Presentation TOPICS— Professional Presentation Mastery
Why are some of these topics engineered to tip while others fall on deaf ears?
The sixth of fourteen posts based on The Business Stage Act™ study.
Background: We’re exploring six core professional presentation elements over this current series of posts with the hope of improving the calibre of thought leadership on stage, on screen, or around a table. In this post, we have gone deep on the third ranked element — Presentation Topic.
“Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.” - Henry David Thoreau
Ranking #3 — Presentation Topic (13% claim leading element to presentation success)
We’ll tackle this ingredient of the professional presentation pie in three parts:
- The Topic Title
- The Topic Speaker
- The Topic Subject Area
A. The Topic Title — 25 Suggestive Methods
If you are a generative mind like myself, one of the joys of the amusement park we call presentation land is determining what will be the title of your discussion. How can you crystallize in the shortest possible amount of words the excitement, expectation and takeaway that will be provided? People do judge a book by its cover, and they do judge a presentation by its title.
I’ve considered some of the best professional presentations ever conducted, and teased out twenty-five distinct reasons why the topic title itself was so intrinsically interesting :
- #1 Invert the Status Quo — Start with Why (Simon Sinek)
- #2 Reveal Insider Info — How Google Works (Eric Schmidt)
- #3 Make the Launch the Hero — Introducing the Macintosh (Steve Jobs)
- #4 Go for Aspiration — Making a Multiplanetary Species (Elon Musk)
- #5 Set up a Promise — How to Get 5 Million to Read your Website (Matthew Inman)
- #6 Provide a Valuable List — The Six Characteristics of Truly Interesting People (Tina Seelig)
- #7 Take on the Establishment — Design Thinking is Bullsh*t (Natasha Jen)
- #8 Address a Controversy — Political Correctness and Postmodernism (Jordan Peterson)
- #9 Impart Important Skills — How to Speak So People Want to Listen (Julien Treasure)
- #10 Tease out a Question — Is God a Mathematician? (Michio Kaku)
- #11 Go for a Big Idea — The Great Reset (World Economic Forum)
- #12 Tackle a Small Universe — The Secret Life of the Gut (Giulia Enders)
- #13 Suggest Something Universally Helpful — How to Spot a Liar (Pamela Meyer)
- #14 Reduce to Its Essence — The Only 10 Slides You Need in a Pitch (Guy Kawasaki)
- #15 Dramatize the Full Complexity — The Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
- #16 Cover off a Continuum - Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
- #17 Provide an Aura of Surprise — Drive : The Surprising Power of What Motivates Us (Dan Pink)
- #18 Jump on Something Trending — How Will Business Use the Metaverse? (The Economist)
- #19 Introduce a Curiously New Term — The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
- #20 Provide a Future Glimpse — Gaming Can Make a Better World (Jane McGonigal)
- #21 Recap an Important Period, Milestone or Era — The Year in Search 2022 (Google)
- #22 Set Up a Humor Premise — Life After Death by Powerpoint (Don McMillan)
- #23 Serve Up A Challenge — Why People Believe They Can’t Draw — and How to Prove They Can (Graham Shaw)
- #24 Establish Credibility — The Most Important Lesson from 83,000 Brain Scans (Daniel Amen)
- #25 Set Up Something Too Good to be True or Incredulous— Why the Majority is Always Wrong (Paul Rulkens)
Some common links to all of the above titles :
- Brevity — three-to-eight words maximum (occasional longer clarifier, only after a short title)
- Resolves Questions — answers the why, how, what or when
- Aspiration — not always, but in general, titles espouse hope & optimism
- A Mix — as per our study (visualized below), professional audiences are pretty much split behind wanting the introduction of new concepts, beliefs & smart opinion vs. stating revealing new evidence, experiences and facts
B. The Topic Speaker — Presentation Ikigai
Beyond what the you can deliver, there are likely larger questions involved when its comes to presentation fit for speaker. When in doubt, I find it’s always good to go back to ikigai — the Japanese concept for “reason for being”, or “finding purpose”.
