Use Unexpected Openers to Capture Audience Interest
By David Green
The informal networking session was over and the 20-odd working speechwriters took their seats in the conference room in eager anticipation of the lunch speaker. It was to be Ted Sorenson, renowned speechwriter and confidante for John F. Kennedy during his White House years.
Sorenson took his place at the podium, smiled kindly at the gathering, and then began: “Thank you so much for having me here today. It is quite an honor to be with you…and that concludes my prepared remarks.”
Now, if you are a god in your industry and have the audience hanging on your every word before you even open your mouth… you can get away with an opening like that. But when it comes to making speeches and presentations, most of us are still mere mortals. And, as the saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression. So your opening comments are critical. You have to engage your audience from the get-go.
That’s why so many speakers think they need to start their talk with a story or a joke – to get the audience “on their side.” These opening gambits are what I call “speech props” and they can be extremely useful…in concept. But not if they come from one of those “500 great jokes for public speakers” sourcebooks.
Because you not only have to engage your audience, you have to overcome their expectations so that they don’t write you off before you get to the good stuff in your presentation. Oh yes, the audience thinks they know what to expect from you. They know your title, your company, maybe they’ve seen an abstract – they think they’ve got you pegged.
Power of the Unexpected
So it’s time to counter-program by opening with a story that throws them off balance, that bends their perspective, that makes them look at you with fresh eyes…and listen with fresh ears. This is pure Made-to-Stick 101 – and if that reference doesn’t ring a bell, you might want to check out Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
The Heath brothers offer 6 basic precepts for creating memorable communications, but the one I particularly fancy is Principle 2: Unexpectedness. Here’s their take on why unexpectedness matters:
“How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive.”
Okay, fine…so, how do you do that exactly? By following these three basic “rules.”
1) Look outside the box
Get outside your industry. Look for stimuli that aren’t “making the rounds.” Seek provocative thinking. One of the best sources might be the web site of the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference, http://www.ted.com/ Many of the five- to 20-minute talks posted there, videotaped from the conference proceedings, are highly effective at turning your head around and making you see your world differently.
I have a friend who, knowing that I do a lot of work with technology companies, occasionally sends me articles like “The 10 stupidest tech company blunders” with the note “good anecdotes for speeches.” But you’ll often find that the best anecdotes for speeches are the ones that come from out of left field. These tend to engage the audience more as they try to figure out where you are going. For example, in recent speeches and ghosted columns for an art-education association client, I’ve used these topics:
•The doctrine of the Cluetrain Manifesto.
•Bud Clark’s stunning mayoral win in Portland, Oregon in 1984.
•The fact that Minneapolis and St Paul aren’t entirely on opposite banks of the Mississippi.
How could such a hodge-podge of disparate and arcane leads make sense? Well, since the association was going through a major cultural transformation, my client’s first task was to get her membership’s attention. Then she needed to champion her cause – over a period of time – enlisting passionate support, and creating local champions to spread the gospel.
So the Cluetrain Manifesto, which advocates for digital media’s ability to overcome the stranglehold of corporate-speak, introduced the power of authenticity in an individual’s voice. The Minneapolis-St. Paul geographic trivia reference was the intro to a speech she gave in Minneapolis – and was used as an example of how preconceptions based on conventional wisdom can keep us from our goals. Bud Clark’s mayoral win, which I knew about from living in Portland shortly before that election, was a model for harnessing populist fervor to overcome great odds.
Dramatically different leads, but all working on the same wavelength to effectively empower the association’s members to take a more activist role.
2) Let inspiration come to you
Many years ago, when I was working as an advertising copywriter in New York City, I told my boss that the company should just pay me to walk back and forth between the subway station and the office because I got more good ideas during those 30 minutes – when I wasn’t really trying – than in the eight hours a day I spent at my desk. A few months ago, a client told me that she loved getting e-mails from me that start out “I was just out for a walk along the reservoir and I got to thinking…”
The best ideas are like that squiggly dust mote on your eye that you catch a fleeting glance of when you gaze up into a summer sky, but that darts out of sight when you try to look directly at it. The more you expose yourself to influences outside your industry, the more you open yourself up to cross-pollination, which is where creativity is most often born. For instance, I once found the conceptual construct for a speech on complexity vs. simplicity in the midst of watching the movie “Pollock.”
