Powerful Pointy Presentations

Are you familiar with the “Murder Board” concept? From Wikipedia:

A murder board is a committee of questioners set up to help someone prepare for a difficult oral examination. The term originated in the U.S. military but is also used in academic and government appointment contexts.

When you’re preparing for an important presentation where you need to convince people to take a course of action, it might be a good idea to set up a “Murder Board” like this:

• Get colleagues to participate in your presentation,
• then get them to ask the most difficult questions they can to try to negate the effect of your presentation
• list the questions
• analyse them for relevance and content
• work on reframed responses
• revise your presentation
• Rehearse, rehearse, rehease.

Situation and Mission

The US Marines use the Five Paragraph Order to communicate verbal battle orders with an acronym SMEAC.

• Situation
• Mission
• Execution
• Administration and Logistics
• Command and Signal (Communications)

For more information see wikipedia

I’ve also used it a lot for non-military planning and I believe we can improve our presentations by using it as a guide. The last three points of the acronym are fairly straightforward and a lot has been written about them, but not so much on the first two.

Situation

The military analyses the enemy forces and our own. When you are giving a presentation to make a sale or to convince a person or a group to take a course of action, do you analyse those people? For instance:

• Who will be there?

• What are their names and positions?

• Have you met them? Do you need to before the presentation?

• What is their role in the organisation?

• What is their role in the course of action or sale? Are they the final decision maker, or do they have user or technical roles that can say no?

• How influential is each of them?

• What is the personal win for each of them if your proposal is approved?

• Is there a downside for them?

• What message does each need to receive?

• Can these messages be grouped?

• What is each’s likely course of action?

So before you’ve even looked at the structure of your presentation, you need you analyse your audience in detail.

Mission (Aim)

The mission or aim is an short unambiguous statement of what you wish to achieve, and answers the questions “Who, What, Where, When, and Why”. For example:

“To convince the Board to allocate $5 million for development of new markets in Asia to increase profits by 4%”.

Before you commit to the aim, you need to test it as follows:

• Is it the best I can do?

• Does I have a reasonable chance of succeeding?

• If it succeeds will the result be favourable?

If the answer is negative to any of these questions, review your aim.

Semper Fi

I was first alerted to this myth by Rolene Liebenberg and found the video on Lisa Braithwaite’s excellent site Speak Shmeak. Trainers, especially presentation trainers keep pushing the myth that only 7% of meaning comes from the words we use and quote Albert Mehrabian as the scientific source. He never said this and the video explains what he really meant.

Note the emphasis on “You”. Another brilliant presentation

These guys will do me out of a job!