Wow opens their mind. Aha changes their mind.
Both are better together.
Aha moments can’t happen when your audience doesn’t pay attention. Wow moments are great at getting you attention.
But wow moments get you only half way there. After all, what use is it when people cheer about what a great show it’s been when what you actually want them to cheer for is your idea?
When you’ve opened the door, walk through and take your audience all the way to a profound aha moment.
If you could pick only one, applause or impact, what would you choose?
Now, if you scroll through your timeline on social media, how do you think did the creators on that timeline choose respectively?
And what were the results for them?
Who got the applause?
Who got the impact?
The keynote was a great success. Standing ovations.
“What a great presentation!”
“You’re a natural born presenter!”
“That was quite the roller-coaster ride! What a brilliant show!”
And yet, the day after, nothing happens.
Because it’s never about “What a great show!” but always about “What a great idea!”
The wow effect brings you the excitement in the moment. But that excitement always fades. Sometimes later, but mostly sooner.
That’s why you need to take your audience beyond the wow effect – all the way towards a profound aha effect.
Aha effects last much longer.
PS: Happy to help.
“And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.” — F. L. Lucas
Wow effects are easy to achieve. When in doubt, throw money at the problem. Samsung, for example, has put entire orchestras on stage during their keynotes.
Wow effects rarely increase clarity, though. Also, you don’t even need clarity to achieve a wow effect.
Aha moments are different. You can’t buy an aha effect.
The aha effect requires effort. It requires you to do the work and think things through. You’ll have to see your audience to understand where they’re coming from and what matters to them. You’ll have to understand their language so that you can find the words that lead everyone in your audience to see what you see.
Aha effects require clarity. Clarity requires effort.
But it’s worth the effort. Because while wow effects usually fade quickly, aha effects often last.
The best way to think about wow effects is as a door opener to your audience’s connection. But once you’re in, lead them all the way to an aha moment.
-> Passionate beats eloquent
-> Prominent beats competent
-> Relatable beats spectacular
-> Relevant beats fancy
-> Simple beats complex
-> Useful beats beautiful
-> Wow beats aha in the short run
-> Aha beats wow in the long run
Don’t persuade harder, resonate stronger!
In my keynote speeches I often ask people what’s so different about movies that we find them entertaining for 2+ hours while most presentations are boring as hell so that we start looking for an escape before reaching the 2 minute mark.
Among the top responses is music. And it’s true. Great music makes great films even greater. But it misses the point – if only because it would be an easy fix to include some music in a presentation.
The movie “12 Angry Men” creates tension from the first to the last second. We witness 12 men in a room. With no music! (And, of course, no special effects.) It’s pure story. It’s a great movie that grabs our attention (Well, mine at least).
If our story is great, we don’t need any music. Nor special effects.
Great stories are great because they resonate – not because we decorate them. They grab our attention and never release it because we can relate to the characters and their struggles. Music – and special effects in general – can make the experience even greater. But they are never the reason why it’s great in the first place.
And they never turn a lame story into a great story. They are an amplifier of greatness, not a rescue to lameness. If the story is lame, it will still be lame despite great music and great special effects.
Granted special effects can get you a short burst of excitement. They can wow your audience. But that’s about it. Most wow-effects fade quickly.
The thing is that – most likely – you don’t have the budget to produce special effects that do that trick for you. Effects that will provide that level of excitement to your audience.
(Not only) therefore, it’s much better to get the story right before we start working on the special effects.
Can you plant a thought in someone else’s head? In the film Inception, Leonardo diCaprio attempts to do so by entering the dreams of his target mind. It’s the stuff that a great Hollywood blockbuster is made of.
But what if you could actually manage to get a message literally right into your audience’s head? Impossible? Not for BMW. How the carmaker used afterimages to literally burn its brand into the eyes of an audience has a simple explanation, but it’s still outstanding:
Getting attention is easy. Make it bigger, faster, louder, or crazier. And if in doubt, throw money at the problem of making it even more so.
In the past, it was the guiding principle of commercial TV and today, it is the guiding principle in wide parts of the Internet. Look here. No, no, no, don’t switch off … something exciting is about to come. The next post is going to be AWESOME. Stay a little longer, or you’ll miss this. Come on, just one more clip. Look here. STAY HERE!
That may grab your attention, it may not be boring, but it’s still a waste of time.
It’s promise after promise after promise … with the sole purpose of getting your attention. It isn’t even about keeping any of these promises. Because these people will happily promise something greater before they even come to keeping any of the promises.
Until, of course, the next guy comes along who makes an even greater noise with an even greater promise: Come here: This. Is. Going. TO BE AWESOME!!!!!
The better question to ask is: once you have the attention what do you do with it? What promises can you make that you can actually keep?
Because when you keep a promise, it builds trust. And from continuous trust follows loyalty. Which means that I don’t even have to make a noise. People will want to hear from you. People will come back. Because they are going to be tired of all the broken promises.
TED has popularised the art of presenting big ideas. What gets easily overlooked is how another art is even more essential to a great TED talk: the art of digging deep.
This is the art of not only identifying the stones but actually picking them up and looking under. The art of scratching our heads and asking further. The art of looking for answers as opposed to stopping at the questions. So that we arrive at ideas that don’t just look big but actually are big.
For this, it’s not enough to copy the looks of a TED talk: the structure, the storytelling, the stage layout, the timing. That’s just the surface.
A big idea is not in how the idea looks.
A big idea is in what it inspires. What it changes. Such as a fundamental change of perspective.
More often than not, these ideas originate in the mud and dirt. By digging deep. And getting your fingers dirty.
People on the TED stage are standing there because they have an important story to tell. One that originates from doing the work. Sweating the details. Looking beyond the obvious. Asking the questions and looking for answers.
The problem with our world of inspirational TED-like speeches is that it’s copying the looks of a great TED speech while missing the work that precedes it. These people copy the TED part but not the digging deep part.
Yet, digging deep is the most reliable way of arriving at a big idea talk. Dig deep and do the work. And then, tell a true story about what you worked out.
This is how you light the path.
Getting applause for your talk and having an impact are two very different goals for a presentation.
A good round of applause feels great. That’s for sure. But the enthusiasm of the moment is no guarantee that your message will stick. Or that it changes a mind.
Even worse: applause is seductive. When you get some, you want more. When you get a lot, you want even more. And it’s quite possible that you do because once you get the hang of it, you’ll have a good sense of what makes your audience cheer for you. The temptation to strive for that applause is not a small one.
And yet, the talks that resonate the most are often the ones that cause the audience to become quiet. Pause. Reflect upon what they just heard.
Applause and impact are by no means mutually exclusive, but they also don’t necessarily come together. Faced with the choice, I’d always prefer the talk that makes a difference rather than the one that makes for a good round of applause.
But let’s look at it from a different perspective: If the audience is still resonating with our talk a month – or a year – after … because that talk made a profound difference in their life … now, that’s a reason to be really proud of.
