Condensed milk and conference talks

As a kid I had a thing for Highlander sweetened condensed milk. There’d usually be a tin in the cupboard for baking (baking what, I can’t really remember), but eating it straight from the tin was one of my favourite illicit treats. A spoonful of that sweet, thick, sticky stuff gave a sugar rush I can taste now just writing about it.

I don’t eat condensed milk from the tin anymore, but I was thinking about it again recently when I was coaching some speakers ahead of a conference.

It was the first time a couple of them had spoken at a large event, so naturally they were keen to do a good job.

Unfortunately, it meant that a few of them had tried to fit more into their talks than the time would really allow.

I vividly remember my first job in advertising. More or less straight out of my air force pilot’s seat I’d been hired to write radio ads at More FM, back when it was a standalone station (think a Kiwi version of WKRP, without the turkeys and helicopters).

I was only there for a while, but a lesson from day one stuck in my head: how many seconds there are in a 30 second ad.

Stuff more in and you just end up gabbling. 30 seconds is 30 seconds. And if you’re giving a talk, 30 minutes is 30 minutes.

It’s tempting as a speaker – especially a first-timer – to try and tell the audience everything you know about your topic.

That’s almost always a bad idea. No audience has the appetite for that. I reckon it’s better to just tell them one or two things, really well.

So back to that speaker coaching. It was clear that some of the speakers had WAY too much stuff to cover in the time available. I knew it and they knew it. What to do?

One of the speakers had an idea: “I’m just going to have to condense it down.”

You already know that I like condensed milk. Condensed talks, not so much.

You’ve probably sat through a condensed talk. Like the milk, it’s nutrient dense. Lots of words, lots of slides, lots on every slide. You might have even heard the speaker say things like “now there’s a lot on this slide but I don’t need you to look at it all.” And forget asking questions at the end about what exactly was on that slide, because there won’t be time for any.

So what I suggested was that instead of condensing the content, we cut it. Brutally. Chop out whole sections, then chop out some more. Forget about removing the odd word from the odd slide. This is work for an axe, not an eraser.

Some of the stuff – most of the stuff – that we cut out was good stuff. That’s fine. There’ll be other talks.

What was left seemed simple on the page; maybe even a little empty.

But on the stage, on the day, it left room for the speaker to move. Time for the audience to connect and understand. It turned a fact-packed broadcast into a two-way conversation.

And that’s a pretty sweet outcome.