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A 6 step formal speaking structure for your presentation delivery

 In Message creation

Four minutes into the presentation I was thinking, ‘Where’s he going with this?’, and ‘What’s the key message?’. Let me explain. I was seated in a large audience listening to a CIO delivering a presentation. However, he obviously was not following any speaking structure, and didn’t have a clear idea of his key message. After four minutes I was tempted to check my emails on my smart phone.

In this fourth week for CIOs who want to BTO (Be The One) to work with, the focus is on large, formal presentation delivery. Compared to other types of presentations, meetings and interactions you’ll have as a CIO, large presentations will occur less frequently. Due to this lack of frequency, your performance in the large presentation environment can become rusty.

Here’s a proven structure to use to plan and deliver memorable large audience, presentations.

Preparation: Know the audience and then form your key message/call to action.

a. Know the audience: Know how the audience thinks and feels about your topic, and what they would want to hear; Identify whose opinion the audience respects and use that information, if appropriate; Think about how you could make the presentation positively memorable; Think about what shouldn’t be said.

b. Construct a simple key message/call to action: Make the message no more than two to three sentences, or two to four bullet points.

Speaking delivery structure

1. Hook the audience to listen. Have a hook that ties into your key message/call to action. A useful, easily applied opening hook is, ‘Consider this, what if . . . ‘;

2. Deliver and sign post your key message/call to action. For example, you could say: “Here’s the key messages to take-away from this presentation.

3. Housekeeping. State how long you’ll speak for and when and how you’ll handle questions.

4. Principles that support your key message. Deliver principles, case histories, simple graphs, ideas, anecdotes etc. that support your key message/call to action.

5. Q&A. To kick off Q&A, state a common question related to your topic and then answer it. For example you could say, “Now it’s time for a ten minute, Q&A session – one question I’m often asked is . . .”.

6. Re-state your key message/call to action.

The key message for this post: Use the above Preparation and 6 step Speaking delivery structure for all of your large presentations.

What to do in the next seven days. Block out 18 minutes. Plug in content, information you regularly speak on – into the above structure. Save that information for future reference.

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