IndustryInsights

By James MacGregor
Vice Chairman, The Abernathy MacGregor Group Inc.

Let’s start fast: It takes 50 words for readers like you to decide whether to keep reading. If you want to inform, use a piece of paper. If you want to persuade, do it in person. Keep presentations short. Keep audiences small. New electronic technologies? Use them carefully and sparingly.

The preceding 50 words fly in the face of most of today’s conventional wisdom. For the better part of two decades, we’ve been told that new technologies are revolutionizing communication: the Web, e-mail, teleconferencing, computing, wireless. Communicate with anyone—or everyone—anywhere, at any time, easily and effectively. Save time. Save money.

New technologies work pretty much as advertised. So how come communicating is such a mess? Has there ever been a time when there were more communications that are misunderstood, not remembered, that are resisted, ignored, resented, or just plain hated? Problems are everywhere, and they take a fearsome toll. Bad decisions. Missed opportunities. Lost learning. Disaffected audiences. More is not necessarily better, and speed is not a substitute for clarity. We need to recall how, and why, people really talk to each other. First, the how:

Basic principle #1: Put it on paper. If your goal is simply to transfer information, the best way to have that information understood and remembered is to put it on a plain old piece of white paper, using words, pictures, charts, and tables as needed. The research says this is still how people absorb content best. Send it electronically (to be fast and efficient), but figure that it’s going to be printed out when it gets there.

Basic principle #2: Say it in person. If your goal is to persuade someone (how to think, what to buy, how to act, what to try), the best way to make the sale is oneon- one, face-to-face. Questions, body language, discussion, debate: The audience buys into the person, and only then into whatever the person wants to “sell.” The task gets harder as the audience gets larger. But it doesn’t become impossible until the persuader and the audience are in physically different places.

Now, here’s why: Communications serve two different, and sometimes opposing, purposes—to transfer information, and to persuade. What’s best to reach one goal isn’t necessarily what’s best for the other. Communications means getting and keeping someone’s attention. But human attention is hard-wired to keep moving, and novelty and spectacle are its attractors. Getting someone’s attention is pretty easy. Keeping it, very hard. We’ll come back to this in a minute.

Why meetings succeed: A group of people meet, sitting around a table. The constant scrutiny of the others forces you to pay attention. Words transfer the information; non-verbal communication does the persuading. Offer an idea: You can see or feel who approves, disapproves, is curious, is threatened, isn’t paying attention, wants to say something, or just wants to go home. Hundreds of non-verbal cues, only some of them intentional, give the in-person meeting much of its communications value.

Why conference calls usually fail: Now let those same people meet via the telephone. No one has to pay attention. An opinion is asked for: The response, “Would you mind repeating the question?” (Perhaps the person being queried was multitasking, er, doing his e-mail.) Another person is asked for information, but the response is, “He’s just stepped out. I’ll go get him.” All the non-verbal cues are lost. No one senses how others are reacting. Interrupters overwhelm the polite participants. A single articulate, aggressive participant can bully the conference to his or her chosen conclusion—but since the others may not have bought into that conclusion, the post-meeting followthrough may be quite unsatisfactory. There’s some research, by no means definitive, suggesting that decisions reached in conference calls are worse than those coming out of in-person meetings.

Making it better: Not all meetings succeed; not all conference calls fail. Conference calls are a business necessity when geographically separated people must work together. The organizations that do them best all seem to follow similar patterns: The most important decisions are made in person. People who need to work together electronically meet in person on a regular basis. Conference calls are short; so are their agendas. Documents are distributed—and actually read—in advance. Expected contributions from participants are defined. Lurkers with no real role are excused. A leader is identified, and actually leads.

Why good presentations persuade: One (or more) persons speaking to a large number of others is a presentation. The only reason for calling the audience together is persuasion—accept these ideas, buy this product, vote for this candidate, invest in these securities. If the purpose is simply to transfer information, the information should be put on a piece of paper and distributed to the audience members, who will understand and remember it better than if it were conveyed verbally (or even verbally with the aid of slides or other visuals).

