The Blockbuster Motif
Some of the most powerful presentation motifs are drawn from popular culture, such as the opening statement of a jury trial using a CSI motif inspired by the popular television show. Finding a blockbuster motif that works well for your audience is a blend of science and art—the science of doing thorough research to know your audience and the art of applying an interesting theme in an innovative way to your information.
■ The best motifs are extendable. The more elegantly a single motif can extend through the presentation, the more impact it will have. Sometimes a motif is straightforward, and other times it will be clever, humorous, or surprising. The deeper and more broadly your simple motif extends through the presentation, the more cohesive and elegant the communication.
You should invest a good amount of time considering your motif and trying on different ones for size, because if you find a good one, it transforms the fiber of your story thread into fiber optics as your new information travels through working memory.
Closing the Curtain on Act I
Now that you have five headlines, you’ve completed the first draft of Act I. Review your headlines. They might seem simple, but they’ve helped you to accomplish many important tasks, such as tailoring your presentation to your audience and establishing criteria to narrow down the information you want to communicate. Consider these headlines a working draft as you complete the rest of the story template; you might need to return to them and revise them as you develop the rest of your presentation.
When a journalist puts the most important information somewhere else in the article rather than up front, it’s called burying the lead. The structure of Act I ensures you don’t bury your lead by making sure that you always bring the most important information to the top level of attention at the start of every presentation.
If you haven’t already done so, take the time now to review your five headlines with your team and anyone else who needs to approve your presentation. These headlines determine everything that will unfold next in your story, so it’s important to get other people involved early in this writing process to make sure that you’re on the right track.
Never rush through the process of writing your Act I headlines—the words that you write in Act I will make the difference between a strong start and a weak one. It’s not uncommon for an individual or a team to completely revise Act I several times until the story is exactly right for the audience. An executive team might spend a great deal of time fine-tuning Act I because, in a bigger sense, these five headlines can define the way the organization understands and relates to its customers. These five simple headlines are in fact a communications strategy and are worthy of whatever resources you normally invest in developing strategic issues.
Review the tips at the end of this topic to develop and refine your Act I headlines. Here are a couple of ways to test and review the headlines now.
Reviewing the Five Headlines
Read the five headlines aloud to verify that you have the tone, flow, and clarity of language that you want. Check your headlines to make sure that you answer each of the clarifying questions that every audience wants to know: where and when, who, what, why and how. Here are the questions in their respective headlines:
■ The Setting Headline Where am I, and when is it?
■ The Role Headline Who am I in this setting?
■ The Point A Headline What challenge do I face in this setting?
■ The Point B Headline Where do I want to be?
■ (The gap between the Point A and B headlines) Why am I here?
■ The Call to Action Headline How do I get from A to B?
Tip
If you ever have to give an off-the-cuff speech, use the five headlines of Act I to start your talk. This is a sure-fire way to answer your audience’s clarifying questions and leave them thoroughly impressed.
Appealing to Your Audience’s Emotions
The members of any audience, including these executives, are not purely rational beings—they are emotional too. You avoid a strictly rational approach by using your Act I headlines to make an emotional connection with your audience and persuade them that the information is important to them. You achieve this connection by including the most important elements of a strong story beginning, in the form of headlines for the Setting, Role, Point A, Point B, and Call to Action slides. By tailoring each of these elements to your audience and presenting them in Act I, you make your story personal to your audience and ensure that you are off to a strong start.
■ REMEMBER Your Act I headlines make an emotional connection with your audience.
Focusing Your Ideas
Act I of the story template helps you to establish criteria to narrow down all the things you could say to only the most important things you should say to this audience during this presentation.
BBP Checklist: Planning Your First Five Slides
Do the first five slides of your presentation accomplish the following:
■ Orient your audience to the setting of the presentation?
■ Interest them by acknowledging their role in the setting?
■ Engage them emotionally by describing a challenge they face (Point A)?
■ Motivate them by affirming what they want (Point B)?
■ Focus them by offering a way to get from Point A to Point B (Call to Action)?
