Resonate by Nancy Duarte - Book Summary
This is my summary of the book ‘Resonate’ by Nancy Duarte. My notes are informal and tailored to my own interests at the time of reading. They mostly contain quotes from the book as well as some of my own thoughts. I enjoyed this book and would recommend you read it yourself (check it out on Amazon).
How to approach a presentation
Presentations are not to be viewed as an opportunity to prove how brilliant you are. Instead, the audience should leave saying, “Wow, it was a real gift to spend time in that presentation with [your name]. I’m armed with insights and tools to help me succeed that I didn’t have before.”
Roughly, follow this process:
Define and learn about your audience
Define your big idea (one sentence)
Write the abstract or teaser (4-6 sentences), which includes:
Background and introduction
Problem statement/thesis
What can the audience expect to takeaway from the talk?
Write an outline (in a doc) to cover all major points from beginning to end
Break the outline into slides (don’t design yet)
After you are satisfied, design the slides
Rehearse and make sure you hit the timing
The presentation form:
Creating desire in the audience and then showing how your ideas fill that desire moves people to adopt your perspective. Something must be at stake that convinces the audience that a great deal will be lost if the hero doesn’t obtain his goal. If nothing is at risk, then it’s not interesting.
Clearly contrast who the audience is when they walk into the room (in their ordinary world) with whom they could be when they leave the room (crossing the threshold into a special world).
There’s an internal, emotional change that must occur before they show signs of external change through their behavior.
When a screenplay is submitted to review, they look at the first and last page of a script. The first page sets up who the hero is when the movie begins, and the last page determines how much the hero changed during its course. If the hero didn’t change enough by the last page, it’ll be a boring movie.
Example: JFK’s lunar speech to congress in 1961:
Inward change: Move from feeling the plan is too risky and impossible within the ten-year constraint to a sense of urgency because the Soviets have had a head start and could remain in the lead
Outward change: Move from approving only a portion of the budget to approving the entire 7 to 9 bn additional budget over the next 5 years
Beginning: paint a picture of the realities of the audience’s current world. Set the baseline of what is. Deliver a concise formulation of what everyone agrees is true. Accurately capturing the current reality and sentiments of the audience’s world demonstrates that you have experience and insights on their situation and that you understand their perspective, context, and values. Should not take more than 10% of your total time.
Turning point 1: call to adventure: create in imbalance by stating what could be juxtaposed to what is. Put forth a memorable big idea that conveys what could be. Contrast between what is and what could be for the first time. It’s crucial that the gap is clear. The turning point should be explicit, not muddled or vague.
Middle: present contrasting content, alternating between what is and what could be. Create and resolve tension through contrast. Audiences enjoy experiencing a dilemma and its resolution - even if that dilemma is caused by a viewpoint that’s opposed to their own. Three types of contrast:
Content contrast moves back and forth to compare what is to what could be - and your views versus the audience’s
Emotion contrast moves back and forth between analytical and emotional content
Delivery contrast moves back and forth between traditional and nontraditional delivery methods
Turning point 2: call to action: clearly define what you’re asking the audience to do. Ending a presentation with a to-do list is not inspirational. It’s important to follow up the call to action with a vivid picture of the potential reward.
End: end the presentation on a higher plane than it began, with everyone understanding the reward in the future. The audience should be able to either understand something new or do something differently. Repeat the most important points and deliver inspirational remarks encompassing what the world will look like when your idea is adopted. What you can give them:
Guidance / teaching. What insights and knowledge will help them navigate their journey?
Confidence. How can you bolster their confidence so they aren’t reluctant?
Tools. What tools, skills, or magical gifts do they gain from you on their journey?
Make yourself transparent so people see your idea:
You must be willing to be you, to be real, and to humbly expose your own heart if you want the people in the audience to open theirs
Being transparent moves your natural tendency of personal promotion out of the way so there’s more room for your idea to be noticed
Three keys to being transparent:
Be honest. Be honest with the audience and give them the authentic you. Share stories that open your listeners’ hearts, sharing how you’ve failed and how you’ve overcome. Openly share moments of pain or pleasure endears you to the audience through transparency.