We have repurposed this effective framework that gets at motivations for doing anything in life and applied it to presentations. Pictured below is our distillation of six topic speaker-relevant factors that when met at a confluence lead to a Presentation Sweetspot. Let’s invent the term Presentation Ikigai:
Summarizing the six elements that when combined make a great topic:
What You Love: what do you like to pursue, spend time with, or makes you happy?
What The World Needs: what is important to others, what problems your presentation could solve, or what breakthroughs it could lead to?
What You Can Be Paid For: what could you be paid for directly or indirectly, or what could lead to engagements that could sustain you?
What are You Good At: what do you have a background, skills, talent and/or successful experience in?
We’ve added two additional areas to the standard ikigai model to address whether your core mission, passion, vocation and profession can also lead to great presentation topic:
What Topic is Timely and Unique: what are you able to present that is relevant and distinctive to event hosts, sponsors, attendees and to your own interests & initiatives (e.g. new book)?
What Topic You can Deliver Excellently & Credibly: what are you able to present better than anybody else, with evidence & credentials (e.g. new research), given the time, venue, audience and format?
There you have it — the Sweet Spot for Presentation Topic success.
Ci. Presentation Subject Area
The last part of our exploration of professional presentation topics is the general subject matter professional audiences want to learn about. We asked this question explicitly in our The Business Stage Act™ study and these were the results:
#1 Innovation & Future (61% top three requested subject)
What intrigues us is not what happened in the past, but what can happen, or will happen in the future. Why? Well, much of it can still be debated (the past is known and can’t be affected) and companies and professionals tend to be ill-trained and equipped to deal with it. We are going to spend most of our life acting and reacting to the future, it’s likely time well spent and invested learning from the future pros. Turning to outside experts that can speculate the future and backcast to the action of the now just makes sense to build long term professional currency and capacity.
#2 Technology & Digital (52% top three requested subject)
Fortunes and careers are now won and lost based on where digital is going. And the pace is rapid. Look up the annual Gartner Hype Cycle if you want a journey through a dizzying array of new tech terms and technologies. The challenge is many professionals and executives aren’t digitally native, they have to learn on the fly and professional presentations are a convenient way to play catch up and offer a springboard to further knowledge.
#3 Leadership & Strategy (48% top three requested subject)
Being a leader can be a lonely place. Challenges from inside, outside and random and unsuspecting black and grey swan areas all can play havoc with you. What’s an executive to do? Staying literate and fluent is a starting point, learning from experts and pros who have been there before is a smart coping mechanism, understanding the scope of decision-making possibilities is springboard to smart strategy and policy.
#4 Change & Transformation (39% top three requested subject)
A year is now worth a decade of 1980s’ type of change. Values, technology, the marketplace and the workplace are causing businesses to move at a blinding pace. Many are misstepping. At the same time, they are being asked to change quicker with one hand tied behind their back with a disengaged, quiet quitting talent base, a fragile supply chain, an expensive outsourcing world and an established company culture that resists. Finding out change-leading practices from people who have tread the path before them can be a great way to avoid repeating past mistakes and critical uncertainties of others.
#5 Customers and Brands (26% top three requested subject)
Peter Drucker’s wisdom still prevails “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” Given the best professionals (ex. sales maybe marketing) are comfortably spending less than 20% of their time with customers, so who are they to turn to? Maybe people who consider and speculate about customers a majority of their time. Additionally, in a world where most companies now have 90% of their assets tied up in intangible services, experiences, knowledge, reputation and people, they crucially need to know how to manage a brand & reputation to drive organizational value and growth.
#6 Intelligence & Data (17% top three requested subject)
We are swimming in data, but drowning with an absence of intelligence. We have a flourishing garden of sensors & algorithms, but starved for knowledge. It’s tough to ground yourself in the proper ways to access knowledge, intelligence and the many ways to ingest them when you are driving on the make this quarter highway. Professional presentations allow executives and management to breathe, step back, synthesize and make sense of the unknown.
