My last important learning
before I left Ernst & Young was the astonishing discovery that
almost none of what business presenters say gets 'correctly'
understood, internalized, or learned by their audience. By 'correctly'
I mean what the audience thought the message was, is almost always radically different from what the presenter intended
the message to be. I base this conclusion on entirely anecdotal
evidence: Throughout 2003, as a result of consternation about how so
little of my presentations
was sinking in, out of curiousity I began systematically debriefing
with a few audience participants in each presentation I attended
(whether or not I had been one of the presenters), as soon as possible
after the presentations, and then fed back to the presenters what the
audience said. The result was usually anger or stunned disbelief. Here
are my totally unscientific findings from this 'research':
- Regardless of the length of a presentation, audience
members will recall no more than one important message or significant
finding from a presentation, and, unless it is reinforced later, will
forget even that one message or finding in about one week. They'll
retain impressions about the speaker, but not what was said.
- The only time a majority of the audience agrees on what the
important messages or findings were, is when one or more of the
following occurs:
- the message/finding is emphasized at the very beginning and/or very end of the presentation
- there is significant two-way conversation about the message/finding during the presentation
- the message/finding is said repeatedly during the presentation, ideally by more than one person
- the message/finding is conveyed by means of a story, joke, example or anecdote
- In the absence of one of the above four 'aids', the
probability that more than a small minority of the audience will
understand what the presenter was actually trying to convey is close to
zero.
- Powerpoint slides with bullets, artwork & photos don't help understanding or retention. Charts, tables and 'top 10' lists can help, but only if they're simple, elegant, compelling, useful to keep, and properly explained.
The good people at E&Y are very intelligent, motivated individuals,
and some of them are quite good at making presentations clear,
articulate and interesting. So I confess I was amazed to discover the
almost complete lack of
communication that occurs in most presentations. Given what I've read
by Nancy Dixon and George Lakoff on the importance of adapting your
message to each listener's 'frames' if you want to be understood, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised.
Lately most of my meetings have been one-on-one, so I've started to look at conversations with the same skeptical eye as presentations. How much do we get out of them really, and are they truly about communicating or actually about something else?
So far I'm just listening to others'
conversations, whenever I get the opportunity. Since I'm male, you will
appreciate that this is very difficult for me to do! But I'm also
finding out (as most women already know well) that it can be very
entertaining, if you pay attention to the whole conversation
and not just to the words being said. I'm starting to think
conversations are as useless a medium for effective intellectual
communication as presentations. It's too early for me to present any
unscientific conclusions, but here's what I've observed so far -- I'd love to
hear what you think about all this:
- Linguistics professor Deborah Tannenseems to have a valid point when she says
women and men (with some notable exceptions) converse in entirely
different ways, and they converse differently with members of the
opposite sex than with members of their own.
- Conversations have a myriad of complex but unspoken
cultural norms, styles and rituals (taking turns, pausing, nodding,
apologizing for interrupting or misunderstanding etc.) When two people
with different norms, styles, or rituals try to converse, or when a
third person ignorant of the styles or rituals shared by the other two
tries to enter a conversation, the result is both comical and tragic. A
form of violence, even.
- Most people don't appear to listen to what they themselves
are saying. Many conversations include someone saying "I didn't say
that" when in fact they did. I suspect if people listened to a tape or
video recording of their conversations they would be stunned. They
might never say anything again!
- Most of the real communication in a conversation is not in the words. It's in the nuances of body and eye language. It's in the tone of voice. It's in the pauses. It's in the physical proximity or distance of the conversants.
- Many effective conversations appear to be really interviews.
That entails specific roles for the two conversants, with the
interviewer's role being the more difficult and more important. If one
person is mostly asking questions and the other person is doing most of
the talking, it's an interview, not a conversation.
- Conversations with more than two people are generally either parallel sequences of two-person conversations, or moderated conversations, where one person is clearly directing the conversational 'traffic'.
- Conversations would, I think, be much more effective if we
had a ritual of having each conversant state upfront what their
personal objective for the conversation is. I appreciate that in some
cases this must be done tactfully: "I've wanted to meet you since Mr. A
told me that you... ", or "I'm looking for some help with..." In the
absence of such a protocol, a lot of initial conversations exhaust an
enormous amount of participants' energy trying to figure this out
tacitly.
- From watching online chat (the only written medium that in
my opinion is fast and immediate enough to really qualify as
'conversation') and listening to young people especially talk, what
people seem to want most from conversation with friends is reassurance.
Everyone is always fishing for compliments and confirmation, and,
unless and until they clearly know and trust the offerer very well,
dubious of the offerer's motivation when they get them. Few people, it
seems, are really looking for advice, debate, or 'constructive
criticism' in a conversation. But many seem enthusiastic to offer these
things anyway!
- You can tell almost immediately whether participants in a
conversation trust each other or not. If you want to observe
conversations where there is trust, go out for dinner a lot, and avoid
offices and bars.
What have you observed from watching and listening to conversations? Is
it just me, or do most of us seem to be remarkably inept and awkward at
doing something that is crucially important, something we spend so much
time doing? What's the one thing (besides improving our listening
skills, of course) we could do to improve the quality and value of our
conversations?
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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