Be unique. No two people have experienced the exact same trials and triumphs in life. During your lifetime, you’ve collected stories and feelings that no one else has. It’s those differences that make you interesting.
Don’t compromise. If you really believe in what you’re communication, speak confidently about it and don’t back down.
Interesting TEDx New York talk about nothing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S0FDjFBj8o
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Tips for effective preparation
Give a positive first impression:
Think about, what’s the first thing you want your audience to experience? What’s the first impression you want them to have? In what kind of mood should your introduction put them?
First impressions don’t have to be overly dramatic or gimmicky. They’re about revealing your character, motivations, abilities, and vulnerabilities.
These choices aren’t driven only by what you say. Moods can be set by the type of room, lighting, music playing, items on the chairs, image projected on the screen, clothing you’re wearing, or entrance you make.
Another part of your first impression the audience has formed about you had already been made before you entered the room. Consider all the communications sent before the presentation. What was the invitation like? How was the agenda framed? How was the email worded? What was your bio like?
There are 2 qualities that account for more than 90% of the impressions others form of us:
Warmth: ability to create authentic connection and build trust
Competence: ability to inspire confidence in abilities and/or expertise
First warmth, then competence. First connect with your audience, they feel an authentic connection and trust, and then you demonstrate competence. The warmth piece gets your audience on your side in the beginning. When that happens, they will be on your side when you talk about your ideas.
Example: National debt in presidential debate between George Bush vs Bill Clinton in 1992
Examples of people who do it well: Oprah, Bill Clinton
Value brevity:
If they give you an hour, target a talk at 40 minutes. Put your own constraint on the amount of time you present.
Only share the right information for that exact moment with that specific audience.
Abraham Lincoln constructed the Gettysburg address with 278 words and delivered it in just over 2 minutes.
“If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.” Woodrow Wilson
Host a screening with honest critics:
“The first draft of anything is shit” - Ernest Hemingway
When practicing, record yourself on Zoom and watch it
Host a screening to test your messages before you present. The screening should filter out any meandering structure, obstructed messages, and confusing language.
Pull together a small group that has a similar profile as your target audience. Choose naysayers who will scrutinize, criticise, and challenge your perspective.
Each screener should have a printout of the slides and notes of your presentation so they can quickly jot down thoughts on the words and visuals. Run through the entire presentation once and then revisit each section carefully. A solid review meeting should last about 3 times as long as the presentation itself.
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Defining the audience
Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it “to whom it may concern”.
It’s important to know what makes your audience tick in order to connect with them. What makes them laugh? What makes them cry? What unites them? What incites them?
Though your heroes might be lumped together in a room, you shouldn’t view them as a homogenous blob. Instead of thinking about the audience as a unified clump when preparing your presentation, imagine them as a line of individuals waiting to have face-to-face conversations with you. Make each person feel like you’re having a personal exchange with them; it will help you speak in a conversational tone, which will keep them interested.
You are not the hero:
When trying to connect with others during a presentation, you have to remember that it’s not all about you. Audiences detest arrogance and self-centeredness. Self-centered people don’t connect.
Avoid slides like:
About us: company history, market cap, # employees and # locations
About our product and services: what it is, how it works, why it’s better than the alternatives
The audience is the hero:
We should help people to see themselves as the hero of the story, whether the plot involves beating the bad guys or achieving some great business objective. You’re Yoda, not Luke Skywalker.
Your role is to give the hero guidance, confidence, insight, advice, training, or magical gifts so he can overcome his initial fears and enter into the new journey with you.
Most mentors were heroes themselves. They have become experienced enough to teach others about the special tools or powers they picked up on the journey of their own lives. Mentors have been down the road of the hero one or more times and have acquired skills that can be passed on to the hero.
Questions to ask when segmenting your audience:
Who they are as people - imagine their childhood:
What games did they play?
What was home life like?
What TV shows shaped their psyche?
Anything that will generate a connection.
Lifestyle:
What’s likeable and special about them?
What does a walk in their shoes look like?
Where do they hang out (in life and on the web)?
What’s their lifestyle like?
Values:
What’s important to them?
