How to write speaking notes without words

A few days ago I tweeted an image of my speaking notes for a talk I was doing and it generated a fair amount of interest. It resulted in emails, new LinkedIn connections and new Twitter followers, so I thought I should maybe explain a little bit more about my visual prompt cards.

It makes a change from all the posts I'm doing about my soon-to-be-released book.

I love doing talks without slides. But when I’m really busy, I find it hard to get all the content into my head. This week I’m doing three pretty different talks, writing a chapter of a book and preparing for a preproduction meeting on a documentary. My brain just isn’t in the place to remember the entirety of a half hour talk that I’ve never delivered before. 

So I’m sharing my speaking notes from a talk I did this weekend. 

Just take a look at them. As you can see, they’re completely useless to you. But they’re perfect for me. So much so that I hardly needed to use them. 

Let me explain what I do and why I do it. Just in case you find it useful in some way.  

Input stalls my output

I don’t know about you but I can’t read one thing and say something different at the same time. And that’s exactly what I’d have to do if I had bullet points written down. I tend to be quite energetic on stage and taking pauses to read what I’d written would be noticeable. If I went further than bullet points and wrote my talk out verbatim, it would be even worse. My delivery would be dead and I’d lose eye contact with my audience. That would be a disaster.

Written language only helps me when it gives me an exact phrase to read. And I don’t do that very often. 

So I use pictures because they activate the opposite hemisphere of the brain to language, allowing me to keep talking while I glance down. They are also faster for me to interpret than reading. 

Remembering concepts not words

I don’t memorise my talks word for word. That wouldn’t give me the flexibility to adapt to the audience. 

I often speak to businesspeople who don't have English as their first language. I’m constantly monitoring them to see if they’re following me okay. I occasionally have to dive deeper into topics, explain topics more simply or cut out colloquial language. If I was working with a memorised script, I’d be unable to do that easily.

Because I know my subject matter pretty well, I can talk around it in my own words. The images on the cards are just there to remind me of concepts I need to talk about and prompt me with specific details. I can then adapt how much I say, the language I use and even the order of the points. I need that flexibility.

So let me tell you how I go about it.

Pick the bones

People are often surprised how much work I put into talks. The talk I delivered on Saturday at the brilliant Fast Forward Forum (of course I’d say that, I’m one of the founders!) will probably never be delivered again. It’s a one-off talk that will have an accompanying chapter in a book we’re publishing. I was given a topic - the future of innovation - and I started working out the points I wanted to make a few weeks ago.

I listed all the points that I wanted to deliver. I came up with about a dozen different points and then whittled that list down to the best five or six.

Assemble the bones 

Once I’d settled on those, I worked out what order they needed to go in. Some points were broader and set the scene for later points, so obviously they went up front.

Just delivering these points as they stood would be pretty dull. And I’d struggle to hold people’s attention for half an hour if I delivered it straight. I needed to come up with something that would keep them interested and stitch everything together.

I wanted something that would surprise and engage people. So I came up with a few approaches. The one I picked was talking about the future of innovation by learning from one of our oldest inventions: the dog. This would surprise people right away because they probably don’t think of the dog as an invention. Yet, without humans, dogs wouldn’t exist. There would just be wolves.

I take the points I want to communicate and find analogies with the development of dogs that will help me communicate them in a memorable way. Having a canine focus provides a couple of other points I hadn't considered before and I adjust the content accordingly.

At this point I’ve got a couple dozen bullet points. These are the foundation that everything else is built on.

Gathering the meat

It was now time for some research. And for this talk, I did two kinds:

• Stats and facts on innovation - I wanted to get some compelling percentages and numbers to put into my talk. For a start, it helps me ensure what I’m saying is correct and is backed up with research. Also, peppering a talk with stats, dates and academic terms gives the audience more confidence in what you’re saying. I balance this geekery with humour and anecdotes because I don’t want to bore people to tears.
• Dog-based research - I wanted to get surprising information to put into the talk. So I read up on the history of the dog. I found out when and where the first dogs came about. I found out how many breeds of dog there are, which organisation is in charge of tracking them, how many new breeds are introduced each year and all sorts of other tidbits. I wrote down everything that interested me because if a fact makes me go 'ooh!', there’s a good chance it will have a similar effect on the audience.

I always enjoy the research. As I collect new information, it often causes me to reshape the talk and adjust the initial points I’d written down. That’s all good. The talk really starts taking shape now.

Putting meat on the bones

Now that I’ve got all the materials I need, I start bringing it together into the final talk.

I add more bullet points under my top-level bullet points to flesh out each concept I’m communicating. I usually rattle these out pretty quickly, writing the way I naturally speak rather than in formal or abbreviated language. That helps me keep the pace up. I bring in stats, anecdotes, case studies, jokes, audience participation and whatever else I’ve collected. 

The last part of the writing process is creating the opening and closing sections.

The introduction usually tells people a little bit about who I am, what I’ll be talking about and why it’s relevant to them. I like to finish the talk by referring to something I mentioned early on. This helps to make the talk feel more complete. You’ve come full circle.

Skinning the beast

This process has taken us to the first draft. It’s pretty good but it can always be improved. So I then go back and spend some time tinkering.

