Simon de Deney

About Simon de Deney

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“Does my thumb look big in this?”

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Big Thumb

We’re all Celebrity Squares now

Who remembers the ITV quiz show Celebrity Squares?  Nine kinda well known people stuck in boxes on top of each other, who’d turn into giant noughts and crosses if they got the answer to a question right. Totally dignified. 

And who’d have thought that in 2020 we’d ALL have turned into Celebrity Squares? Zooming, Teaming, FaceTiming, Skyping, House Partying in attempts to keep in touch with the important people in our lives. 

The trouble is that very few of us have been trained to be celebrities. To know how to create that bond between us and our adoring audience. Particularly when we have 5cm square of real estate in which to make an impact.

The new normal?

The most recent research suggests that, as we emerge from lockdown, we’re likely to continue to have meetings online. Corona considerations aside, it’s a way of working that dovetails with environmental trends, people’s desires to work more flexibly and from home. 

But the truth is that the skills needed to connect with your audience were always needed even in real life. (or IRL as I’ve learned to call it, although it always reminds me of Republic of Ireland’s car stickers). What you could call the emotional, primitive or instinctive ways of building and developing relationships and communicating have always been needed. Lockdown and its forcing us to appear in small squares online only amplifies the challenges and adds a few extra for good measure. 

BeingThere (STAR)

So, to help people, unleash their inner celebrities, Infinite Space developed BeingThere. It uses a lot of what we’ve found works well with our live presentation skills workshop, PresentPerfect. To keep things simple and easy to use, we divided what people need in online meetings into four areas: Sound, Together, Action and Room. Which makes an easy to remember acronym: STAR. (See what we did there? Yes, it’s a little cheesy. But it’s better than R.A.T.S. Or the acronym you get if you do Action Room Sound Environment…).

Sound concentrates on voice skills, Together on how you can lead meetings and keep everyone engaged. Action focuses on how you make a physical impact in such a small space. And Room looks at how dramatically you can influence relationships by making better choices for your onscreen environment.  

Top five tips

From the workshops we’ve delivered since lockdown, these seem to be the five  things that help people the most and the most quickly (the section of the STAR acronym is in brackets after each):

1. Lighting (Room)

You don’t need to have a lighting rig that you could shoot Star Wars with. But you do need to light yourself from the front. If most of the light in your room is behind you, people can’t see your face, your expressions and it’s much harder for you to communicate all that you want to with them. Beyond this, how warm is your lighting? If you’re using natural light or a bulb with warm light, it helps you appear more approachable, literally warmer. Save the fluorescent strip lighting for the interrogation scenes. 

2. Centring yourself (Action)

You can dramatically increase your impact if you change your posture. In real life meetings it’s easy enough to ‘over-relax’ or slouch in chairs (yes, your Nan was right). It’s particularly hard to resist the temptation when you’re at home and feeling super comfortable in your environment. But if you’re sitting with a straight spine and relaxed shoulders, not only do you look more engaged, you’ll also sound more alert and energised. Your lungs won’t be crumpled, you’ll breathe more deeply, your voice will be able to have its natural resonance and you’ll sound warmer and more confident. 

3. NIQ or Name Inspire Question (Together)

Yup. Another acronym. There are many techniques you can use to make sure that everyone on your virtual conference feels involved. This simple acronym has really lit a fire with many people. It’s three techniques rolled into one. The first one is naming people. Nothing makes us sit up more and pay attention than having our name read out. The second is remembering to use the kind of energy and intention behind everything that you do that you feel and believe will inspire people on the call. It’s astonishing what a difference this simple technique makes. The third is asking questions. These can be rhetorical. Or they can be real questions asked of people on your conference, particularly people whose views you feel you would like to hear or who maybe are not used to speaking up in public.

4. Vocal challenges (Sound)

The technological challenges of patchy Wi-Fi and/or not brilliant quality microphones and loudspeakers mean that you have to make even more of your voice than you do in real life. And it is important to be prepared. If your  preparation has simply involved rolling out of bed and onto a call, the chances are your voice will not sound as dynamic as it could do. Take a few minutes to warm up your voice with a few simple tongue twisters – “Red Leather, Yellow Leather” or “Unique New York”. 