The process of writing the five slide headlines described in this topic covers the fundamentals that apply to any presentation story and helps you to appeal to emotion and focus your ideas. Once you learn the basics, you’ll apply a broad range of creative resources, tools, and techniques to help you adapt this structure to your own style and circumstances.
When you’re satisfied with your Act I headlines, it’s time to flesh out your story in Act II.
10 Tips for Enhancing Act i
The Act I structure in the story template isn’t a strict formula—it’s a basic platform with the potential for endless innovation and improvisation based on the specifics of your situation. Just as writers can create endless story variations using this pattern, you likewise have the potential to create endless presentation variations with this tool. After you learn the fundamentals, there’s plenty of room to adapt and improvise to suit your personality, audience, and situation.
If you’re ready to take your presentations to the next level, here are 10 advanced tips for building on the basic structure of Act I.
Tip 1: inspiration from the screenwriters
Spark your creative energy by going back to the past to see the future of presentation stories. All you need to do is consult with the original expert on story structure. Start by picking up copies of Aristotle’s classics Poetics and Rhetoric. For a more recent adaptation of Aristotle’s ideas, a number of excellent topics on screenwriting can help you with writing your Act I headlines, including Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting;Syd Field’s Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (Dell, 1984); and James Bonnet’s Stealing Fire from the Gods: The Complete Guide to Story for Writers and Filmmakers (Michael Wiese Productions, 2006). Any of these titles will help you learn more about the key elements of the first act of every story, including settings, character development, inciting incidents, and plot points. As you read these topics for inspiration, keep in mind that your presentation is a specific type of story in which your audience is the main character and you are in a supporting role. Maintaining this focus will ensure that all of your stories align with the specific needs of your PowerPoint presentations.
Tip 2: Varying your Story
After you’ve mastered the basics of the five Act I headlines, try improvising in your stories. For example, your story structure might involve changing the order of headlines in Act I. You could place the Point A and B headlines first and define the Setting, Role, and Call to Action headlines later. You could begin with the Call to Action headline to grab people’s attention and then continue with the other headlines. At times, you might be able to delete a slide if the audience is absolutely in agreement about a situation, although it rarely hurts to clearly restate information to bring everyone to the same starting point.
Tip 3: Your Act I Screen Test
In filmmaking, a screen test puts actors in front of a camera to test how they will do on screen. In a PowerPoint presentation, your first screen test is for your Act I headlines, and your first audience is the members of your team. It’s important to include other people at this stage of your presentation to get early feedback and fresh perspectives. If you’re working on a small or informal presentation, ask a colleague or your boss to look over your Act I headlines.
Once you get the hang of writing an Act I with your group, try applying these techniques to other communications scenarios beyond your PowerPoint presentations. Crafting Act I of a presentation is a problem-solving framework that also helps a group to clarify strategy, develop marketing messages, create project plans, and resolve other challenges. Sharing your Act I headlines with a team is also a great way to kick off a project or orient someone new to a team. By reviewing the five headlines of Act I and the clarifying questions, team members learn the situation quickly and efficiently.
Tip 4: Multiple Stories, Multiple Templates
When it comes to presentations, one size might not fit all.
The beauty of your Act I headlines is that they are finely tailored and tuned to solve the specific problem of a specific audience. But what if your audience has more than one problem? What if you give the same presentation to different audiences that have different problems to solve? For example, you might need to present a marketing plan to different audiences, including the board, your advertising agency, and your sales team. In each instance, the presentation will have a different focus and will need a different version of Act I. If you don’t tailor your presentations to your audiences, you won’t connect with them.
One way to plan for these different situations is to create several versions of Act I, each of which is tailored to a specific audience. Create a copy of the document that contains the five Act I headlines from your current story template. In the new document, revise the Point A and Point B headlines, which describe the central problem that your new audience faces. When you change these headlines to reflect a new problem, you might find that you need to revise the Setting and Role headlines if a different set of circumstances led to this problem. And you most likely will also need to revise the Call to Action headline because the solution for the new problem will probably be different from the solution to the previous problem. After creating separate versions of Act I, you choose the most appropriate version for your next audience.
