EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Matt Krause
Hi, this is Matt.

Alper Rozanes
This is Alper.

Matt Krause
And what are we going to do today, Alper?

Alper Rozanes
Matt, today I’m going to question you about the first three questions that I always hear you talk about. I think they’re fantastic questions. And you made a comment the other day that there are obvious, but it doesn’t mean that they’re utilized all the time. So I want to pick your brain on what those questions are and why do you think that?

Alper Rozanes
Why you think they’re important?

Matt Krause
Yeah. So so in just a few minutes, I’ll outline what those questions are, but you can correct that they are completely obvious and everyone knows them, or at least they think they know them. And the thing is that very few people do them. And so knowing them, knowing them makes you average. It makes you just like everybody else doing okay.

Matt Krause
That makes you makes you a pro. It’s like I think about free throws and basketball and pro spend, you know, hour after hour practicing free throws and free throws are like the most basic thing in basketball. So you see a pro and he’s probably had free throws nails since he was, you know, six years old. And you’d think that he’d spend all day.

Alper Rozanes
They seem to come very natural.

Matt Krause
Yeah. You think that? Okay, here’s this pro he’d spend eating him. Spend all this time practicing the fancy stuff like fancy layups. And it’s true that he, I’m sure, practices his layups, too, but he also spends hours practicing free throws. It’s like. Free throws are the most basic things ever. But he practices them. And that’s why he’s a pro.

Matt Krause
Because he doesn’t know free throws. He does them. And these three questions are like that.

Alper Rozanes
Okay, tell me more. Tell me what the questions are.

Matt Krause
Okay. So the first question is, who am I talking to? And it sounds like a pretty obvious quote.

Alper Rozanes
The answer to that seems pretty obvious.

Matt Krause
Yeah. Well, the purpose of asking this question, who am I talking to is to focus your presentation. Because in order to answer this question, well, you’re going to need to define your end goal. You know, maybe when you’re answering this question, who am I talking to? Maybe when you’re answering that question, maybe your project or maybe your prep, your your presentation is to present a project.

Matt Krause
And in order to get this project done, you need to get board present to IRB board approval. So you need to get board approval at the beginning.

Alper Rozanes
Okay.

Matt Krause
Okay. So maybe in this present design.

Alper Rozanes
Presented to the board.

Matt Krause
No. Is that the key thing? Thing is you’re not presenting to the board. Maybe you’re presenting to your to your fellow department members. And there are only four members. Okay. Four members actually from the board. Maybe the board is ten people and you’re not even going to be in the board room when this decision is made. So what you need to do is you need to equip these four board members to go back into the board room and argue your case for you because you won’t be there to argue it for yourself.

Matt Krause
It’s really hard to focus your presentation on a group of ten or 20 or 50 people or whatever you’ve got for your presentation. What you need to do is make it as specific as possible, and in this example, we’re going to do a present or we’re going to focus on four people, in particular, these four board members. And let’s say let’s let’s borrow some names from the TV show Friends.

Matt Krause
Let’s let’s say that one of the board members is named Chandler. Oh, my favorite. Yeah. And then there’s Monica and Phoebe. And the fourth board member is Ross. Okay, so let’s say that Chandler, this board member, Chandler, really likes graphs and numbers. He explains his world in grass and numbers. He sees the world in graphs and numbers. You need to give him graphs and numbers so that when he goes into the boardroom, he knows what to do because you’re basically equipping him to do your job for you to persuade the board to approve your project.

Matt Krause
Now, let’s say that let’s say that two of these other board members, Monica and Phoebe, let’s see that they’re wordsmiths. So they like really well-crafted words. So you need a phrase, let’s say let’s say that they really like catchy phrases, catchphrases. They really like catchphrases. So you need to give them, let’s say, a six word phrase that explains why the board should approve your project.

Matt Krause
And Will Ross I don’t know. Okay, we would do the same project process with Ross, but okay, so now you know that your presentation because you’ve dived into this question, you know that your presentation needs some graphs and numbers because you need to equip Chandler and you know that you need to come up with a catch phrase because you need to equip Monica and Phoebe to go into the boardroom, too.

Alper Rozanes
So we’re basically talking about empowering the people who have a role in carrying on the message to to other people, for example.

Matt Krause
Exactly.

Alper Rozanes
Giving them the tools to do that.

Matt Krause
Yeah, exactly. You are not going to be there to accomplish what you need to accomplish then. Yes, you do your job in your presentation is to equip other people to do your work for you.

Alper Rozanes
And going from the same example, if I happened to be presenting to the board itself and I just want them to to see if things from my perspective and act on it. For example, is this question still relevant in that situation.

Matt Krause
Is still relevant. The application will be completely different. But you still need to ask, who am I talking to? Because now if you’re presenting to the board, you’re presenting to ten people. And we’ve already talked about, you know, the way that Chandler sees the world and the way that Monica and Phoebe sees the world. And we already so we know that the presentation is going to need to have tools for them.