5. Hand gestures or “Does my thumb look big in this?” (Action)

People often find what they should do with their hands and arms when they’re presenting or in meetings really challenging.  We tend to gesture completely naturally when we don’t feel the glare of the spotlight. But in front of an audience we start to doubt what it is that we do, becoming self-conscious  and freezing. Online the technology presents us with extra challenges. The quality of the cameras in particular means that if we move our hands too quickly, they become a blur. Also, if you have your hands too close to the camera, hey presto, it looks like you have suddenly acquired giant hands.

How not to Surrender Act

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Brace yourself. Prepare to be outraged. Boris Johnson is right: it’s the Surrender Act. Why? Because he’s called it that and, crucially, in a country actively bored with politics, it’s cutting through in focus groups.  

What is Johnson’s opponents’ response? They are trying to reframe the debate. They claim, with some justification, that calling it the Surrender Act raises the spectre of militarism. This, in turn, contributes to a more heated debate, which, in turn, leads to MPs being more likely to suffer violent attacks. So, they argue, we must all tone down the rhetoric. Which is laudable, desirable, totally reasonable. But unlikely to happen.  

Dominate the debate

Populists will continue to use emotionally charged language because it works. In the UK, politicians who want to leave the European Union brand Remainers ‘Remoaners’: sore, whiny losers. Leavers laud themselves as ‘Brexiteers’. With associations of musketeers, buccaneers, privateers. All very swashbuckling and romantic. And we can see how effective it has been by the prevalence of terms like ‘Brexiteer’ in mainstream media over the last three years. Not just in media with the same agenda such as the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail or Daily Express. Even on the BBC, which is supposed to be impartial, ‘Brexiteer’ has been the default term. Subtly, but powerfully the argument tilts towards Leavers and the populists. 

Love language (don’t appreciate it)

Many on the other side of the Brexit argument (and, again, note how ‘Brexit’ has become the default term in the debate. By coining a new composite noun, Leavers turned the idea of Britain exiting the EU into ‘a thing’, something more concrete with its own identity) shy away from using language like this. There is a sense that liberal progressives SHOULDN’T ‘stoop’ to use this kind of emotive language. However, the science of how we respond to language, remember things and make decisions suggests strongly otherwise.  

Is there another way? Is it possible to use language emotionally but positively? Effectively a rebrand of the Benn/Surrender Act. And, if so, what would a successful rebrand look like? 

Positive rebranding or ‘Win the Words’

Without retreading the evidence (but Daniel Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick are great starting points if you’re interested) the rebrand needs to be simple, emotional, catchy and resonate with the audience it’s aimed at. So, in the case of the Benn Act (named after one of the Act’s sponsors, Hilary Benn, rather than its more catchy real name, “The European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019”), it could become the: 

  • Lifebelt Act, 
  • Rubber Ring Act, 
  • No Deal Safety Net Act, 
  • Trip Switch Act, 
  • Belt and Braces Act (or maybe even the ‘Benn and Braces Act’ – variations on themes work really well: see ‘Education, Education, Education’ out of ‘Location,Location,Location’), 
  • Safe Hands Act, 
  • Parachute Act.  

You can probably come up with much better examples than these, but they illustrate the general idea. Reframing the debate by ‘renaming the thing’ is an essential part of influencing stakeholders. Relying on rational argument is only, at best, half the battle. 

PowerPoint’s ‘The Deck’ – the world’s deadliest assassin

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Is ‘The Deck’ killing your presentations? Everyone’s heard of ‘Death By Powerpoint’, but ‘The Deck’ is its insidious, secret, lurking in the shadows younger sister. Rosa Kleb’s and Villanelle’s more lethal daughter.

The global killer?

And ‘The Deck’ has been making an appearance a lot recently in all sizes of organisations. Although I’d say the bigger the company, the greater the danger. So how does it appear?

It’s an understandable but fatal problem. You are asked, requested, even ordered, to produce a printed copy of a presentation – the Deck – to be handed out at the start of the presentation thus destroying everything else that you do in person and on the screen.

Why so fatal?

