Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Preparing Persuasive Presentations
Canons to the left of me. Canons to the right of me.
My clients often ask me what they should think about when they think about preparing a persuasive presentation. Should they write the script first? Create the images? Write an outline? Select a few key phrases and figures of speech? All of these are important elements of a persuasive presentation. But I usually tell them to think back 2,000 years to a Roman orator named Cicero.
Cicero was the best orator in the Roman forum. He could move audiences to tears or — more importantly — to action. He wrote down five rules for creating persuasive presentations in the first century BCE. Over time, these have become known as the five canons of rhetoric. They’re as relevant today as they were in ancient Rome.
For Cicero, the five canons are: 1) Invention; 2) Arrangement; 3) Style; 4) Memory; 5) Delivery. Let’s look briefly at each one.
Invention — Aristotle said that rhetoric is the ability to “see the available means of persuasion” in a given situation. Invention is about seeing all the ways you might persuade an audience and picking the best ones. First, you need to decide what you want the audience to do. You may simply want them to agree with you. Or take some specified action. Or buy your product. If your audience largely agrees with your message, you may select certain persuasive tactics. If your audience is largely hostile to your message, you’ll probably need other tactics. In today’s world, this is often known as creating the message strategy.
Arrangement — You’ve created your strategy, now you need to identify the elements of your argument and arrange them, in the best possible order. Let’s say you have three key points to make: A, B, and C. Your recognize that A is your strongest point, B is the second strongest, and C is the weakest. Knowing what you know about audiences, which order would you put them in? People often put them in descending order. But you’re typically better off putting them in A –> C –> B order. Why? Because audiences remember the beginning and end of your speech (primacy and latency) and forget the middle. You might as well put you weakest point in the middle — they’re going to forget it anyway. You also need to consider ethos, logos, and pathos. How you use these and when you use them depends on what you’re trying to achieve. You can learn more here.
Style — you’ve outlined your thoughts, now how do you want to sound? Do you want to sound like a college professor? A preacher? A business leader? A rabble-rousing politician? What does the audience expect? Which persona will be the most persuasive? This is about positioning yourself — the audience will ask, who is this person and why should I trust her? Once you decide the persona, you need to select the vocabulary. As you know, college professors use different words than rabble-rousing politicians. What words best fit your message strategy?
Memory — you probably have a big storehouse of knowledge. How easily can you access it? In my prepared remarks, I usually memorize certain keywords that trigger a chain of thoughts. Once I’m on the chain, it’s easy to follow. I appear to be in command of my material, which enhances my credibility. Memory is also important in the Q & A session. If you can answer questions easily, fluidly, and clearly, your credibility will soar. The trick is to know your way around the storehouse. The Greeks invented the memory palace to help orators remember and retrieve relevant information.
Delivery — You’ve now got it all organized. Can you deliver the goods when the time comes? Where style focuses mainly on what is said, delivery focuses more on how you say it. Do you want to speak quickly or slowly? Do you want to stand or sit? Podium or not? How will you dress? How do you want your voice to sound? How will you modulate your voice — or your body language — to emphasize key points? The goal is twofold: 1) to fit in with your audience (good decorum); 2) to appear comfortable and confident as you speak.
Using the five canons is like using a checklist. If you can fulfill each canon, you’re likely to have a very persuasive presentation indeed.
Too Much Rhetoric? Or Not Enough?
When will we learn to argue without anger?
In the Western world, the art of persuasion (aka rhetoric), appeared first in ancient Athens. We might well ask, why did it emerge there and then, as opposed to another place and another time?
In his book, Words Like Loaded Pistols, Sam Leith argues that rhetoric blossomed first in Greece because that’s where democracy emerged. Prior to that, we didn’t need to argue or persuade or create ideas — at least not in the public sphere. We just accepted as true whatever the monarch said was true. There was no point in arguing. The monarch wasn’t going to budge.
Because Greeks allowed citizens from different walks of life to speak in the public forum, they were the first people who needed to manage ideas and arguments. In response, they developed the key concepts of rhetoric. They also established the idea that rhetoric was an essential element of good leadership. A leader needed to manage the passions of the moment by speaking logically, clearly, and persuasively.
Through the 19th century, well-educated people were thoroughly schooled in rhetoric as well as the related disciplines of logic and grammar. These were known as the trivium and they helped us manage public ideas. Debates, governed by the rules of rhetoric, helped us create new ideas. Thesis led to antithesis led to synthesis. We considered the trivium to be an essential foundation for good leadership. Leaders have to create ideas, explain ideas, and defend ideas. The trivium provided the tools.
