Finding Inspiration

Grant Leboff: Simon, I think one of the challenges people have and why perhaps they use Power Point as a crutch because of this, is getting inspiration for a speech, for a presentation. They know what they’ve got to get across, but how do you find inspiration so you come up with an idea or a hook or something which will capture an audience’s attention?

Simon Morton: This is going to be a bit of a rubbish answer because the answer is that it’s everywhere. Some of the best presentations I’ve created for my clients have come off the back of me peering over the shoulder of somebody on the tube as they’re reading a newspaper and there’s an article there, and I go that’s really good. I can use that and then three weeks later it pops up. Recently I attended a school assembly where both my kids were speaking and there were a couple of things that came out from that assembly that I’ve since used in presentations. It’s everywhere. What you’ve got to do is, you’ve got to open your mind up to it.

The easiest thing in the world when it comes to business presentations is to lock yourself into this straight jacket of Power Point slides, very business speak, lots of three letter acronyms, it’s the worst thing that you can do. Remember your audience is made up of people. It’s about communicating with those people and those people want to be communicated to in ways that they’re comfortable with as well. That can be stories about your kids, it can be stories from the newspaper, it can be things that just pop up on the way to that meeting. Share those personal ideas, it makes a big difference.

Grant Leboff: I agree inspiration can be everywhere, and for someone like yourself who’s a professional, who’s building presentations and working with companies to help them with their presentations all the time, I can see how you can sort of draw on those kind of things, I suppose it’s a poet that gets inspired by, or a song writer that gets inspired all sorts of different things. But when you’re perhaps not a creative in that way, you’re an electrical engineer and you’re suddenly being asked to do a presentation, how would you perhaps go about even starting that journey? Do you have any advice for someone in that situation?

Simon Morton: It does kind of go back again to stepping away from Power Point which is a catch all for all sorts of different presentation technologies out there and actually thinking, starting on paper. It’s the fundamental stuff again. Go back to who is in your audience, what do they want to get out of it? What’s the message you want to share? Then start doodling, start drawing, start mind mapping as much as you can. There are some simple story structures that you can follow and they are really, it could be as simple as tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. It’s as old as the hills, but it works. Don’t get yourself tied up in knots.

There’s no reason to freak out just because you’re preparing a presentation. Take a step back, think about the most important stakeholder in the whole process, which as we’ve said, is the audience, and then build off the back of that. It makes a big, big difference.

Grant Leboff: I suppose the audience in a way is a great way of getting inspiration because if you can take a step back and think, who are they and what would they like, and even if you’re saying, well I’ve got a predominately male audience of a certain age, maybe there’s football analogy or I’ve got a different audience that might like this kind of thing, is that a useful way of starting to have a starting point?

Simon Morton: It’s a really good place to start and one of the things that I talk about a lot in the book is don’t follow stereotypes. There’s a quick story in the book that talks about, we were working with a client that was pitching to a procurement’s audience and it was quite a long way into the procurement process and we almost fell into the trap of just repeating the same facts and pricing and SLAs and all of those sort of things. We recognized that this part of the process is about trust and so we told stories and developed the presentation around the importance of trust in a contractual relationship of the size that we were talking.

It really engaged with that audience. Just because they have procurement manager on the business card, doesn’t mean that you have to talk about procurement the whole time. They got over that bit, this was now about are we a good person, or a good business to be working with. Go a little deeper and that inspiration then will fire up.

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