This multiple-version approach also works if you find that you have more stories to tell in addition to the one you’re working on. If you sense another story emerging, open up a new story template, and keep it open while you’re working on your current presentation, adding headlines to your second story as you go. As you develop your second presentation in parallel to the first, you might find that you’re able to refine both versions at the same time.
Tip 5: Visualize Your Audience
The more clearly you know your audience, the clearer your communications will become.
When you start writing your Act I headlines, take some time with your team to visualize everything that you know about your specific audience. To do this, open a new PowerPoint presentation, create a blank slide, and insert a picture of a specific audience member or just type a specific name on the screen. If you’re speaking to a large audience, consider the slide a composite of the average audience member.
Ask your group questions like these:
■ What do we know about this person?
■ What have we heard about his personality type?
■ How does she make decisions?
■ What can we learn from a Web search about his thinking process?
■ What can we learn from our social network about how she works with other people?
■ How do we effectively fashion an experience that aligns with his interests and personality type?
Type the information on the slide as your group gives feedback so that everyone has all the information captured on the slide. When you do this, you tap into the collective thinking of your group to better understand your audience. And you think more deeply about your audience and your purpose, which will significantly improve the quality of your headlines.
Tip 6: What Problem Is Your Audience Facing?
To accurately define the problem your audience is facing, try putting yourself in the place of the audience.
Your Act I headlines identify a problem that your audience faces and a solution that you propose. But it’s not always easy to figure out the problem to be sure you have the right solution. The visualization exercise described in Tip 5 helps you to see into the mindset of your audience so that you’ll be in a better position to write the appropriate headlines for them.
Another technique is role playing. When you review the rough draft of your Act I headlines, ask a member of the group to play the role of a decision maker or representative member of your audience. She will review the material you gathered from the preceding profiling exercise to help her get into character.
Request that this person be a devil’s advocate during your review session, continually asking questions such as these:
■ What’s in this for me?
■ Why do you think this is important to me?
■ Why should I care?
When you hear this critical voice during your review, you’ll be able to test your headlines to make sure that you’re hitting the mark. It’s better to hear the questions from a fictional audience than to have them pop up unexpectedly during your actual presentation.
Once you’ve identified your audience’s problem, don’t be surprised if your presentation holds tightly together and your ideas start to emerge into clear meaning.
Tip 7: strategic Collage
If you have a high-stakes presentation to make, you might need to invest extra effort to get to know your audience in advance. One way to get to know them is to spend a day in their shoes—at least symbolically. Open up a new PowerPoint file, and then create six blank slides. On each of these slides, type one of the clarifying questions: Where? When? Who? What? Why? and How?
Use a digital camera to take pictures of the objects your audience uses every day or of the environments where they live and work and the people they might see. Your visuals should represent whatever data you have about your audience, whether it’s market research, demographics, or focus group information. Go through your organization’s photo libraries to find licensed photographs and clip art to show the buildings in which these people work, the products they use, and the places they visit. Use a digital scanner to insert pictures of documents, a pen tablet to make sketches, a video camera to insert video clips, and a microphone to collect sound.
When you’ve collected these multimedia elements, arrange them on each of the six PowerPoint slides to create six collages. Size the different elements according to how important you think each is to your audience—for example, if mobility is most important, make the picture of a car larger than less important elements.
Present the file to your team as you discuss what it’s like to spend a day in your audience’s shoes in the context of these six slides. Then open your story template and start working on Act I. Discuss with your team how well the headlines match the collages, and then edit the headlines to provide a good fit. The better your Act I story matches the reality of your audience’s lives, the better your presentation.
Tip 8: the story of Advertising
Some of the most powerful examples of Act I story structure pass right before your eyes every day. If you look for them, you’ll find an endless stream of ideas for your presentations. These stories are all around us—in the form of advertising.