The problem is deceptively simple. It’s easy to think of presentations as one homogeneous mass. They’re not. They’re made up of three very different channels of communication: 

  • you, the presenter; 
  • your slides; and 
  • the handouts. 

Each of these channels performs very different jobs.First, you as the presenter are there to:

  • build trust, 
  • establish and/or deepen the human relationships, 
  • excite, inspire, entertain your audience (so… no pressure);

Your slides are there as your lovely assistant:

  • supporting your performance, 
  • reminding you of the main points, 
  • gently keeping you on track, 
  • providing audio visual delights for your audience, 
  • mixing things up a bit.  

The Deck is there:

  • as a reminder of just how good a time your audience had with you
  • to reassure your audience that they were not just bewitched by you, but that the spell your cast was based on powerful magic, finely-honed logic and exhaustive research
  • to get them over the line to choose you and your organisation. 
  • possibly for your audience to hand on to other people unlucky enough to have missed your presentation, but who’d like to add their pennyworth to the decision making.  

So, if your presentation is dictated to and dominated by the assassin Deck, you’re making your other two channels’ purposes practically impossible.

How can you cheat Death?

Think USD

First, be aware. Find a way to remember that your presentation needs to have three different parts. One way is to use acronyms. Who doesn’t love a TLA (three letter acronym)? So let’s try USD. Not an abbreviation for the US $, but standing for U (You)—Slides—Deck. Along with your USP (Unique Selling Point), dividing your approach into USD will help you remember the three different channel approach. (Just for the records, my inner pedant REALLY hates my cheating with the You:U trick. But my inner marketing guru, who’s called Joxanna [the x is silent] won the argument).

Order order

Second, have a clear idea of the order in which you create your presentation. We all work differently. However, in my experience, during planning is the one time I would recommend starting with the deck. Get all your arguments and supporting evidence in the most compelling order.

Then create the slides from the deck always remembering they’re there to support you. The usual advice applies such as:

  • having no more than three points, 
  • simple graphics
  • only one chart
  • a striking, surprising image
  • use builds on your slides so your audience focus on you and your current point rather than reading ahead

Finally, work out what you’re going to say on the day. The Presenter Notes in Software like Apple Keynote or Microsoft PowerPoint can be used both for bullet points you can refer to if needed while you present. You can also print them on card if you feel more comfortable using hard copies while you talk.

One more thing

Follow these steps and you should find your presentations are much more successful, memorable and actually more enjoyable to deliver. One thing I’ve not mentioned is something that we find Infinite Space clients mention a lot as being valuable when we go back to train them It’s the ‘Who What What’ – the job of asking yourself three simple questions that help you get any communication, including presentations, really clear. They are:

  • ‘Who are we talking to?’;
  • ‘What do they currently think and feel?’
  • ‘What do we WANT them to think and feel?’

Using the ‘Who What What’ can help you be ruthlessly effective with each of your USD channels.

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Why Factfulness’ contradiction matters

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Bill Gates thought it so important, he gave it away free to all US students who graduated in 2018. What was it? Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund’s Factfulness. It’s a great read with a great contradiction at its heart.

Read it and you come away with, possibly perversely, both a more positive and more realistic view of trends in human progress. It’s also one of those books that makes you feel smarter than you actually are (that might just be me).

Rosling lays out ten human biases he shows are responsible for our distorted world view. He describes these as:

  1. The Gap,
  2. Negativity,
  3. Straight Line,
  4. Fear,
  5. Size,
  6. Generalisation,
  7. Destiny,
  8. Single Perspective,
  9. Blame, and
  10. Urgency instincts

They are all cognitive biases which tend to make us believe that the world is going to hell in a handcart rather than ascending heavenward (but on a stopping train).

World leaders wronger than chimps

Rosling describes how he illustrated how common these cognitive biases among different audiences. He used to travel the world asking audiences questions about human progress. Ostensibly to make things easier they were presented with multiple choice answers. Typical questions were:

  • “In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school? A: 20%, B: 40%, C: 60%” and 
  • “In 1996 tigers, giant pandas and black rhinos were all listed as endangered. How many of these three species are more critically endangered today? A: Two of them, B: One of them, C: None of them”

Yet, overwhelmingly his audiences got them wrong. They consistently held gloomier views than the facts supported. Even at the World Economic Forum, where you’d really expect the participants to be far better informed than the rest of us, Rosling gleefully reports that they got fewer of the answers right than ‘chimps’ (Rosling’s affectionate way of describing choosing the answers randomly).  

