How do you keep your audience on its toes when delivering a presentation? Spontaneity is essential for presenters who want to engage their audience. In this feature, Clive Lewis, MD of Illumine Training, reveals how to think on your feet.

How do presenters use spontaneity without losing their audience? What's their secret?

Well let's look first at what can go wrong. The problem for many presenters is that they simply have too much expert knowledge and this trips them up in a number of ways. Some simply go off track and never return. Others go round and round in ever decreasing circles. Then there are those who try to cram everything in and lose their audience in the first few minutes. 

And all of these traps derive from the presenters belief that it is what they are saying that matters most. But it isn't. It is only what the audience takes in and understands that is important.
 
So what can presenters do to address this? How can they be spontaneous and relevant? The answer is  'whole brain' reasoning or, to put it in another way, using structure to support spontaneity.

The way this works is as follows. When it comes to communication our logical left-brain is superb in three critical areas - cutting to the core (breaking down your topic), breaking down the core (separating ideas out distinctly) and dynamic movement (giving ideas energy and force). Meanwhile our right hand, intuitive brain is brilliant with images, stories, sensation, colour and imagination.

A good analogy here is to think of a plane journey. Pilots use the autopilot to set the direction so that they then have the freedom to engage with passengers, provide flight information, even tell jokes.

So let us see how this approach works in practice. Let us imagine that the topic for our presentation is corporate culture and we want to be able to improvise around the subject.  So how would we design such a session? Well in the first case, using structure, we might prepare something like this:

1. For our introduction we start with the principle of cutting to the core. This is about 'the big headline' which, for example, could be 'Our culture … good or bad for business?'.

2. We then break this into manageable chunks such as a) The current culture - what is it like. b) The desired culture - what would we like it to be and c) The gap between here and there.

3. The conclusion adds force to our ideas and echoes the headline …. 'So our challenge is to ensure we develop a culture that encourages people to bring their energy and enterprise into work.'

Now we have the structure we can add the spontaneity.  This is where we allow our 'right brain' capacity for imagination to bring colour and magic. So, for example, on the headline we might use a metaphor, such as 'Is our culture like a marching band?' to capture people's attention.

Then we might provide stories, anecdotes, personal insights gleaned from our own experience to personalise the main chunks of our presentation. And we might provide the momentum by being imaginative with our conclusion. 'So if we are a band do we want to be a marching band? And if so are we playing good music to the right people?

Now this technique of combining structure and imagination is ideal if you want to improve your presentation spontaneity. The paradox is you just have to start with structure in order to keep your audience with you.

Clive Lewis is the MD of Illumine Training. Call him on 01753 866633  or see www.illumine.co.uk

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