’s car of choice. Maybe he thinks that requires some ‘fresh ideas’ as well!

Don’t be afraid of simple solutions when constructing your business presentation

Much has been made of the need for simplicity when it comes to communication and at some stage we have all been taught the ‘KISS” principle – ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’! I would like to make a gentler, more practical proposal for constructing a business presentation: Don’t be afraid of the simple solution – that may be staring you in the face.

I actually touched on the challenges to achieving simplicity and the clarity that usually results in my last blog (see immediately below) on the ‘Curse of Knowledge’. We tend to know too much about our subject matter to be able to explain it in simple terms. 

One of the occasions on which this became most apparent to me was a few years ago when a newly formed group of doctors and other NHS bodies was making its final pitch to become a fully-certified Clinical Consulting Group. They needed help with their presentation because they were all much more used to day-to-day medical matters than they were to making persuasive arguments to bureaucrats in control of purse strings. As experts in their various fields, however, they knew everything there was to know - other than where to start, where to finish and how to cram it all into the allotted time frame. They were truly afflicted with the ‘Curse of Knowledge’. 

After listening to some longwinded meanderings that were neither persuasive, nor memorable, I told them that the structure with which they were struggling was actually very simple; they already knew it and it’s up there. “Where”, they asked. “Just there”, I replied, pointing to a pop up banner that I was seeing for the first time, but had seemingly become just ‘part of the furniture’ to everyone else. Underneath the organisation’s logo the banner proudly declared: ‘Better Care, Better Health, Better Value’. “Those are presumably your founding principles and I assume you still stand by them”, I suggested to nods all round. “Well all you need to do in the presentation to get final sign off for your CCG is to give brief but compelling demonstrations of how you are delivering better care, better health and better value, ideally in that order”.

The solution had not occurred to anyone until that point, probably because it seemed too simple to be true. Within that simplicity, however, lay – from the audience’s point of view - clarity and familiarity, all wrapped up in the ‘Power of Three’. For the presenters it overcame all the agonising over structure – and the presentation content started to write itself.

So don’t be afraid of the simple solution – that just may be staring you in the face.

You can easily know too much when constructing a business presentation

When it comes to constructing a business presentation, you might assume that the more you know about the topic, the easier you will find the process. Actually, the opposite is often true - those with really deep knowledge of their subject matter tend to struggle with construction because they are afflicted by the ‘Curse of Knowledge’.

Outbreaks of the Curse have been most prevalent in my presentation skills coaching at a leading University where I help some of the most brilliant post-graduate students with pitches to potential investors. Having lived and breathed their projects for some years - often to the exclusion of almost anything else – they actually struggle to explain what it is they have invented. Sometimes it takes them so long to do so, that they run out of time to lay out their business plan. We have to work hard at getting their message into a neat little nutshell and positioned right up front in the running order. On one excruciating occasion, however, a student decided to manage without the coaching with the result that the Q&A kicked off with an investor asking: “This all sounds very impressive, but what actually is it”?

Fund Managers also tend suffer from the Curse of Knowledge. Their super-sized brains simply cannot cope with distilling their messages down to something the rest of us can process in the time available. In one instance I took the highly unusual step of declaring: ‘Let’s not even try to teach him any Presentation Skills; let the sales guys do all the heavy lifting and just wheel out the Fund Manager briefly so that the audience gets a glimpse of his ‘boffin credentials’.

Most recently, I discovered very clear symptoms in a highly accomplished author and broadcaster. She is giving a talk on a leading rock star and she is travelling to the USA to give the talk, because she is the world’s leading authority on the said rock star. She needed help with construction, though, saying: “I’ve got so much material, I don’t know where to start. Shall I show some clips here, play some music there, how am I going to fit it all in”? I pressed her on the nature and knowledge of the audience and listened to the general sense of what she wanted to say. We then put the two together and drew up a simple three-part structure.  The elements of the structure immediately suggested material that should fit within them; and if anything did not answer that brief it would not be included. My client relaxed because the curse of all her knowledge had been lifted and she could now focus on being magnificent in her delivery.

So the Call to Action here is: when constructing a presentation, seek help from others who are broadly within your target audience but know little or nothing about what you plan to say. Only then can you be sure of hitting home with your message. Having done exactly this with many people over a number of years, only recently did I realise that the psychologists call the problem the ‘Curse of Knowledge’. I am indebted to InsightAgents, whose blog here goes into more detail and links to a video discussion with Steven Pinker, who discusses this and the many other issues featured in his latest book The Sense of Style.