Matt Krause
But there are, you know, seven other members of the board, and you’re going to need them to support you, too. So, yeah, you’re going to need to know what appeals to these seven other members of the board.

Alper Rozanes
Okay. So at the end of my preparation, when I have a date to present to a group of people, is that enough to say, well, I’m just presenting to the department or I’m presenting to the board, I need to dig deeper and find answers.

Matt Krause
Correct? Correct. The second question is, well, what do I want them to do? What action do I want them to take after the presentation? And it seems like a totally obvious question. Like, you know, maybe the answer should be why I want them to listen to me. Or, you know, I want them to change the world or whatever.

Matt Krause
The surprising thing is that I’ve been doing presentation training for a long time and when I ask people this question, What do I want? What do you want them to do? Surprisingly often people don’t know the answer. It’s amazing they’re preparing a presentation, but they don’t know what they want people to do, or at least are not able to articulate it.

Matt Krause
And so and one of the reasons that you ask this question is that you want to avoid scope creep or presentation creep. You know, in presentation creep, you’ve got this one presentation and then you add something else to it and then you add something else to it and add something else to it. And you think, Oh, this other thing is important too.

Matt Krause
And pretty soon you have a presentation that lasts, you know, 4 hours and it’s got 9 million slides and it’s a huge monster. So you ask this question in order to focus your preparation and only put in the presentation what answers this question, what do I want them to do in the. And so this question kind of ties back to the first question, you know, which was who am I talking to?

Matt Krause
Because, you know, what do I want them to do? In our example? In our example, we want people we want these four people, these four board members to go back into the boardroom and argue the case for me because I won’t be there to argue it for myself. That’s what we want them to do. And the third question is why should they care?

Matt Krause
Why should they care?

Alper Rozanes
And that’s a good one. I like this.

Matt Krause
One. Why should they care? And you’ve got to deal with this one because you need to know how to hook your audience, because remember, in our example, we’re trying to persuade four audience or four board members to go back into the boardroom and argue our case for us. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish. And if Chandler doesn’t care about my presentation, he’s not going to do that.

Matt Krause
Or if Phoebe and Monica not about my presentation. If Chandler doesn’t care about my project, he’s not going to argue for it in front of the board. Same goes for Monica and Phoebe. So I’ve got to find some ways to hook them and the ways that you hook somebody, the ways that you hook Chandler might be completely different than the ways that you hook.

Matt Krause
Monica and the way that you hook Monica might be completely different from the way that you hook Phoebe. So you’ve got to ask this question Why should they care if Chandler just sits there and checks his phone and he doesn’t care about what you’re saying? He’s just checking his phone. There’s no way if he doesn’t care about your project or he doesn’t care about what you’re saying, there is no way, even if you have an infinite number of charts, numbers, things that he would love.

Matt Krause
If he doesn’t care about your project, he’s not going to go into the boardroom and argue your case for you. The same goes for Monica and Phoebe.

Alper Rozanes
So I need to dig deep into this question and find out how and why they should care. Each one of them.

Matt Krause
Yeah, you know that. You know, there’s a great quote from I think it was Albert Einstein. He said, If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes understanding the problem in 5 minutes, solving the problem. If you have an hour to prepare your presentation or 10 minutes to prepare your presentation or six months to whatever, whatever, whatever amount of time you have to prepare your presentation, spend most of us answering these three questions and the rest of it will fall into place.

Alper Rozanes
Okay. Now, before we wrap up, I love these questions and thank you for being inside. And at this point, I would like to ask you, our listeners, not not the entire question, not all of them, but I would like to ask the third question from their perspective, why should they care about these 3/1 three questions?

Matt Krause
Why should they care about these three question? Because you don’t want to waste your time. You know, I’ve got I’ve got a million other things to do at work. I’ve got a million other things to do at home. I’ve got a million other things to do. I might have kids to feed, beds to make showers, take food to eat.

Matt Krause
I might have bosses to please. I might have other projects that need attending to you don’t want to waste time. And if you don’t address these problems, if you don’t address these questions at the beginning, then you’re going to waste a lot of time on the back end with fancy stuff that’s never going to get you anywhere.

Alper Rozanes
And I like that. So it turns out there is a huge amount of preparation that goes before any any kind of presentation engagement.

Matt Krause
If you do it right. Most of the present, most of the preposition or most of the preparation happens at the beginning.

Alper Rozanes
I like that. I have a feeling that you have more questions to ask before the presentation and we’ll keep them for a different in other episode. Do you have any closing arguments? Anything to wrap up this part?

Matt Krause
No, I think that takes care of it until until next time. Right. So that wraps it up for today. And we will see you again on the next episode.

Alper Rozanes
Thanks, Matt. Thanks for the insight.

Matt Krause
Thank you. Later.