All too much - Why conventional speech simply no longer works
Whoever steps in front of an audience today, whether online, on a stage (before Corona) or in a meeting, is faced with a huge task. After all, it has long since ceased to be simply a matter of conveying information. As a speaker, you are working against decreasing attention spans, sequential information behaviour, content and visual overstimulation, and the growing distrust against authorities and opinion leaders. Effective information and knowledge transfer at the beginning of the 21st century has thus become one of the greatest challenges.
Every speech, every conversation, every lecture serves to convince. Managers and executives are masters in persuasion. Their most important tool is the ability of persuasion. They lead by informing their counterparts - employees, team members, superiors, partners, customers and opinion leaders - about their goals, ideas and strategies by inspiring and motivating.
This power of persuasion is more decisive today than at any time in the last 100 years. (...) We live in times of change, which demand new skills and competencies from managers and employees. In her essay "Innovation and Competencies in the Change of Industrial Organizational Structures", Constanze Kurz, sociologist at work, lists the fields of competence that will be decisive:
- Professional competencies: This refers to all job- and context-specific skills that are necessary to accomplish a task.
- Methodological competencies: This includes all instrumental skills that serve to present, interpret and solve work tasks.
- Personal skills such as the ability to organise, combine and make decisions, to deal with oneself and others.
- Social skills such as communication and cooperation skills.
But at the same time it has never been so difficult to be heard (...):
Too much information
"Presentations fail because of too much information, not too little." - Nancy Duarte
On August 6th, 1991 Tim Berners-Lee published the first website: info.cern.ch. 23 years later, on September 16, 2014, Berners-Lee announced via his Twitter account that the number of websites had risen to over a billion. (...) In 2017 there were about 1,767 billion websites registered on the net.
Anyone looking for information will find plenty of it. Somewhere. The average knowledge worker in the U.S. spends about seven hours in front of the screen, surfing about 40 pages a day - for work and personal use. (...) According to Statista, 771 billion e-mails were sent in Germany in 2017. The forecast is 917 billion. Office workers check their e-mail inbox 50 to 100 times a day (...).
But e-mails are only part of the flood of information: Every 60 seconds, 510,000 comments are published on Facebook, 293,000 status updates and 136,000 photos are published per minute. On YouTube, 300 hours of videos are uploaded in the same time. In addition, communication and information exchange are increasingly shifting to messenger apps and networking platforms. Already today, each of the 1.5 billion WhatsApp users sends and receives an average of 43 messages per day, all of which have to be read and processed. No wonder that hardly anyone listens anymore. (…)
Too little time
The flood of information is not so much the problem. A good speaker who has an exciting topic to offer could still rely on the attention of his audience - if the clock wasn't ticking. Time is precious.Online magazines inform their readers about the probable reading time of an article. (...) Readers are trained for time-efficient reading. E-readers and tablets record how often you turn the pages and calculate in percent and minutes how much time you will need for the rest of the text. Internet sites such as howlongtoreadthis.com provide information on the reading time of novels. (...) If you want to be faster, you can increase your reading speed eightfold with the help of apps like FastReader. Just like driving a car, where the navigation device displays the driving time in real time and calculates the arrival time and best route, the information intake is also optimised for efficiency - whether news, background information or even entertainment.
Speakers who have to adapt to a time-optimized audience therefore need much more than just an interesting range of topics: They need a presentation style that makes their audience forget about time.
Too little concentration
However, the time aspect is still not the biggest problem for a good speaker. (...) According to a survey by Mind Store Marketing, over half of smartphone users look at their device every five to ten minutes. (...) Things are even more unsettled at the workplace: McKinsey found out that employees are interrupted in their work every three minutes. The reasons are well known: digital communication tools, automated alerts, social networking distractions, infotainment sites and other disruptive factors (...). Everywhere colleagues and friends ping us, pop up hints and ask menu windows for help and cooperation. The attention of knowledge workers is fragmented into slices.This interrupter mentality costs companies a lot of money. Up to 28 percent of productivity is lost daily.
If this figure does not alarm you, you should at least pay attention when psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell blames modern workplaces for promoting stress-related ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder). Hewlett-Packard was able to prove in a study that the intelligence quotient of knowledge workers decreases by up to 10 percent due to constant interruptions of work and segmented communication and information bites. This is twice as much as smoking a joint, as commentators on the study noted (...).
Speakers today must therefore adapt to an increasingly critical and impatient audience. An audience that wants to be addressed, informed, entertained and kept in good spirits with special offers - especially in view of stressful time management and the efficient use of one's own time.
Too complex
"The complexity that our company will have to deal with over the next five years is outside the measurable range - on a scale of 1 to 5, I would give it 100. - Edward Lonergan, President and CEO, Diversey, Inc. (IBM CEO Study)
Pepsi or Coke? McDonalds or Burger King? Michael Jackson or Prince (formerly known ...)? The 70s and 80s of the 20th century are a time of simple decisions in the transfigured retrospect. There was only an either/or. Today the world seems much more complex. Coca-Cola offers over 27 different cola drinks, and the music market has expanded into countless niche genres (...).