Yet, overwhelmingly his audiences got them wrong. They consistently held gloomier views than the facts supported. Even at the World Economic Forum, where you’d really expect the participants to be far better informed than the rest of us, Rosling gleefully reports that they got fewer of the answers right than ‘chimps’ (Rosling’s affectionate way of describing choosing the answers randomly).  

Rosling’s prescription? More facts 

Rosling, completely reasonably, argues that we need to be better informed to help us guard against this emotionally distorted view of the world that is factually inaccurate, rather depressing and which opens so many of us up to the siren requiems of agenda media and populist terrormongers.  

Yet the most powerful and memorable parts of Factfulness are emotionally driven – his stories. 

The magic washing machine 

For example, Rosling tells a simple, moving story about his mother’s reaction when they first got a washing machine. “She said, ‘Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.’ Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the ‘ABC’s’ – this is where I started my career as a professor, when my mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for herself. She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. And we really, we really loved this machine.”

Ice hotels and Africa 

Or, in another powerful tale, Rosling also describes giving, what he calls, ‘the lecture of my life’, to 500 women leaders at an African Union conference called “The African Renaissance and Agenda for 2063.” He explained how extreme poverty could be ended in Africa within 20 years. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the African Union’s chair, sat right in front of him. When he asked her afterwards for her feedback, she said, “the graphics were nice, and you are good at talking, but you don’t have any vision.”

Rosling continues, “What?! You think I lack vision?” I asked in offended disbelief. “But I said that extreme poverty in Africa could be history within 20 years.” Nkosazana replied, “Oh, yes, you talked about eradicating extreme poverty, which is a beginning, but you stopped there. Do you think Africans will settle with getting rid of extreme poverty and be happy living in only ordinary poverty?… As a finishing remark you said that you hoped your grandchildren would come as tourists to Africa and travel on the new high-speed trains we plan to build. What kind of a vision is that? It is the same old European vision.” Nkosazana looked me straight in my eyes. “It is my grandchildren who are going to visit your continent and travel on your high-speed trains and visit that exotic ice hotel I’ve heard you have up in northern Sweden… But my 50-year vision is that Africans will be welcome tourists in Europe and not unwanted refugees.” Then she broke into a broad, warm smile. “But the graphics were really nice. Now let’s go and have some coffee.” 

It’s a beautifully self-deprecatory story, particularly as one of Rosling’s targets in the book are people who believe they know better.   

Reconciling the impossible?

The irony of Factfulness is that the very mechanism responsible for the ten cognitive biases, our feelings or emotional responses – the mechanism that leads us to answer more of Rosling’s questions wrongly than chimps – is also the one that helps us remember Rosling’s arguments. The feelings generated by his stories are the positive side of the coin. 

Win hearts without losing our minds

It’s this irony, I’d argue, that lies at the heart of Factfulness, which presents – if I can be grandiloquent – humanity with one of its great challenges. Namely, is it possible to combine our instinctive thinking with the kind of thinking that facts and factfulness demand? The stakes couldn’t be higher. The rise of populism, distrust of ‘elites’, climate change denial, conspiracy theorising, ‘anti-social media’ all rely on exploiting our feelings of fear allied to the cynical confidence that factfulness isn’t strong enough to withstand these feelings. It’s a game that instinctive thinking tends to win and often leads us to make poor decisions. However, if we can use the facts to work out something that more accurately reflects the reality of a situation and then communicate that with a story which appeals to our instinctive thinking, it should be possible to “win hearts without losing our minds”.

Stories not stuffing

Even less globally, Factfulness’ contradiction matters. For example, stuffing facts into our children rather than engaging them with stories which helps them to remember the facts is an incredibly inefficient and unmotivating way to educate. Or organisations which allow negative stories to circulate when they may actually be performing well are likely to suffer unnecessarily: most social workers do an extraordinary job, alleviating suffering and saving lives daily. But, predictably, we only get to hear about the stories of when things go catastrophically wrong such as, in the UK, with the ‘Baby P’ or the Victoria Climbie cases. 