Advertisers are well aware of Aristotle’s ideas and techniques of storytelling and persuasion, because at its core, every advertisement is a persuasive story. Whether you look up at a billboard, open a magazine, or watch television, you’re seeing a mini-story built on the fundamentals of persuasion. Each advertisement has a singular goal in mind: to persuade you to do something—usually, to buy a product.
To persuade you, an advertiser will use the most current and sophisticated blend of multimedia possible. But beneath the media mix are the same classical story elements you’ve been working with in Act I of the story template: the clarifying questions where and when, who, why, what, and how. As in a PowerPoint presentation, the main character of an advertisement is usually the audience—in this case, you—because the advertiser’s goal is to persuade you to buy or think something new.
So if you’re watching a commercial for a laundry detergent, compare the questions your audience silently asks of your five Act I headlines with what you see on TV, something like this:
■ Where am I, and when is it? I’m at home, and it’s the afternoon.
■ Who am I here in this setting? I’m a person getting ready to go out for the evening.
■ What challenge do I face? I dropped spaghetti on my favorite shirt.
■ Where do I want to be? I want to impress my date tonight by looking my best.
■ How do I get from here to there? If I buy Product X laundry detergent, my shirt will be clean in time for my date.
There’s usually a one-to-one correspondence between your Act I questions and most advertisements because both have the same intent: to make an emotional connection and to persuade. And both creatively interpret the fundamentals of story structure to get the job done. The next time you notice an advertisement, observe the structure that gives it form. Sometimes the story elements might be implied or communicated using a photo, sound, or movement instead of words, but they will usually all be there.
As you begin to see this common persuasive story structure in advertising, you’ll be more aware of the range of storytelling approaches, and you’ll be able to apply these techniques to your own Act I headlines.
Tip 9: Persuasive Education
Educators and trainers are in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to the challenges of communicating today. They also are affected by the expectations of audiences who now are fluent in the visual language around them and expect the same level of media sophistication in the classroom.
For example, a university professor who’s struggling to find a way to make his architecture course more interesting and engaging is struck by the fact that every one of the architects he’ll discuss also struggled with change—economic change, social change, demographic change, and technological change. So he decides to adopt a classical persuasive technique and chooses the singular topic of change as the key theme of his course. The persuasive story in Act I goes like this:
■ Where am I, and when is it? Architects stand at the epicenter of economic change, social change, and technological change.
■ Who am I in this setting? As a new graduate, you will be facing the reality of the situation soon.
■ What challenge do I face? As a new hire, you are most in danger of instability due to the forces of change.
■ What do I want? You’d like to learn the skills to handle the situation no matter what changes occur.
■ How do I get from here to there? Learn three crucial techniques to ensure that you keep a firm footing.
This persuasive Act I structure provides an elegant framework for the entire course. It gives students a way to understand the single theme and follow it through the various events in the complicated history of architecture. And the dramatic and persuasive elements give students a way to relate personally to the material.
Finding a defining structure like this is not always easy, but it can make the difference between a boring lecture and an engaging presentation. Try applying the persuasive model the next time you teach or inform, and see whether you make things more interesting for both yourself and your audience.
Tip 10: Get the Writing Right
Beyond the nuts and bolts of writing down the words, consider ways to apply literary techniques to convey clear meaning across your headlines. Act I is so brief and elegant that you are actually telling a rich but concise story in only five sentences. Using a motif is one powerful technique; look for other techniques from professional writers whose work you admire.
Writers such as poets are extremely good at communicating a great deal of information in a limited number of words. Pick up a topic of good poetry, and pay attention to how the author uses words, metaphor, and pacing. Scan through the text in a range of newspapers, and consider how the writers manage to tell a complicated story in only a brief article. Listen to people speak, and try adapting the direct and clear phrases you hear to the words of your Act I headlines. If you have good writers on your team, ask them to help write your Act I headlines, and if you have the resources, hire a professional writer to help. The success of your entire presentation rests on the language you use for Act I, so invest the resources necessary to get it right.
And you can put that in writing.
