Today I’m going to show you how I actually design a really phenomenal presentation. Over the past 15 years, I have presented to many hundreds of thousands of people. Just last month I taught 150 leaders at IKEA this exact method.
Designing a Presentation for Any Audience
Stephen, who’s behind the camera, doesn’t know what’s happening right now, but we’re going to actually design a mock presentation for a group. I asked him to shout out a very niche group of professionals, and he picked “jet ski insurance professionals”.
So this is our mission. We’re going to design a 60-minute presentation using The Contribution Method. Here’s going to do the quick and dirty version.
Start with a Blank Piece of Paper and Five Ingredients
Here’s how I design any gathering. It doesn’t matter if it’s for an arena of 6,000 people or an all-day program for 100 executives at a Fortune 500:
I get a blank piece of paper and I write one, two, three, four, five.
These five things are five “locations for contribution”. They map to the timeline of your gathering. If you don’t want to think about jet ski professionals, think about the thing that you’re presenting and designing. No doubt it has a start time and an end time. What you have latitude over is from the few minutes before somebody even walks in to the time you’re done. This is what you have to work with.
These five ingredients map to that timeline. Ingredient number two happens really quick, takes less than 60 seconds, but if you don’t do it, it will completely shoot the rest of your presentation in the foot. Ingredient three is so often missed, and it has a profound difference in how people actually remember, retain, and relate to everything you’re going to say after that. Ingredient number four is your content, the stuff that you actually want to get into people’s heads, but we’re going to be really deliberate about designing that content for contribution as opposed to a really boring death by PowerPoint slog. And the fifth one, usually people forget, and they end things leaving in a rush with high stress.
Ingredient 1: The Unofficial Start
A friend of mine, Mark Collard, would call this an unofficial start. It’s the few minutes before your gathering begins, when you have people walking in. Even though you think your presentation hasn’t started, it has.
An unofficial start is any strategy that you’re going to use to promote early engagement and interaction that amplifies the productivity of what you’re up to.
If you’re presenting to jet ski professionals and you want it to be really useful, here’s an unofficial start I might do. I take the deck of cards out, a bunch of words on one side. I’m not trying to sell you card decks. Well, actually I do sell card decks, but you can get a free printable version of this deck too. The cards all have visually illustrated words on them.
As the jet ski insurance professionals are walking into a room, my prompt is going to be: choose a word that would make the next month of your life a bit easier. As people are coming in, instead of me standing nervously thinking about myself and what I’m going to present, I’m saying, “Hey, welcome. Grab a word off the table that would make the next month of your life a bit easier, and sit down next to somebody and feel free to share the word.”
Already, by the time my presentation starts, there’s this buzz. There’s this sense of, okay, I’m going to actually be engaged here. This is not a sleeper PowerPoint presentation. And if your thing starts at 9:00 a.m., this is happening from about 8:57 to 9:02, to extend understanding for people who show up a minute or two late.
Ingredient 2: The Context Hook
The second ingredient is this idea of a context hook. When you have a room full of people walk into a meeting, if you don’t invite the group into one clear shared experience and unite them around one clear shared intention, then you’re going to have 30 different meetings going in different directions, because everybody wants something different.
The context hook is anything you say or do that invites people into that moment. For me, as a context hook, I’m going to say: “You all chose a word as you walked into the room. I’ve designed an experience for you today, not a one-way presentation that you have to sit through. To make sure you get even more value out of it, here’s what I want you to do. Take the word that’s in your hand. Imagine that word as a pair of glasses. If you chose resilience or anticipation or humility, that’s your lens. For the hour that we have together, I want you to listen for all the ways that word shows up in this presentation.”
In essence, if there are 30 people in the room, you’re giving 30 personalized presentations, which is a whole lot more engaging than counting on everybody loving what you put on your slides five days ago.
Ingredient 3: Connection Before Content
In 60 minutes, if you’ve got a lot of content to get through, a lot of people will say, “I don’t have time for this.” I would argue you do not have time to skip ingredient number three, which is this idea of connection before CONTENT, in all caps.
I don’t want people just connecting and relating to me, because then all the heavy lifting is on me. If I’m the only one presenting, I’ve forced everybody into the role of either critic or consumer. But as soon as I invite them to connect with each other and have a quick conversation, I’ve invited them to step into the land of contribution. Now they’re not judging what you’re saying as the presenter. They’re having an experience and making a connection that will last.