Watching Pollock’s chaotic jumble of splatter painting seemed to represent technological complexity in a very obvious way. Later, for stark contrast, I chose Mark Rothko’s tranquil works, with their blocks of muted color, to represent simplicity. The speech was by the CEO of a networking equipment company to industry analysts and angel investors and, after a brief scene-setting comment about the challenge of developing breakthrough innovation, he got into his true lead:
“So every now and again, I like to look at our challenge from an entirely different frame of reference. It keeps me fresh. And I’m willing to bet that it will make the next 25 minutes more intriguing than maybe you thought they were going to be. I figured I could get away with using Jackson Pollock as my keynote visual, because you’re all eclectic, multi-dimensional people, with diverse interests. If I tried this with an engineering audience, I’d probably lose the entire audience while they scribbled down all the architectural flaws in Pollock’s schematic.
Now, I’m a network guy. I look at Jackson Pollock, and I see networks. Specifically, I see today’s wide area networks – the complexity, the layers, the obstacles to flow. Of course, if you know anything about Jackson Pollock as a person, you know that he was a bona-fide tortured soul – which I suspect might eventually describe the engineers in charge of building broadband networks on [complex] SONET-based architecture.
Now, Mark Rothko – he’s my idea of an Ethernet Everywhere guy. There’s a fundamental simplicity here, and a sense of the infinite – infinite space, infinite potential.
3) Practice storytelling
This may seem like splitting hairs, but there really is a difference between storytelling and telling a story. Storytelling is about more than the relating of an anecdote; it’s about the creation of a distinctive, intriguingly listenable voice.
Let me give you an example. I had a technology client who wanted to build a keynote address around the message that his industry needed radical innovation in order to jump start recovery from the 2001 recession. The tepid, incremental, more-bang-for-your-buck product improvements that had dominated the recession period no longer would get the job done.
While the speech was still in incubator mode, I came across an article about building strategic competitive advantage that included a quotation about the noted computer scientist, Alan Kay, with the catchphrase, “Perspective is worth 80 points of IQ.”
This was the resulting presentation lead:
“In March 1975, a new office building was dedicated on Coyote Hill Road in Palo Alto, CA. Now, ordinarily, I wouldn’t much care about the dedication of an office building, and I can’t imagine you would either. Except that this building was the new home to a still-youthful organization called the Palo Alto Research Center, better known as Xerox PARC – and you probably all owe your jobs to what was invented in that building. I know I certainly wouldn’t be standing here before you if Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs hadn’t joined forces there in the mid-‘70s to develop Ethernet technology.
The creations that originated at Xerox PARC are mythic, and their creators are legendary. One of the most legendary of these is a man named Alan Kay, who is responsible for inventing object-oriented programming, the graphical user interface, and the very concept of a personal computer. Alan Kay has one of the most original minds in the technology field – perhaps one of the most original minds, period.
But I come here, not to praise Alan Kay – nor to bury him – but to quote him. Alan Kay once said that perspective was worth 80 points of IQ. In other words, it’s not how smart you are that matters, it’s your ability to see things from different points of view. That’s how innovation happens: by looking at things from a different angle and making connections that no one has made before.”
After my client finished, the conference organizer met him backstage and told him that, unlike the previous day, when a more prominent CEO had some 300 people leave his keynote before he finished because his approach was too “same-old, same-old,” not one person left before he finished.
A good speaker also knows how to leave his audience on a powerful upnote – but that’s a story for another time. So next presentation, look for a way to start that will take your audience by surprise (as long as you can make it relevant to your message). It may make you a little bit nervous – but then, the best communications solutions almost always do.
About the Author:
David Green is principal of UnCommon Knowledge, a speechwriting and strategic communications consultancy in the New York City area. He has written speeches for senior executives at Hewlett-Packard, Mercedes-Benz USA, Advanced Micro Devices, Johnson & Johnson and Extreme Networks, among others – all while being an involved father of 11-year-old twin boys. He’s not sure which activity is the more demanding. For more on David Green, visit www.uncommon-knowledge.com
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Check out David's website for his 3 simple rules
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