Then in the 20th century, we decided that we didn’t need to teach these skills anymore. Leith argues that we came to see history as an impersonal, overwhelming, uncontrollable force in its own right. Why argue about it if we can’t control it? Courses in rhetoric — and leadership — withered away.
It’s interesting to look at rhetoric as an essential part of democracy. It’s not something to be scorned. It’s something to be promoted. I wonder if some of our partisan anger and divisiveness doesn’t result from the lack of rhetoric in our society. We don’t have too much rhetoric. Rather, we have too little. We have forgotten how to argue without anger.
I’m happy to see that rhetoric and persuasion classes are making a comeback in academia today. Similarly, courses in leadership seem to be flowering again. Perhaps we can look forward to using disagreements to create new ideas rather than an anvil to destroy them.
Are Men Bigger Risk Takers Than Women?
Now that’s risky.
Most people (in America at least) would probably agree with the following statement:
Men are bigger risk takers than women.
Several research studies seem to have documented this. Researchers have asked people what risky behaviors they engage in (or would like to engage in). For instance, they might ask a randomly selected group of men and women whether they would like to jump out of an airplane (with a parachute). Men – more often than women – say that this is an appealing idea. Ask about driving a motorcycle and the response is more or less the same. Men are interested, women not so much. QED: men are bigger risk takers than women.
But are we taking a conceptual leap here (without a parachute)? How do we know if something is true? What’s the operational definition of “risk”? Should we be engaging our baloney detectors right about now?
In her new book, Testosterone Rex, Cordelia Fine suggests that we’ve pretty much got it all backwards. The problem with using skydiving and motorcycle driving as proxies for risk is that they are far too narrow. Indeed, they are narrowly masculine definitions of risk. So, in effect, we’re asking a different question:
Would you like to engage in activities that most men define as risky?
It’s a circular argument. We give a masculine definition of risk and then conclude that men are more likely to engage in that activity than women. No duh.
Fine points out that, “In the United States, being pregnant is about 20 times more likely to result in death than is a sky dive.” So which gender is really taking the big risks?
As with so many issues in logic and critical thinking, we need to examine our definitions. If we define our variables in narrow ways, we’ll get narrow and – most likely – biased results.
Fine writes that many people believe in Testosterone Rex – that differences between man and women are biological and driven largely by hormonal effects. But when she examines the evidence, she finds one logical flaw after another. Researchers skew definitions, reverse cause-and-effect, and use small samples to produce large (and unsupported) conclusions.
Ultimately, Fine concludes that we aren’t born as males and females in the traditional way that we think about gender. Rather, when we’re born, society starts to shape us into society’s conception of what the gender ought to be. It’s a bracing and clearly argued point that seems to be backed up by substantial evidence.
It’s also a great example of baloney detection and a good case study for any class in critical thinking.
(I’m taking a risk here. I haven’t yet read Testosterone Rex. I based this commentary on four book reviews. You can find them here: Guardian, Financial Times, NPR, and New York Times).
Happiness and Creativity
Do you want to be happy or creative today?
The 2017 World Happiness Report was released yesterday. The headlines today are all about Norway, which supplanted Denmark as the happiest country in the world. That’s nice and I’m sure that Norwegians are celebrating today. But what intrigues me is the relationship between happiness and creativity. (See also here, here and here).
In 2015, the Martin Prosperity Institute published the Global Creativity Index. Reviewing the two lists together suggests that the relationship between happiness and creativity is very tight indeed. Here are the top ten countries on each list.
| Rank | Happiness (2017) | Most Creative (2015) |
| 1 | Norway | Australia |
| 2 | Denmark | United States |
| 3 | Iceland | New Zealand |
| 4 | Switzerland | Canada |
| 5 | Finland | Denmark |
| 6 | Netherlands | Sweden |
| 7 | Canada | Finland |
| 8 | New Zealand | Iceland |
| 9 | Australia | Singapore |
| 10 | Sweden | Netherlands |
Of the ten happiest countries in the world, eight also make the top ten list for most creative countries in the world. The two that miss — Norway and Switzerland — don’t miss by much. Norway is 11th on the most creative list; Switzerland is 16th.
Conversely, of the ten most creative countries in the world, eight also make the list of the happiest countries in the world. Again, the two that don’t make the list — the United States and Singapore — don’t miss by much. The United States is 14th; Singapore is 26th.