How do they spend their time and money?
What are their priorities?
What unites them or incites them?
Knowledge:
What do they already know about your topic?
What sources do they get their knowledge from?
What biases do they have (good or bad)?
Influence:
Who or what influences their behavior?
What experiences have influenced their thoughts?
How do they make decisions?
Motivation and desire:
What do they need or desire?
What is lacking in their lives?
What gets them out of bed and burns their crank?
Respect:
How do they give and receive respect?
What can you do to make them feel respected?
Creating common ground:
Shared experiences. What from your past do you have in common memories, historical events, interests?
Common goals. Where are you headed in the future? What types of outcomes are mutually desired?
Qualifications. Why are you uniquely qualified to be their guide? What similar journey have you gone on with a positive outcome?
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Defining the big idea
Define the destination: your big idea.
Presentations should have a destination. If you don’t map out where you want the audience to be when they leave your presentation, the audience won’t get there. Every bit of content you share should propel the audience toward that destination.
Your big idea is that one key message you want to communicate. It contains the impetus that compels the audience to set a new course with a new compass heading. Screenwriters call it the “controlling idea”. Also called gist, take-away, thesis statement, or single unifying message.
A big idea must articulate your unique point of view:
It doesn’t have to be so unusual that no one has ever heard of it before. It just needs to be your point of view on the subject rather than a generalization. Example:
“The fate of the oceans” is a topic, not a big idea.
“Worldwide pollution is killing the ocean and us” is a big idea
Your ideas should stand out:
The enemy of persuasion is obscurity. You can learn what attracts attention by examining the opposite: camouflage. The purpose of camouflage is to reduce the odds that someone will notice you - by blending into an environment. The more you want your idea adopted, the more it must stand out. An audience should never be asked to make decisions based on unclear options.
Don’t blend in; instead, clash with your environment. Stand out. Be uniquely different. Nothing has intrinsic attention-grabbing power in itself. The power lies in how much something stands out from its context. Show how your idea contrasts with existing expectations, beliefs, feelings, or attitudes if you want to gain the audience’s attention.
You don’t necessarily need to rebel against the current messages and content, you do need to lift them out of the drab, traditional way they are communicated. Identify opportunities for contrast and then create fascination and passion around these contrasts.
A big idea must convey what’s at stake:
The big idea should articulate the reason why the audience should care enough to adopt your perspective. Help the audience recognize the need to participate and become heroes. Without a compelling reason to move, a big idea falls flat. Example:
Meh: “Replenish the wetlands through new legislation”
Better: “Without better legislation, the destruction of the wetlands will cost the Florida economy $70bn by 2025”
A big idea must be a complete sentence:
Answers the question, “What’s your presentation about?” It’s good if the word “you” is used in the sentence. Examples:
Meh: “It’s the third-quarter update” or “It’s about new software”
Better: “This software will make your team more productive and generate a million dollars in revenue over two years”
Emotion matters:
Ultimately, there are only two emotions: pleasure and pain. Play on those emotions by doing the following:
Raise the likelihood of pain and lower the likelihood of pleasure if they reject the big idea
Raise the likelihood of please and lower the likelihood of pain if they accept the big idea
Example:
Meh: “We are losing our competitive advantage”
Better: “If we don’t regain our competitive advantage, your jobs are in jeopardy” (appeals to the human instinct to survive)
Make the reward worth it:
Types of rewards:
Savings: time and money are two precious commodities.
Prize: can be anything from a personal financial reward to gaining market share. The privilege of taking possession of something.
Recognition: People relish being honored for their individual or collective efforts. Being seen in a new light, receiving a promotion, or gaining admission into something exclusive are all giving recognition.
Relationship: people will endure a lot for the promise of community with a group of folks who make a difference. A reward can be as simple as a victory celebration with those they love.
Destiny: guiding the audience toward a lifelong dream fulfills the need to be valued. Offer the audience a chance to live up to their full potential.
Don’t just think about the rewards for them as individuals:
Benefit to them: how will they personally benefit from adopting your idea? What’s in it for them materially or emotionally?