#7 Startups & Entrepreneurship (16% top three requested subject)
This is not your father or mother’s generation. In popular culture, the new captains of industry are no longer the power brokers of Wall Street or Main Street. They are the Silicon Valley CEOs who is trying to change the world. They are the people who introduced a new energy drink that went viral. They are the energy or fintech contrarians who outsmsrted the establishment with a diffferent business model. Test here — who is the CEO of Tesla? the CEO of Meta? Well done. Now who is the CEO of Nestle? or ExxonMobil? See. Beyond the vanity & visibility of the startup leader, much can be learned from the speed, flexibility, experimentation, scale chasing and risk appetite of the startup, entrepreneur or garage venture in order to apply yourself on your new venture, or bring back inside the larger organization to awaiting change agents and intrapreneurs.
Cii. Speaker Bureau Topic Offerings
Now let’s compare our list above with what a cross-section of eight prominent speaker agencies are currently serving up as categories of keynotes and expertise. Their list is no doubt thorough but as mentioned in previous posts, there seems to be a awkward mismatch particularly at the top of this list with what is being pushed and what we have learned audiences really want (in parentheses, is the amount of times we spotted the category among eight leading speaker bureaus, occasionally we gave 1/2 points for sharing joint categories) :
The Essential Four Presentation Categories (#1–4):
- Motivation & Inspiration (8.5)
- Technology, AI, IOT and Robots (8.5)
- Sports, Adventure & Risk Takers (8)
- Celebrities, Authors & Personalities (8)
The Ubiquitous Seven Presentation Categories (#5–11)
- Business & Workplace (7.5)
- Leadership & Achievement (7)
- Economics & Finance (7)
- Politics, Government & World Affairs (7)
- Human Rights, Social Change & Society(7)
- Sales, Service & Growth (7)
- Media & Entertainment (6.5)
The Steady Ten Presentation Categories (#13–21)
- Futures & Trends (6)
- Health, Wellness & Work-Life Balance (6)
- HR/Future of Work/Organizational Culture (6)
- Environment, Sustainability & Climate (6)
- Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (6)
- Innovation, Disruption & Creativity (5.5)
- Change, Disruption & Adversity (5.5)
- Peak Performance & Productivity (5)
- Education, Universities & Colleges (5)
- Current Events (4.5)
The Middle Grouping of Presentation Categories (#22–33)
- Marketing, Communications & Branding (4)
- Mental Health & Resilience (4)
- Strategy & Decision Making (3.5)
- Social Media & Networking (3.5)
- Security/Cybersecutity (3)
- Comedy, Humour & Satire (3)
- Entrepreneurship (3)
- Teamwork/Collaboration (3)
- Customers/Customer Experience (3)
- Law & Legal (3)
- Facilitators, Moderators & Emcees (3)
- Women Speakers (3)
The Niche Eight Presentation Categories (#34–41)
- Energy (2.5)
- Cities & Urbaniusm (2.5)
- Arts & Culture (2.5)
- Retail & Commerce (2)
- Youth, Young People & Campus Life (2)
- Trust/Ethics (2)
- Reputation/Crisis Management (2)
- ESG/CSR (2)
The Speciality Twenty Presentation Categories (#42–61)
- Turnarounds (1)
- Fintech & Crypto (1)
- Consumer Behavior (1)
- Relationships (1)
- Generations (1)
- History (1)
- China (1)
- Middle East (1)
- Indigenous (1)
- Black Speakers (1)
- Fashion (1)
- Homes (1)
- Food (1)
- Supply Chain/Logistics (1)
- Virtual Speakers (1)
- Accountability (1)
- Stories/Storytelling (1)
- Knowledge & Intelligence (1)
- Science (1)
- Negotiation (1)
In one of our follow up posts, we will attempt to address the mismatch mentioned above between what audiences want and what a bureau can deliver through a Grey Swan Guild Cygnus venture.