Perhaps it’s time to look at Storyfulness?


Storytelling: why it’s rational to be emotional

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We are bewitched by reason. The spell it casts is so powerful it blinds us to the evidence. It means that – whether we’re trying, for example, to pitch for business, make a sale, inspire our team or educate our students – we place our faith in reason and facts. Whereas all the research shows us that we are influenced far more by emotion.

Stories increase value by 2706%

We’re told that to help us tap into our audience’s emotions we should tell stories. Let’s look at a couple of examples which put numbers on how powerful they can be. In a project called Significant Objects, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn bought things from charity shops, none of them costing more than $4. They commissioned writers to create stories about the objects and put them on eBay. In total the objects which they’d bought for $127.74 sold for $3,612.51: a staggering markup of 2706%.

Or take the 2004 research at Carnegie Mellon University; it looked at how people might contribute charitably to an abstract cause rather than to one person. The researchers discovered that people who read a story about a girl facing starvation in Africa gave more than double than those who just had the statistics. A simple story was more than twice as successful as the facts.

The creative myth of storytelling

The problem arrives when we are asked to develop a story. It all feels rather vague. And worse than vague, underminingly stressful. When you run story workshops, you constantly hear: “I’m an accountant/manager/lawyer/scientist. I’m not creative.” There’s a sense that creating stories belongs to mysteriously imaginative people; it’s not something that mortals should try. And yet, as the neuroscientist, Paul Brooks writes, story is fundamental to what it is to be human: “From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self – feelings, thoughts, memories – are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.”

How do we create great stories?

What makes a good story? Is there a way for all of us to shape one simply and reliably?Again, the science helps. Two principles are key. First, we’ve evolved to learn from our experiences so that we survive. How we learn is through the carrot and stick of emotions, pleasure and pain. A story is, simply put, a free way to learn as we, respond emotionally to what the characters in the story experience.

Second, we are faced with too much information to take everything in. So we’ve evolved to mainly pay attention to things that we find unusual, that surprise us, that we believe may threaten or reward us. Good stories use the same technique to hold our attention.

STORIES framework

We can create great stories using these two principles of emotion and surprise. They govern the seven elements that we can use to shape our stories. And we can remember them through a seven letter acronym: STORIES. This stands for:

  • Surprising: we need to grab attention at the start;
  • Touching: the character in our story needs to be affected emotionally by the story’s events;
  • Obstacles: our character should never have an easy ride. The challenges they overcome is where we, as an audience, learn and get most value;
  • Risk: or, what are the stakes for our character? The higher the stakes, the greater our audience’s emotion and their involvement;
  • Individual details: including surprising, colourful details and descriptions helps keep our audience engaged by painting memorable pictures;
  • Empathetic Character: our story’s main character needs to be someone our audience identifies and empathises with. Often this involves their being vulnerable in some way;
  • Simple: ask yourself, “Could someone listening to my story, remember it well enough to retell it to a friend the next day?”

Four Quick Tips

From our storytelling workshops we’ve learned there are a few things that make life easier when you’re starting to create stories.

1. Work with someone else to develop your story

It really helps to bounce ideas off people. What works for successful TV shows where you have groups of writers works equally well in other organisations.

2. Focus on E O R to start

Great stories have all seven features of the STORIES framework. However, when you’re starting, keeping things really simple increases your chances of success. So try concentrating on having an empathetic character (E), who really wants something (R), but is faced with at least one obstacle (O) that gets in their way of achieving it.

3. Don’t underestimate the obstacles

We have a tendency to rosetint our memories and gloss over, forget the obstacles. If you’re re-creating a story that happened to you, remember carefully how things felt at the time. It’s easy to forget things like not having enough money, not having the right experience, needing to improvise, the unexpected accidents that blew you off course.

4. The power of now

What keeps our attention is not knowing the outcome. Make your audience ‘earn it to learn it’. When you’ve written your story, go over it and see if you anticipate the outcome. Two ways to help are, first, to use the present tense, and second, when you get to an obstacle to ask a rhetorical question. For example, “So she reaches the ravine and the bridge has disappeared. What does she do?”