Benefit to sphere: how will this help their sphere of influence such as friends, peers, students, and direct reports? How can they use it to their benefit with those they influence?
Benefit to mankind: how will this help humans on the planet?
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Next, the book talks about all the steps required to create the actual content of a presentation. It follows the following order:
Generate ideas
Move from ideas to messages
Verify contrast
Create a STAR (something they’ll always remember) moment
Design visuals / slides
They follow below.
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1. Generate ideas
Collect, create, and record as many ideas as possible.
Do your research:
Look at industry studies, competitor insights, news articles, partner programs, surveys - everything. Gather as much as possible about the competitors’ messages so you can position yourself differently than they do.
Look for contrast:
There is an intelligent counterargument to each point you make. It’s important to explore them all. You might not use them, but as part of your preparation, you should know what they are:
What is - What could be
Alternate point of view - your point of view
Past-present - future
Pain - gain
Problem - solution
Roadblocks - clear passage
Resistance - action
Impossible - possible
Need - fulfillment
Disadvantage - Opportunity
Information - insight
Ordinary - special
Question - answer
Etc.
People are naturally attracted to opposites, so presentations should draw from this attraction to create interest. Communicating an idea juxtaposed with its polar opposite creates energy. Moving back and forth between the contradictory poles encourages full engagement from the audience.
Consider and address the audience’s alternate beliefs. Confronting their perspectives gives you credibility; you’ll even hear opponents say things like, “Wow, that was thoroughly thought-out.”
Most people jump right into describing what the world looks like today (or historically) vs. what it could be tomorrow. But it could also be what the customer is like without your product vs. what the customer could be with your product. Or what the world looks like from an alternate point of view vs. what the world looks like from your point of view.
Include stories from your own personal life:
Most great presentations use personal stories. As you create the content, there will be places where you want the audience to feel a specific emotion. Recalling a time when you had that very same emotion connects the audience to you in a credible and sincere way. Creating a personal catalog of stories associated with various emotions is a useful resource.
Less is more:
Tell just enough to create a vivid picture and set the scene, don't include any unnecessary details.
Jot down as much of the memory as you can - especially how you felt as the story unfolded.
How to find these stories:
Chronological. Reflect upon a timeline of your life. You can go year by year or cluster the years into phases like early childhood, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, career, parenthood,
People. Evoke relational memories by capturing a list of people you’ve known, e.g. a family tree. List people you’ve known who’ve influenced you and relationships you’ve observed. Teacher/student, boss/co-worker, friend/enemy. These kinds of power dynamics make exciting stories.
Places. Think about spaces where you’ve spent time. Homes, yards, offices, neighborhoods, sporting facilities, vacation sites, even virtual spaces.
Things. Catalog the material things you’ve possessed in your life that you deem valuable. They don’t have to have been expensive items - just sentimally significant. Why were they so precious to you? Did you love your old jalopy because you had your first kiss there?
High moments: when something went super well, outstanding
Low moments: when you’re really struggling. Things were a disaster
First: the first time you did something
Last: something recent, “just 2 weeks ago, this happened”
Story template:
Point you want to make, e.g. “every cross-divisional function could benefit from a steering committee”
Beginning. When, who, where
Middle:
Context: At the time, all sales groups were independent
Conflict: This means we were confusing the customers with many different rules, processes, and formats
Proposed resolution: so we decided to create a sales-steering committee
Complication: you can imagine how hard it was to reach agreement on anything
End: actual resolution: but we agreed to meet every two weeks to discuss common ground. Over the next year, we standardized all our processes and learned a lot from each other. The customers were much happier with our service.
Most important point: I think every cross-divisional function could benefit from a steering committee.
Example from Nancy Duarte:
I once needed a story for a presentation that communicated staying calm under pressure. I wanted to draw from a real childhood memory.
The memory of my 4-yr old little sister, Norma, came flooding in as I sketched a closet door. She’d accidentally locked herself in the closet. The lock was made in the early 1900’s and was on the inside of the closet. It had a difficult two-step process that involved turning a dial and moving a lever sequentially to open it. I felt helpless and clawed at the door from the outside while she screamed on the inside.