In 2010, IBM asked 1,500 CEOs worldwide in its CEO study about the greatest challenges of the future. The majority of CEOs agreed that we are heading for a "completely different world", a world whose complexity is increasingly difficult to manage. More than half of the respondents even doubted that they would be able to master this complexity (a result which looks also somehow wired in the mid of the Corona virus anyway...).
We are well advised to deal with the dynamics and complexity of the new world and to create learning and flexible organisations that are able to deal with complex systems and, above all, to make this world more understandable and accessible. Information and communication services play a key role in this respect. Only those who succeed in transforming complex facts and data into actual knowledge can make meaningful use of information.
This means a great responsibility for speakers and presenters who are competing against a constantly overstrained audience, which - to make matters worse - usually does not even trust the speaker on stage.
Too little trust
"If people can no longer distinguish between facts and misinformation, this has fundamental consequences for our social discourse and cohesion." - Susanne Marell, former CEO Edelman.ergo Germany(...) Fake news, manipulation of opinion, lack of opportunities and lack of competence to check the truth of news increase the distrust of opinion makers and multipliers. (...) Never since the survey of the Edelman Trust Barometer 2001 has media worldwide become less trusted than today, especially social media.
Stories are not the answer, are they?
On April 9, 2014, after 34 minutes of his speech at the Annual Meeting of Daimler AG, CEO Dieter Zetsche, reached into the left inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a letter.
Speeches at shareholder meetings are usually not very emotional. Once a year, the audience is presented with the balance sheet, and at the end they are discharged with a positive outlook for the coming year. The management enumerates in a businesslike tone step by step what has been achieved. This is also how Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG, explains the successes and achievements of his company for more than half an hour at the Annual Meeting 2014 in Berlin.
But suddenly - talking about "vehicle safety" - he pulls out a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. Grabs a a letter from a Spanish customer named Juan, thanking the Mercedes-Benz engineers in friendly words. Why?
A motorist had missed a red light, so he raced with full force into the car in which Juan and his girlfriend had been sitting. It was a terrible accident but the couple survived unhurt. They did not even get a scratch, although their car, a Mercedes CLA, had been damaged completely. In the letter that Zetsche reads to his shareholders at that annual meeting, the client tells about this incident and finally thanks Mercedes for the safety technology that saved his and his girlfriend's life. All's well that ends well.
A little story - told in the middle of an otherwise very sober speech proving vehicle safety and customer satisfaction - suddenly triggers applause from the shareholders in Berlin, gives the appearance of the Chairman of Daimler AG a very personal, emotional note and above all shows the power of storytelling (...).
What is deliberately staged in a shareholders' meeting is actually a matter of course for us in everyday life. Every day we tell stories and anecdotes. The psychologist Dr. Robin Dunbar from the University of Liverpool was able to prove that 65 percent of our daily conversation consists of personal stories.
And in this way we attract the attention of our friends, family members and acquaintances - we get their valuable time, their concentration and strengthen their trust in us.
So storytelling is actually something quite natural in our communication - when we exchange ideas with other people. So why is it so difficult to apply storytelling in the professional working world?
But suddenly - talking about "vehicle safety" - he pulls out a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. Grabs a a letter from a Spanish customer named Juan, thanking the Mercedes-Benz engineers in friendly words. Why?
A motorist had missed a red light, so he raced with full force into the car in which Juan and his girlfriend had been sitting. It was a terrible accident but the couple survived unhurt. They did not even get a scratch, although their car, a Mercedes CLA, had been damaged completely. In the letter that Zetsche reads to his shareholders at that annual meeting, the client tells about this incident and finally thanks Mercedes for the safety technology that saved his and his girlfriend's life. All's well that ends well.
A little story - told in the middle of an otherwise very sober speech proving vehicle safety and customer satisfaction - suddenly triggers applause from the shareholders in Berlin, gives the appearance of the Chairman of Daimler AG a very personal, emotional note and above all shows the power of storytelling (...).
What is deliberately staged in a shareholders' meeting is actually a matter of course for us in everyday life. Every day we tell stories and anecdotes. The psychologist Dr. Robin Dunbar from the University of Liverpool was able to prove that 65 percent of our daily conversation consists of personal stories.
And in this way we attract the attention of our friends, family members and acquaintances - we get their valuable time, their concentration and strengthen their trust in us.
So storytelling is actually something quite natural in our communication - when we exchange ideas with other people. So why is it so difficult to apply storytelling in the professional working world?
I say, have courage: present less and tell more.
You will find tips and tricks for storytelling in speech and presentation in the book from which this text also originates (in German): "What's your Story? Leadership Storytelling für Führungskräfte, Projektverantwortliche und alle, die etwas bewegen wollen" - a book that encourages everyone to tell more than just present. Published by O'Reilly, available at your bookstore, at amazon, at O'Reilly, Thalia or GenialLokal - just as you like.
