“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”
Albert Einstein
Communicating effectively is surprisingly difficult. In our attention-starved, multi-tasking society, we rarely have people’s undivided attention when we’re communicating. The onus is on you to make your audience sit up and take notice.
And the simpler you can make your message, the better.
These five tricks will help you distil your message to its essence, and grasp the attention of your audience.
1. Bring statistics to life
Many business presentations are based around facts and figures. But most people find it difficult to take in the relevance of numbers unless they’re experts in that particular area. And once numbers become very large, it’s difficult to get our heads around them. As a result, we tune out.
In The Imitation Game, MI6 agent Stewart Mingis overcomes this problem when describing the impact of the Nazi Enigma machine to the scientists at Bletchley Park in The Imitation Game. “Do you know how many servicemen have died as a result of Enigma?” he asks. “Three. While we’ve been having this conversation. Oh, there’s another. I do hope he didn’t have a family.”
Mingis could simply have told them that thousands of people were dying as a result of the Enigma machine. But he increases the impact by making the situation real, personal and urgent.
2. Use an analogy
If you’ve got a difficult concept to explain, try finding an analogy to represent it. As Chip and Dan Heath explain in Made to Stick, analogies work because they tap into existing schema you have in your memory: things you already understand well, which help you understand something new.
In Lincoln, the President uses a powerful analogy with Representative James Ashley to convince him to table the 13th amendment once more:
“We’re whalers Mr Ashley! We’ve been chasing this whale for a long time, and we’ve finally placed a harpoon in the monster’s back. It’s in James, it’s in. We finish the deed now, we can’t wait. Or with one fluff of its tail he’ll smash the boat and send us all to eternity!”
3. Coin a phrase
Presentation expert Carmine Gallo recommends writing your key message in no more than 140 characters – the length of a tweet on Twitter. And the snappier and more memorable you can make it, the better.
In The Queen, Tony Blair captures the mood of the nation by coining a phrase for the late Princess Diana: ‘the People’s Princess’. It’s a phrase that helps fan a huge outpouring of public grief at Diana’s death.
In Seabiscuit, owner Charles Howard frequently calls his underdog racehorse ‘the little guy’. He cleverly aligns Seabiscuit’s plight with the American people enduring the 1930s Great Depression.
Seabiscuit has had a tough ride, Howard tells them, but he never gives up. It’s a message any American can relate to, and it attracts the punters in their thousands.
4. Find your ‘one word pitch’
As Dan Pink highlights in To Sell is Human, sometimes one word is enough to encompass everything you’re trying to achieve.
In Friday Night Lights, Coach Gaines uses the word ‘perfect’ to encapsulate the ethos of his high school football team and what he wants them to strive for.
In Braveheart, William Wallace consistently uses the word ‘freedom’ so his followers are never in doubt about the prize they’re fighting for. Watch how many times he uses it in his iconic speech below.
Repeated frequently enough, a one-word pitch can prove a powerful rallying call.
5. Make it tangible
If your message is complicated, you need to work harder to make it simple.
In this scene from The Big Short, Jared Vennett pitches a proposal to Mark Baum and his team of investors. Bennett’s plan is to ‘short’ the market through a credit default swap. He illustrates its viability by demonstrating the precarious state of mortgage bonds using a game of Jenga.
It simplifies a complicated issue and brings it to life in a tangible and surprising way.
So the next time you have a complicated message to get across, try using one or more of these tips to grab the attention of your audience: and keep it.
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