The most basic way to do this, if they’ve just chosen a word, is to say: “Turn your word over. There’s a question on the other side. Get into groups of three with people you know least, and just answer the question on the back.” Each question on the back of that word is kind of a laser pointer at the particular word they chose, from a different angle. So you have everybody in discussions about a topic that they volunteered and said would make their life easier.
If you actually give up four or five minutes of your mic time in a presentation for people to connect with each other, what will shift is they’ll assume, wow, he or she actually cares about what I think.
Want to try this with your group? The deck I’m using is the We! Engage Cards, and you can download free printable cards, book excerpts, and more here.
Ingredient 4: Content Designed for Contribution
Here’s the thing as you shift to ingredient number four, which is content designed for contribution, not just passive consumption. If you have given up four minutes of your time and allowed people to connect with each other, relatedness enters the room. People do not care about what you’re going to say unless you care about them. In a presentation of a thousand people, you can’t individually care about every single person. But when you invite them to connect with each other, it builds this culture of relatedness that allows for whatever you’re going to share.
Let’s say you have some very technical safety policies to present to these jet ski insurance professionals. You have a PowerPoint slide with a thousand words on it. You can present that in one of two ways. You can stand up and try to be as entertaining and engaging as possible, and that’s all the heavy lifting on you, and people are just gladiator-judging: I like this person, I don’t like this person.
The much more effective way, which is way less of a lift on you, is this. Ready? “Hey everybody. At the beginning of today you chose a word. In a minute I’m going to put up a PowerPoint slide, and I’m going to give you 30 seconds to read everything on it. At the end of that, I’m going to ask you to turn to somebody, or popcorn out: what is the one thing on this slide that might actually make your life a little bit easier? And what’s the one thing on this slide that might actually make your life a bit more annoyingly hard? Ready? Go.”
You can mess with those prompts. All I’ve done is taken that content and handed it back to the audience and said, here, you can read, do something awesome with this. They’re passing it through their gray matter rather than relying on you to be the song and dance at the front of the room.
Relying on the song and dance leaves most presenters with a major vulnerability hangover at the end of the session, because you’re left wondering: I gave it my all, but I’m not sure if people were actually with me. Did they get it? Did they like it? No one’s going to walk up to your face and say it was really terrible, so you’re always your own harshest critic, left wondering. But as soon as you turn this content into an experience, that can’t happen.
Ingredient 5: A Closing That Leaves Them Wanting to Come Back
The last ingredient, if you skip it, everything you’ve done up to this point may fall flat and become forgettable. That is the closing. You’re going to end in a way that leaves everybody wanting to come back.
Most presenters have this dynamic of, I have too much to share, I didn’t get it all in, and they get all this nervousness built up. That is the curse of knowledge. Your audience doesn’t know what you didn’t share with them. They just know: how do I feel leaving this room? Do I feel like I was better for being here, or do I feel like I just wasted 60 minutes of my life?
If you’ve got logistics to end with, logistics should never be the closing. Ending with scheduling the next meeting or talk should never be the end of a presentation. Logistics are always the second to last thing that you wrap with.
For example, right before I share a killer closing for these jet ski professionals: this was a really quick and dirty design of a 60-minute presentation for a random group, off the cuff, with no props or prep. If I was actually presenting to them, I would spend a little more time and attention. If you want to do that, I put together a really robust free field guide on The Contribution Method, on how to cut your prep in half and double your impact in any presentation, workshop, or gathering that you’re hosting. Totally worth your time. It goes much deeper into all this stuff.
And now to the killer closing that I promised. The way I’m going to close with the jet ski professionals is by inviting them to look at their word. I’m going to give them 60 seconds of silence to think about one thing that struck them from the last hour, related to the word they chose at the very beginning. Then, in the large group, no matter how many people are in the room, I’m going to popcorn out three to five responses. A friend and mentor of mine, Peter Block, would say, once you’ve heard from three to five people, you’ve heard from the whole room.
And then I’m going to simply say: “Thank you so much for bringing all of yourself to this. It made it so much more interesting. Now, let’s go ride jet skis.”
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