I look for places that need stories or case studies to illustrate points. 

I look for areas that feel a bit dry and lighten them up with jokes and nonsense.

I then look for places to add audience participation. This can be as simple as asking a question like “who here has a dog?” Or it can be more involving, like asking people to draw something, conducting an experiment on audience members or playing a game with them. These are great opportunities to hammer a point home.

I go through the document a few times, making tweaks to the content. But it’s important that I don’t spend much time making tweaks to the wording of sentences. That would be a waste of time and would force me to learn it word for word like a Shakespearean actor.

What I have at this point is similar to a script of everything I’ll say. But it’s a lot looser. I do this to make sure I cover all the important points. Now it’s time to get rid of all the words.

Sketchy sketchy

I’m fortunate that I’m alright at drawing. But you really don’t need to be. Stick figures are just as good. You’re the only one who’ll be seeing your drawings, so as long as you understand what they are, it’s fine.

I do my drawings on an iPad because I find that easiest. But in the past I’ve hand-drawn them on record cards or in my notebook. I’m just aiming to create something that easily fits in my hand when I’m speaking. If your prompt cards are nice and small, most people won’t even notice you’ve got any and they won’t distract the audience. See if you can spot them during Saturday’s talk. Then feel free to admire my legs.

I get my notes and divide the content into chunks. Each chunk is a concept or story or point that I want to make. I then do little drawings to represent these.

From theory to action

Let’s take my first prompt card as an example to show you how I do this. Here are the speaking notes that I needed to summarise visually.

• I want to talk about the future of innovation by looking at one of man’s earliest and most successful inventions: The dog. 
• You may not think of the dog as an invention - but it was very much a human creation. 
• Exactly how it happened is lost in the mists of time but it probably happened a bit like this: 
• We’ll take a trip to Belgium just over 30,000 years ago. Sadly, they hadn’t invented beer by then. 
• There was a group of humans living together, hunting, gathering and waiting for the invention of Netflix. 
• In the same area there was a pack of wolves hunting, scavenging and waiting for someone to start throwing sticks for them fetch. 
• The wolves would hang around the tribe of humans to scavenge food. Humans would throw them scraps of food. And trust between the two groups would grow.
• The friendlier of the wolves would have been welcomed by the humans and would have started living with them. This was a form of selection in itself - the more aggressive wolves would never have been among this group.
• As soon as the humans allowed the wolves to breed within their community, they stopped being wolves. They were dogs now. Because humans had a hand in their breeding.
• Over the 30,000 years, humans managed to take the wolf and turn it into about 340 breeds - according to the Fédération Cynologique Internationale that governs dog breeds.
• The breeds go from the tiny Chihuahua to the massive Great Dane. Each breed has different features, personality traits and abilities.
• Humans have done something extraordinary in creating dogs. And I want to explain some things the world of innovation can learn from it.

And here’s the card:

The right arrow leading to the astronaut with the jetpack prompted me to talk about the future of innovation.

And the corresponding left arrow, traveling through a puff of mist and pointing at a dog, prompted me to talk about the invention of the dog.

Above the dog is a Belgian flag and below it is the number 30,000 which prompted me to talk about where and when it happened.

Under the dog are a thumbs up and a thumbs down which represented the fact that humans made decisions about the breeding of the wolves and, hence, turned them into dogs.

Below that is a branching structure representing the splitting of dogs into different breeds. The number 340 reminds me of the actual stat. And the FCI below that prompted me to remember the Federation Cyanologique Internationale who are the international body that governs this figure.

As you can see, I didn’t put every detail I wrote into the card. But I didn’t need to. I just put enough things in there to remind me of the most important details.

The rest of the cards are pasted below, so you can get a better understanding of what they look like.

Getting it into my head

After getting this far, there’s still work to do. I don’t enjoy rehearsing but I have to do it. Especially for this approach. I initially go through the cards alongside the script notes a couple of times to make sure I remember all the stuff I want to talk about.

I then put the script notes away and just work with the cards. The first couple of times are awful and I have to refer back to the notes from time to time. Every time I go through this process I worry that I'm going to fail. But I push through and refer to the notes less each time. I’m just aiming to get through the talk a couple of times without using the notes.

The night before I’m delivering the talk, I go through it a couple more times. And I go through it again on the morning of my talk. Then I put the cards in my pocket and don’t get them out again until I’m going on stage. I think it's important to relax before you speak rather than work yourself into a panic.

Half an hour of work?

The only part of this process that’s visible is the time I spend on stage. So many people get confused and wonder why I get paid to speak for what seems like very little work. They say things like "But I'm only asking you to speak for twenty minutes". They're not. They're asking me to put in lots of thought and preparation and draw on years of thinking and experience. They don’t see the work that goes on behind the scenes. If I was to convert the preparation work I did for this weekend’s talk into office hours, it would come to about a week. But that’s because this talk mattered to me.

I hope this little glimpse behind the scenes might help you in some way. The most important lesson is that a good talk or presentation takes time. The people who make it look effortless do that because they’ve put in a lot of effort.

I’ve not found a shortcut for that yet.

Sorry! 

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Dave Birss has a new book coming out: How To Get To Great Ideas. You can book him to talk about it. As you can see, he'll put a lot of work into it!

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