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The Importance of Having Clear Objectives You couldn't teach the ancient Greeks much about oratory, and one of their most important oratorical concepts was what Aristotle called teleology - 'the study of things with the end or purpose in mind' - i.e., planning every single aspect of your speech or presentation with your objective in mind. Because once you've decided on an objective, remember that this is what you are trying to achieve. When you've finished, a hundred people can come up to you and tell you it was a great speech - funny, entertaining, incisive, brilliant, etc. But none of this is important if you failed to achieve your objective. Many people begin their preparation by selecting a dozen or so slides from their personal 'archive' that they can bolt something around. They use the slides as 'inspiration' to give them some ideas about what they might say. This is letting the tail wag the dog. The selection and preparation of visual aids is the penultimate of my seven steps of preparation. This is because (and you'll tire of hearing me say this) your slides are there to support you, not the other way around. First you need to decide what you want to say, and THEN choose the slides that help you do that:
The first question you ask yourself when you are asked to speak is: What exactly am I trying to achieve? There is a whole range of possible answers to this question, the most common of which might be: • To entertain • To inform • To inspire • To motivate • To persuade But such answers are simplistic and are only a starting point. If your objective is 'to motivate', for example, what do you want to motivate your audience to actually do? Are you trying to motivate an entire salesforce to achieve next year's sales targets, or a small audience of three prospective buyers to purchase your company's products or services? Or do you want the diners at a black tie event to put their hands in their pockets and give generously to a charity? If it is 'to educate', what key messages are you planning to communicate? You may also have a secondary objective, and I would recommend also having a personal one. A personal objective can be determined by asking the question: 'What do I want the audience to think of me after I have spoken'. For example: I want my boss to see me as
I want the audience to
Do this for every speech or presentation you give, because it has relevance not only to the words you choose to deliver, but also the manner in which you will deliver them. As an illustration, let's take the Managing Director of a company who is planning the opening speech at his company's annual conference. His objectives could be: Objective No.1: 'To outline the seriousness of the competitive threat facing us, our objectives for the coming year and our strategy for achieving them' Objective No. 2: 'To make everybody realise we'll only succeed if everyone pulls their weight.' Personal objective: 'To demonstrate that I have a clear vision of where I want to go and a strategy for getting us there, and am 100% committed to it.' He now knows exactly what he is trying to achieve. At any point when looking at his content, he can ask himself, ' Will this help achieve my stated objectives?' If the answer is ' yes', then the material is a candidate for inclusion. If 'no', it should be jettisoned, no matter how funny, interesting or impressive it sounds. Having determined your objectives, you should then write an elevator speech. This is a twenty-thirty second summary of the message you plan to deliver. Imagine you are in an elevator with your Managing Director or CEO (if you're already the MD or CEO, imagine it's the Chairman or your largest investor), and she asks you, "What message are you going to deliver in your speech at the conference next week?" You now have thirty seconds to summarise your entire speech. What would you say? Write it down, as this will crystallise in your mind the central message(s) you want to deliver. Our fictional Managing Director might sum it up as follows: 'One of our main competitors has recently been purchased and reinvigorated and they have stated they are going to attack us head-on using price. We had an excellent 2005, but can't rest on our laurels; we have very stretching targets for 2006. We are going to fight them using customer service rather than price. However, this means re-inventing ourselves. Our objectives will only be achieved if every single department in the company pulls its weight in amazing our customers with our service. I intend to demonstrate my firm commitment to making this happen.' _______________________________________________________
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