Page to Stage (part 2): preparing a topic
Hi! My name is Oleksandr Leushchenko. I’m a senior staff engineer at Tide and GDE in Flutter and Dart. Since 2012 I have been speaking at small local meetups and big international conferences. Several companies invited me to host workshops for their employees and share my experience about where I’m looking for speaking topics, how I prepare my presentations, what I’m doing on stage, etc. This series of articles is the summary of what I’m talking about in such workshops:
- Where are topics hiding?
- Preparing a topic.
- Working on presentation.
- The speech.
In this second article, I’m talking about how you may start working on the topic.
Developing a topic 📝
Try to remember these words: grapes, oranges, milk, butter, potatoes, apples, eggs, sour cream, carrots.
Now close your eyes and try to recall all the words. Did you manage? (hey, you haven’t even tried! 🙂) To be honest, I didn’t do well the first time, but if you go shopping often, then your brain could have helped you. This list is far easier to remember if you associate it with departments in the store:
- dairy products: milk, eggs, butter, sour cream
- fruits: grapes, oranges, apples
- vegetables: potatoes, carrots
It is easier to remember three lists with 2–4 elements in each than one list with nine elements. This list of lists can be represented as a pyramid:
The same principle can be applied to presentations.
It will be easier for the audience to remember your presentation if you structure it as a pyramid.
The Minto Pyramid 🔺
Barbara Minto wrote a great book about this — “The Minto Pyramid Principle". So, why a pyramid?
You start with one idea. This idea is a kind of response to the topic of your speech. For example, a presentation on the topic “Why is the sky blue?” I would start with the answer: “Due to Rayleigh scattering of light on air density fluctuations.” This approach is called BLUF (bottom line up front).
In some cultures, it is customary to unfold the pyramid the other way around and give the answer at the end of the speech. This is one of the reasons you need to know your audience. You can learn more about this from Erin Meyer’s book “The Culture Map”.
The answer about “Rayleigh scattering” may lead to questions, and that’s exactly what we need! Your presentation is an imaginary dialogue between you and your audience. Each statement you make should lead to a question, answering which you present facts.
At a certain stage, facts and statements will cease to raise questions. If you start talking about “Rayleigh scattering” to first graders, the number of questions will make your presentation long and boring, and everyone (including you) will forget about what started it all. Your audience is people who have a 2–4 levels gap between an idea and a familiar fact. That’s why you need to know your target audience. Without this knowledge, it will be difficult for you to prepare in advance and predict how much time you’ll need for the presentation.
Working on the pyramid 👷
Top 👆
The top of the pyramid is the answer to the question you posed in your presentation. Tell a story about this question and describe a situation that made you think about the answer.
Do not start with provocative statements. Start with something common knowledge. Make the audience agree with you. By agreeing from the beginning, it will be easier to accept your other ideas.
Your goal is to establish a dialogue in the introduction. It doesn’t have to be explicit, but your task is to make the average person in the audience wonder “what happened next?”, “how is that?”, “why?” etc.
Vertical transition👇
Ideas and statements at each level must be derived from the ideas, statements, and facts below them.
As you move from the upper to the lower level, ensure that the upper level asks the question. A vertical transition in the pyramid is only possible when statements raise questions. For example, “In our company, we have junior-, middle-, and senior-level developers”. If the audience asks “who are junior developers?” we move to a lower level. If not — this level of depth is sufficient for this audience. This is very important, so I will say it one more time: your audience is people with a 2–4 levels gap between an idea and a familiar fact. This approach will help you understand when to stop or to think twice before making a presentation to a particular audience. This correlates with the last item of the topic checklist from the previous chapter — make sure that the average person in the audience will be able to understand the problem from the beginning, and their knowledge will be enough to accompany your point throughout the presentation.
Horizontal transition 👉
The horizontal transition between statements must be made by deduction or induction. That means a series of statements must end with a conclusion (this is easy to check, just add “therefore”, “so that”, or “that means” to the end of your statements and repeat the phrase from the top level of the pyramid), or must be related chronologically (April, May, June), structurally (shirt, pants, shoes), or relatively (junior, middle, senior).
That’s it for today. In this chapter, we discussed the theoretical part of the presentation preparation that you’ll need later. See you in the next — practical part!
Russia started an unfair and cruel war against my country. If you found this article interesting or useful, please, donate to Ukraine’s Armed Forces. I can recommend my friends volunteers — the “Yellow Tape”, you can be 100% sure that the money will support our victory. Thanks in advance to everyone who participated.
Glory to Ukraine! 🇺🇦
