New choices, new skills

At this point we know we’re not going “back to normal.” Even as shelter-in-place restrictions are lifted, we won’t be rushing back into stadiums and conference centers. I believe that the tech industry user conference as we’ve known it is dead. We are creating new ways to connect, inspire, and convene. We are giving up spectacle for connection.

Your customers are facing upheaval in their businesses. More than ever, they need you to help them co-create solutions to the urgent challenges they face in their businesses today.

You are reaching them in a whole new way - creating and delivering a talk from your home office is nothing like preparing and delivering a talk on a keynote stage!

Here’s my current thinking on writing and designing the talks we need now - talks that will break through even if your audience is watching on a laptop or a phone at home, talks that will help us all build our new world.

The first thing to do when you sit down to write your talk is this: Throw away your usual playbook. Outline your content by focusing entirely on your audience. Every person in business is managing urgent, unprecedented problems. Now more than ever, your talk must be a gift, not a performance.

Express empathy and relevance. Being drop-kicked into a massive global health and economic crisis of unknown duration is terrifying. We are all in this together. What’s been scary and hard for you? Say a few words about that. Talk about how much you’ve been doing to understand the huge problems your customers are facing now. Talk about the future we co-create together. Filter your content for immediate relevance. Do your best to share ideas with your audience that will help them right now. Be a human helping other humans.

Engage your audience’s whole brain. Stories that use the classic Hero’s Journey model activate hormones in our brains that capture and retain attention. When you define a problem in sensory detail - which should be pretty easy these days! - your audience has to know how it ends. Stories about surviving past crises are especially valuable this year.

Design visuals to stimulate eyeballs. Replace needless words with simple, powerful graphics and images. When you engage the senses, you engage attention in different ways. Music and lights do this in person. Beautiful, clean graphics will do it online.

Say Less. We’ve all learned the hard way in the last several weeks that staring at a video conference for several hours a day fries your brain. A short talk suits your audience’s current attention capacity. Planning on 20 slides? Cut it down to ten. Finally, wordy slides were always poor practice, but for an audience watching on a phone they are impossible. Got multiple bullets on your slides? You’re doing it wrong.

Next time we’ll dive into best practices for digital delivery - a whole new ballgame.