My grandfather ran off mumbling something about finding the ax. Images of a bloody mess shot through my mind; I had to do something. I quieted Norma down enough to explain the choice of having grandpa hack the door down or calming down and listening to my instructions. On her tiptoes, she carefully turned the knob, pressed the switch, and was freed just as grandpa ran back into the room. I knew she could do it, but only with calm, persistent determination.
Move from data points to meaning:
Numbers rarely speak for themselves. Explain the bumps, anomalies, and trends by accompanying them with narrative:
Scale: we casually throw around profoundly large (and small) numbers. Explain the grandness of scale by contrasting it with items of familiar size
Compare: some numbers sounds deceptively small or large until they’re put into context by comparing them to numbers of similar value in a different context
Example: Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini’s 2010 CES presentation. Today we have the industry’s first-shipping 32-nanometer process technology. It’s 5,000 times fasterl its transistors are 100,000 times cheaper than the 4004 processor we began with. With all respect to our friends in the car industry, if their products had produced the same kind of innovation, cars today would go 470,000 miles per hour. They’d get 100,000 miles per gallon and they’d cost 3 cents. We believe these advances in technology are bringing us into a new era of computing.
Context: numbers in charts go up and down or get bigger and smaller. Explaining the environmental and strategic factors that influence the changes gives the numbers meaning.
Address resistance:
People can react very differently to change - from passively resisting it, to aggressively trying to undermine it, to sincerely embracing it.
Empathetically address an audience’s refusals by stating them openly in your talk. Otherwise, audience members will often push back or try to find errors in your presentation because if they don’t, they have to either live with the contradiction between their old position and the new one you’ve sold them, or opt to change.
Empathize with their sacrifice and risk:
Sacrifice: what would they sacrifice to adopt your idea? What beliefs or ideals will be let go? How much will it cost them in time or money?
Risk: What’s the perceived risk? Are there physical or emotional risks they will need to take? How will this stretch them? Who or what might they have to confront?
Potential sources of resistance:
Comfort zone:
What’s their tolerance level for change?
Where is their comfort zone?
How far out of it are you asking them to go?
Misunderstanding:
What might they misunderstand about the message, the proposed change, or the implications?
Why might they believe the change doesn’t make sense for them or their organization?
Fear:
What keeps them up at night?
What’s their greatest fear?
What fears are valid, and which should be dispelled?
Obstacles:
What mental or practical barriers are in their way?
What obstacles cause friction?
What will stop them from adopting and acting on your message?
Vulnerabilities:
In which areas are they vulnerable?
Any recent changes, errors, or weaknesses?
Politics:
Where is the balance of power?
Who or what has influence over them?
Would your idea create a shift in power?
—
2. Move from ideas to messages
Filter down: filter down the best ideas that support your big idea
Cluster: cluster ideas by topic. Be MECE. Once you created the bigger topics, create 3-5 supporting ideas for each.
Create messages: turn topics into charged messages in the form of a sentence
Market → we have an aggressive competitor grabbing market share
Acquisition → this acquisition will be successful because we applied insights from the last one
Operations → operations will pay the biggest price, so let’s support them
Culture → our culture is valuable and will be strengthened through this historic change.
Arrange messages: place messages in an order that creates the most impact
Add supporting points: each message needs supporting evidence in the form of slides
Strengthen the turning points (TP): get your acts together! Ensure you have a clear beginning, middle, and end with strong turning points
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3. Verify contrast
Validate the content contour, emotional contrast, and delivery contrast
How to create emotional contrast:
Moving between analytical and emotional content is a form of contrast.
Emotion should not be over-amplified. Appealing to emotion is only effective if it furthers the argument.
Examples of analytical content:
Diagram
Feature
Data,
Evidence
Example
Case study
Specimen, exhibit
System
Process
Facts
Supporting documentation
Examples of emotional content:
Biographical or fictitious stories
Benefits
Analogies, metaphors, anecdotes, parables
Props or dramatization
Suspenseful reveals
Shocking or scary statements
Evocative images
Invitations to marvel and wonder
Humor
Surprises
Offers, deals
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4. Create a STAR (something they’ll always remember) moment
Create a moment where you dramatically drive the big idea home by intentionally placing something they’ll always remember in each presentation. This moment should be so profound or so dramatic that it becomes what the audience chats about at the watercooler or appears as the headline of a news article.
