The 3-Minute Challenge

COULD YOU MAKE YOUR CASE IN ONLY 3 MINUTES? What would it take to have a real impact in that short a time?

Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen points us to two wonderful examples of how to get your point across in only 3 minutes. These are from a TED Talks series in which each presenter got only three minutes to make their case.

The two presentations aren’t perfect in all aspects. Richard St. John’s is marred by his incessant moves to his laptop, which broke the otherwise great connection he was making with his audience. And Dean Ornish’s could have been better by throwing out all the bullet slides and just talking with the audience — and then laying in that incredibly powerful sequence about the spread of obesity in America.

So? Why only 3 minutes?

I can’t speak for the TED organizers, but there are a lot of reasons why you should take this challenge to do your presentation in only three minutes. Here are a few reasons:

· it forces you to be concise

· it eliminates extraneous details

· it succeeds when it covers one main idea

· it increases your flexibility

All these things are critical elements in making a really compelling presentation, whether you have only three minutes, or you’re leading a day-long session. (The difference, if you have more than three minutes, is that you start with the three-minute foundation and then add layers as required.)

Now, it IS possible to still bore an audience in only three minutes, if you insist on rattling off a long series of features at a high rate of speed and/or throw a lot of bullet slides at them.

But you really shouldn’t do that in a three-minute presentation — or one of any length, for that matter.

How to build a 3-minute presentation

So what do you need to do to create one of these? Let’s start with:

What You Don’t Need
  · agendas or company background
  · lists of features & benefits
  · complex graphics that require extensive explanations
  · long testimonials
  · PowerPoint? (Hey, it’s only three minutes — can’t you
    just talk?)

What You DO Need
  · one key idea
  · no more than three supporting points
  · no more than one bullet slide
  · answers to these questions:

    How will this change their lives?
    Why does it matter? (Why should they care?)
    How can they apply it?
    What are the first (or next) steps?

 

Try this exercise before your next presentation. And give yourself only an hour to complete it. That will keep you from obsessing about details and will force you to be creative and concise. (Kathy Sierra did a great post on this: “Creativity on Speed”) If you need help getting it really concise, check out “The Cocktail Napkin Presentation”.

The cool thing about this challenge is that, in addition to being a really interesting exercise, it will give you a strong idea of how to improve even your longest presentations.

Let me know how it goes!