What’s it all mean? I can think of at least four ways to interpret the data:
- Happiness causes creativity — there’s a meme that says that only tortured geniuses are truly creative. Perhaps it’s wrong. Perhaps you have to be happy to be creative.
- Creativity causes happiness — this explanation appeals more to me. I know that when I create something (like an article for this website), it makes me happy. I get a little glow of accomplishment. On the other hand, I know happy people who aren’t very creative and vice-versa.
- A hidden third variable causes happiness and creativity to correlate — perhaps there’s something else going on. It could be income — all of the countries are fairly rich. It could be government policy — they all invest public funds in research. It could be geography — they are all fairly far from the equator. It could be language — all of the countries on the list have very good English language skills.
- The two surveys are measuring essentially the same thing — though the two surveys seem quite different, perhaps they really measure the same thing. Perhaps happiness and creativity are so throughly intertwined that we can’t tease them apart.
It’s also interesting to delve into which countries have the best combination of happiness and creativity. We can make some crude judgments by adding up the national position in each survey. Like golf, the low score wins. For instance, Denmark is second in happiness and fifth in creativity, for a combined score of seven. As it happens, that’ s the lowest score — so Denmark takes first place in the combined league table. Here are the top five combined scores. I don’t know about you but I think I’ll soon pay a visit to Denmark.
| Rank | Country | Combined Score |
| 1 | Denmark | 7 |
| 2 | Australia | 10 |
| 3 | Iceland | 11 |
| 3 (tie) | Canada | 11 |
| 3 (tie) | New Zealand | 11 |
Persuasion, Traffic, and Zebras
Que te vaya bien!
Let’s say that you’re the mayor of a big city that’s growing rapidly. Traffic jams last the entire day. Tempers fray and drivers become more and more aggressive. People ignore traffic laws. Pedestrians cross the streets whenever and wherever. Accidents happen constantly. Police can’t keep track of the chaos.
You’ve tried cracking down with more police writing more traffic tickets. That only makes the drivers angrier. Traffic is constantly tangled. The air is increasingly polluted. Your popularity is plummeting. You need a persuasion strategy to convince drivers to play fair and obey the rules. What to do?
How about putting some zebras in the streets? That’s what the mayor of La Paz, Bolivia did. Here’s how the magazine Veinte Mundos described the situation:
“Vehicular and pedestrian traffic is increasing every day in the Bolivian capital. Automobiles don’t respect the traffic signals and pedestrians cross the street wherever they want. It’s total chaos. People’s lives – especially children’s lives – are in constant danger. As a result, local authorities decided to take concrete steps to improve the situation. Thus were born the ‘zebras.'”
Each day in La Paz, roughly 400 to 500 young people dressed in zebra costumes disperse through the city to guide and direct traffic. But they’re not traffic cops. They’re not there to enforce the rules. They’re behavior modifiers. Ultimately, they hope to persuade people to behave – and drive — better.
The zebras dance and chatter and interact with both pedestrians and drivers. They remind people to mind the traffic lights, buckle up, cross with the light, and generally behave like good citizens. They reward good behavior with a dance, a pat on the back, and some kind words. They make fun of bad behavior by miming “Can you believe that? WTF?”
According to El País, the zebra program began in 2001 and quickly captured the attention of Kathia Salazar, a popular local actress. Salazar volunteered to run the program and soon became known as mamá cebra. Salazar says that the program started slowly: “When we first began, people yelled at the zebras, cursed them, and even tried to run them over. Slowly, things changed. Today, pedestrians are the ones who are protecting the zebras.”
The zebra program is sufficiently popular that it is now spreading to other cities, like Tarija, Sucre, and El Alto. It’s also expanding into new services. Zebras are now visiting schools and retirement homes. Their message has expanded, too. It’s not just about traffic. More generally, it’s about good citizenship and a positive attitude. As Amanda Pinos, a 29-year-old zebra puts it: “Our principal task as urban educators is to ask citizens to reflect on their own behavior and create a kinder, more respectful attitude.”
A similar program in Bogotá, Colombia inspired the zebra program in La Paz. The Bogotá program, which used mimes rather than zebras, began in the early 1990s and claimed to have reduced traffic fatalities by as much as 50%. I haven’t seen similar statistics for La Paz but it’s a fair bet that the zebras have calmed and smoothed and enhanced traffic in a traditionally tumultuous city. Think about it. Wouldn’t you drive more safely if zebras were around?
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