It should be a significant, sincere, and enlightening moment during the presentation that helps magnify your big idea - not distract from it.
Know your audience and determine what will resonate best with them. Don’t create something that’s overly emotionally charged for an audience of biochemists.
Five types of STAR moments:
Memorable dramatization:
Can be as simple as a prop or demo, or something more dramatic like a reenactment or skit
Example: Steve Jobs in 2008: “This is the MacBook Air, so thin it even fits inside one of those envelopes you see floating around the office.” With that, Jobs walked to the side of the stage, picked up one such envelope, and pulled out a MacBook Air. “You can get a feel for how thin it is. It has a full-sized keyboard and full-size display. Isn’t it amazing? It’s the world’s thinnest notebook.”
Repeatable sound bites:
Small, repeatable sound bites help feed the press with headlines, populate and energize social media channels with insights, and give employees a rally cry. If people can easily recall, repeat, and transfer your message, you did a great job conveying it.
How to create a memorable sound bite:
Imitate a famous phrase. Example: Golden rule - do unto others as you would have them do to you. Imitation: Never give a presentation you wouldn’t want to sit through yourself.
Repeat words at the beginning of a series. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness” (Charles Dickens)
Repeat words in the middle of a series. “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed” (Apostle Paul)
Repeat words at the end of a series. “... and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” (Abraham Lincoln)
Once you’ve crafted the message, there are 3 ways to ensure the audience remembers it:
Repeat the phrase more than once
Punctuate it with a pause that gives the audience time to write down exactly what you said
Projecting the words on a slide so they receive the message visually as well as orally
Example from Steve Jobs:
During the keynote address, Jobs used the phrase “reinvent the phone” five times, the same phrase that Apple used in their press release. After walking through the phone’s features, he hammered it home once again: “I think when you have a chance to get your hands on it, you’ll agree, we have reinvented the phone.” The next day, PC World ran a headline stating that Apple would “reinvent the phone.”
Evocative visuals:
A compelling image can become an unforgettable emotional link to your information
You can use one large full-screen image to convey a point, or pair images together to create conflicted emotions
Emotive storytelling:
Attaching a great story to the big idea makes it easily repeatable beyond the presentation
Shocking statistics
Example from Steve Jobs: “We are selling over 5 mn songs a day now, isn’t that unbelievable? Five million songs a day! That’s fifty-eight songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day”
—
5. Design visuals / slides
Once the message and the structure are final, turn the words into pictures
One idea per slide:
Each slide should have only one message
Each bullet point becomes its own slide. A bullet point might become one sentence on a slide or be replaced entirely with a photo.
3-seconds rule:
If viewers do not understand the gist of your slide in three seconds, it's too complicated.
"Think of your slides as billboards," says Duarte. "When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus, which is the road, to process a billboard of information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you're saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them."
Visuals over text & bullets:
"Since stories are best told with pictures, bullet points and text-heavy slides are increasingly avoided at Google":
When it comes to presentation design, we can't read text on the screen and listen to the speaker while retaining all of the information. It can't be done. "We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10 percent of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65 percent."
How to turn words into pictures: circle all the verbs and nouns on the slide and think through how they are all related to each other
Cool idea from Kathy Sierra: use stock photos and add speech bubbles. Example: cheesy picture of a party, and putting developer jokes there. You can construct narratives there, from slide to slide, just like a comic.
Wean yourself from the slides:
People can only process one inbound message at a time. They will either listen to you or read your slides; they cannot do both.
Don’t stay on a slide for more than 2 minutes. Changing the visuals as often as possible helps retain the audience attention.
If you choose to put only one idea per slide, you’ll have more slides than are traditionally seen in a slide deck and that’s okay.
Move away from projecting a document and toward giving a presentation. Only put elements on your slides that help the audience recall your message. Reduce large phrases and bodies of copy to single words. Simplify the slides so the audience can process each one in under 3 seconds.
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