Presentation Topic Recap:
Presentation topic is the third most important factor between being accepted by a conference or not; between having a message stick or not; between gathering a following around you, or not. Pay heed to it. When considering a presentation, invoke three steps:
- The Topic Title — tap into some of the 25 methods to make the headline stick in the minds and hearts of your audience, perhaps even mix up a different title for a different audience.
- The Topic Speaker — get to Presentation Ikigai and balance your topic choice with six factors only you can answer: what you love, what you are good at, what you can get paid for, what is sought out by the world, what is currently relevant & unique, and what you could pull off credibly and powerfully. Time for deep inner reflection.
- The Topic Subject Area — no matter how much you want to pitch Scottish Highland Dancing to professionals, it may be an uphill battle. Fish where the fish are, and serve up content in categories audiences care about. Remember even the current industry offerings might not be the best relfections of what audiences REALLY want; act on the gap and frustration that professional audiences currently harbor.
We’ll provide eight follow up posts on our Professional Keynote Presentation series:
I. -Fifteen Leading Types of Professional Presentations
II — What I Love and Hate About TED Talks
III — Top Six Ranked Presentation Ingredients & The Presentation Venue
IV — Professional Presentation — Ten Preferred Formats
V — Professional Presentations — Establishing Credibility
VI- Professional Presentations — Presentation Topic Choice
VII- Professional Presentations — Presentation Content
VIII — Professional Presentations — Presentation Delivery
IX — Top 10 X Factors in Professional Presentations — #6–10 Special Sauces
X — Top 10 X Factors in Professional Presentation — #1–5 Special Sauces
XI — How to Not be Tone Deaf — Reading Audiences and Cultural Difference for Professional Presentations
XII — A Professional Presentation Canvas — 16 Elements to Get right
XIII — A New Offering in the Professional, Practitioner Friendly Space
XIV — Speakers Corner — Professonal Presentation All-Stars & Rebels Have Their Say
Futureproofing Keynotes 55
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About Sean Moffitt, Futureproofing and the Grey Swan Guild
I connect the dots. It’s what I do. It’s what today marketplace, technosphere and culture demands. It’s what I’m passionate about and good at. And it’s what some people and companies pay me for. I spend a disproportionate amount of time living and breathing change and “the future” and connecting them both.
I have four big professional passions:
- I love to build companies value the right way and get to the future beyond innovation (my corporate shingle Futureproofing)
- I love to make sense of today’s biggest challenges and tomorrow’s Grey Swans (my collaborative shingle Grey Swan Guild)
- I love to help out passionate startups/scaleups, people with a cause, institutions making a difference, students eager to bite into the change apple, anything Canadian and anything that marries sports & fitness with technology & trends (see various boards, universities and incubators I work with)
- I love to share the freshest perspectives and what I know with others through books, webcasts, research projects, keynotes and guest lectures (look under my personal website SeanMoffitt.com)
Plus I’m a real person, trying to minimize BS & pretention, avoiding wasted time and leaving things better than when I first arrived. When not staying up to speed with the many facets of the new economy, I can be seen around Toronto and some world capitals either cycling, running, travelling, brunching (rhe forgotten fourth meal), enjoying a finely crafted beer, sifting through a page-turning book, Wordle-ing, rooting for my favourite sports teams, chewing on classic films or Netflix’s hidden gems and playing ice hockey (it’s a Canadian patriotic ritual).
Contact me if you find any of the above interesting.
SeanMoffitt.com : http://www.seanmoffitt.com/ and https://medium.com/@seanmoffitt
Futureproofing: https://futureproofingnext.com/ and https://medium.com/@Futureproofing
Grey Swan Guild: https://www.greyswanguild.org/ and https://greyswanguild.medium.com/
