The Compelling Communicator Series: Overcoming the Challenges of Messaging*
Yale’s 3-Minute Thesis Competition
Your life’s work: could you give a presentation that explains it clearly and powerfully—entertainingly, even—to an audience completely unfamiliar with the topic – in *three minutes*?
What if that work was highly technical and very complicated? Recently, Yale University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences held its annual “3-Minute Thesis Competition.” The university says the competition “challenges students to (very) succinctly convey (very) complex ideas.”
Go watch this winning presentation. It’s about how the *memory* of an allergy can trigger an actual allergic reaction:
https://vimeo.com/showcase/12182376?video=1178860057
Obviously, a very complicated research endeavor! But in just three minutes, we get it. Why? Because the presenter focuses on the important stuff. The big ideas.
By synthesizing the technical details into big ideas – into the “so whats” – she reduces both quantity *and* complexity. She tells us what it is and why it matters. There’s an absence of jargon as well as of abstraction.
The presenter also weaves her ideas into a classic story structure – more on that in our next post (coming Monday).
Simple is…hard. But it’s also a skill, and like all skills, with practice and guidance you can develop it.
Here’s a good working rule to reduce your content. For a presentation with a medium or high level of interactivity (discussion, questions, etc), follow the “Rule of One Third:” limit your amount of content to that which you can present—fully—in less than one-third of your total meeting time.
For example, if you are presenting in a 60-minute meeting and expect a lot of discussion, then your content must require less than 20 minutes to cover thoroughly.
And here’s another powerful tool the winners of the competition demonstrate: story.
Far too often, presentations are forgettable. Why? Because there’s no clear connection from one slide to the next, no logic flow. Audiences have no idea why the current slide appears after the previous slide. Or what the next slide likely will contain given the content of the current slide.
Collectively, the slides are a list of disconnected points. And lists are utterly forgettable.
How do you fix that?
Instead of presenting a list, synthesize your content into a story. When you’re designing a presentation, organize your content into three chapters.
If you have “stuff” that doesn’t fit precisely into that tight narrative, put it in an appendix for reference. But keep your main presentation tight to the topic, organized in that three-chapter story structure.
The Yale presentations provide great examples of the three-chapter story structure.
Think about a presentation you remember: was it organized as a list of points or did the presenter tell a story?
*The Compelling Communicator Series addresses destructive, common mistakes in messaging (presentation) design and delivery. Oratium helps executives avoid these mistakes, thereby improving their effectiveness not simply as speakers but as managers and as leaders.