Why Your Next Presentation Will Be Compared To A TED Talk

Ideas are the currency of the 21st century. In the knowledge economy—the information age—you are only as valuable as your ideas. Most great ideas, unfortunately, will fail to persuade an audience because they are confusing, convoluted, and boring. How can we communicate complex ideas to a multimedia generation who consume information in photos, videos, and 140 character tweets?

For help we can turn to TED Talks. For more than 30 years the TED conference has been celebrating the best of public speaking. TED videos are posted online at TED.com and have been viewed more than 2 billion times. Smaller, independently organized TEDx events have been organized in 150 countries. TED has so influenced our culture that, like it or not, your next presentation is being compared to a TED talk.

The “TED style” pervades nearly every aspect of our society: business, education, healthcare, nonprofits.

I recently received an email from a student who had attended a lecture at a prestigious university. Half way through a “dry presentation,” the professor said, “An author named Carmine Gallo would tell me I should include a story.” The professor then told a personal story about how the topic impacted his life directly. He choked up as he shared it. According to the student, “it put the relevance of the discussion on a different plane.” The second half of the class was much more insightful and interesting than the first part.

The professor had read my book, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds.

While it’s gratifying to read such emails, it’s not uncommon. The TED style is pervading classes and boardrooms around the world. UCLA held a workshop for its graduate students to learn to pitch their dissertations, inviting them to share their content in the “TED Style.” High school and even elementary schools are holding similar events to teach their students better presentation skills. Church leaders in many faiths are sharing TED-style advice with one another in articles and blogs. But nowhere is the TED style so prevalent as in business. Business professionals who ignore it risk their own careers by doing so.

I recently met with strategists from one of the world’s largest management consulting firms. The challenge—they were losing new business to competitors. Their prospects said the strategists (all MBAs and PhD’s) delivered presentations that were heavy on data and short on stories. “Be more TED-like,” they were told.

What does ‘TED-like’ really mean? You can’t be more TED if you can’t define it. Here are three simple rules to rock the TED style.

Start with a story

Stories inform, illuminate, and inspire. Our brains are wired to respond to story and yet, in business, we tell very few of them. The most successful TED speakers—business professionals included—tell stories and they tell lots of them.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged that the presentation she had prepared for a TEDWomen audience was “chock full of data and no personal stories.” A friend of Sandberg suggested that Sandberg would have more of an impact on her audience if she talked about her own conflicts and insecurities as a working mother. She did. The talk went viral and sparked a movement called Lean In. Data doesn’t trigger movements; stories do.

Use more pictures than words

It’s nearly impossible to find ‘old school’ presentations on a TED stage. You know ‘old school’ slides when you see them: slide after slide of text and bullet points, the slides that make people’s eyes glaze over. Today’s most successful presenters—on and off the TED stage—create visually engaging slides that contain more pictures than text. Whether they use PowerPoint, Prezi, or Apple Keynote, the common theme is picture superiority. Picture superiority simply means that when people hear information, they retain about 10 percent of it. Add a picture and retention soars to 65 percent.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield gave a TED presentation that contained 35 slides, all of which were pictures, images, and videos. “In my TED talk, I was responsible for the words,” Hadfield told me. “I’m a big believer in the power of a compelling visual.”

Create jaw-dropping moments

The human brain craves novelty. We are natural explorers. When the brain detects an event that is fresh, unique, unexpected, or shocking, it jars the brain out of its preconceived notions and acts as a mental note that signals ‘this is important; pay attention.’ When Bill Gates released mosquitoes on a TED stage in a discussion about the spread of malaria, it took the audience by surprise and the video went viral. Six years later and it’s still one of the most “shocking” events people remember from a TED presentation.

I often ask clients, “What’s your mosquito moment?” Obviously you’re not going to release mosquitoes in your next business pitch, but what will you do that goes beyond the slides? What will you do that your prospect will remember the next day? The jaw-dropping moment can be very simple – a story, a demo, a visual. I spoke to one group of anti-terrorism experts who created a simple and effective jaw-dropping moment. To support their argument that locks at a sensitive facility had to be replaced, they brought samples of broken locks with them to their presentations. “Our audiences don’t remember all the slides, but they always remember the locks,” one leader told me. Of course they remember the locks. It’s novel, surprising, and unexpected.

TED speaker Robert Ballard, the explorer who discovered Titanic, once told me, “Your mission in any presentation is to inform, educate, and inspire. You can only inspire when you give people a new way of looking at the world.”

The TED style offers a new way of looking at the world and how you communicate your ideas. Adopt just a few elements from the TED style and your presentations will never be the same. Your audience will thank you and be more likely to act on your ideas.

Carmine Gallo is a popular keynote speaker, communication coach, and author of the international bestseller Talk Like TED. Join his list at carminegallo.com.