The essence of persuasion is personal. Good presenters project competence, confidence, and other traits an audience recognizes and approves of. Good presentations involve the audience, earning its acceptance through questions and answers, dialogue, and debate. Nobody persuades while reading a script. (Politicians rehearse endlessly and use teleprompters so as not to seem to be reading from a script).

Why bad presentations don’t persuade: Nobody persuades an audience that’s not listening. When a single voice is talking, a listener’s attention starts to fade after nine minutes. After 15 minutes, that attention is pretty well gone. Some college professors claim great results from replacing their 45-minute lectures with two 15-minute talks separated by another activity that engages the mind differently.

Nobody persuades an audience that’s paying attention to something else—such as a brilliantly lit nine- by twelve-foot image projected onto a screen (a Power- Point presentation). Human attention goes to the strongest visual attraction. A comparatively tiny talking head just can’t compete with a slide.

And there’s another problem. A typical word-based slide (such as PowerPoint) contains no more than 40 words, which a viewer can read in about six seconds. A simple graph takes about the same time to comprehend. But a speaker will normally talk about the slide’s subject matter for a minute or two. The brain’s solution to differing inputs from eyes and ears is to absorb the slide’s content and then devote attention to something else, such as hand-held wireless e-mail, until the next slide appears.

Making it better: A great presentation today isn’t too different from a great one a hundred years ago. If the presentation is on behalf of an organization, its head or CEO will be the most persuasive presenter. He may be a poor speaker, but he’s the one with the power. The presentation should be short. If there’s a lot of information to transfer, put in into a document that can be read in advance. If the presentation must be long, use multiple speakers, Q&A sessions, breaks or other changes of pace to keep the audience as attentive as possible. Use slides or visual aids only where they’re needed for explanation or emphasis; when they’re not needed, let the screen go dark, so attention returns to the speaker. Write the speech first, then add the slides; too many people today do this backwards.

Above all, don’t skimp on time for questions and audience interaction. This is where the real persuasion takes place. This is even more crucial when the presentation takes place electronically rather than in person. Presentation-based teleconferences now connect many hundreds of participants, while webcast audiences may number in the thousands. They’re disliked by presenters and audiences alike, but the desire for simultaneity across great distance makes them a necessary evil.

Telepresentations need to be brief: The good ones rarely cross the 15-minute barrier. With nothing for the eyes to look at (except, perhaps, slides on a Web site), it’s essentially impossible to hold audience attention while reading a canned script. Even when the readers are polished, listeners deeply resent presentations that recite material already distributed in press releases or other advance documents. Q&A sessions after long presentations are usually numbingly detailoriented. Short presentations leave just enough undiscussed that really good questions can arise—the kind that good speakers can hit right out of the ballpark.

Most CEOs don’t have to be told these things. They communicate straight information (such as new policies) in written form, whether e-mailed or printed on a piece of paper. But when they’re selling, which is most of the time, they reflexively employ direct, inperson communications—with boards of directors, key managers, employees, key customers, vendors, business partners, legislators. (Many also know that if they cannot do the selling themselves, an in-person subordinate is more persuasive than a CEO reading a script on a webcast or the phone.) So why do conference calls and webcasts clutter their calendars? Usually, someone said it would save time or money.

Good communications practice falls down with the greatest regularity when publicly traded corporations try to talk to their investors. “The regs say we have to give material info to everyone at once, and fast, so we have to do it this way” is the recurrent explanation. Yeah, right. The regulations are intended to foster more open and timely communication, and that’s all to the good. But when the communication is stilted, tedious, and superficial, all that openness and timeliness is wasted. Real dialogue is still where the rewards are.

Sixteen closing words: Information transfer is about documents. Persuasion is about direct human contact. Anything else is second-best communication.

If you would like to discuss any of these ideas, please feel free to call Jim MacGregor or Rhonda Barnat at 212-371- 5999 or Ian Campbell at 213-630-6550.