Story before slides.
This is one of the most important messages I impart to our rising-star, young leaders at the TBWA\GLP “Sea Legs” program here in Madrid.
Wait, Spain…what’s with the Roman letters?
Ah…SPQR. In Rome of course SPQR stands for “Senatus Populusque Romanus,” which translates to “The Senate and People of Rome.”
But here in Spain during the Presentation Skills Workshop I lead at this Global Learning Program, I commandeered the venerable Roman letters to create a helpful acronym to help unearth the story of your presentation: SPQR or Situation, Problem, Question, Response.
This SPQR governs your presentation.
You see, all too often the first move on creating a presentation is jumping right to the slides in the deck. Then loading up those slides with far too many words and too little story. (And this is true for all presentations from strategy, creative and yes, even…finance!)
SPQR is designed to help you understand exactly what you’re presenting. The story of your presentation.
SPQR is a framework that helps you synthesize and organize all of your material first before you start making the deck. And once you know the story, it keeps you from making a whole lot of dull deckware that the audience or reader tunes out.
SPQR is based on a simple premise: Story before slides.
Here’s how SPQR works.
What’s the Situation?
What’s the real Problem here?
And once defined, that problem leads to a provocative Question…which leads to your Response (creative idea) that will answer the question — and solve the problem.
Fact is, you can boil down your Situation and Problem to a few sentences. Raise a single question. Then explode with your response.
It’s a far cry from the usual “47 pages of upfront strategery blah, blah, blah,” as one Slegger said to the group.
During the program, we had our Sleggers do two presentations.
The first without any knowledge of SPQR on their first day. And as you can imagine those presentations were a slide-a-palooza of mezzo-mezzo storytelling.
It was a shame because some of the wonderful, most breakthrough ideas didn’t break through.
Then a few days later after folks learned SPQR, the results were dramatic. We had the Sleggers re-do some of the first-day presentations. Suddenly the same material burst through as clear, compelling and powerful business stories — sometimes told with all but one slide.
The before and after transformation was truly remarkable.
Why? Because the presenters were now going into the arena with a story and not just a deck. And these stories were striking, smart and short. With a premium on clarity and impact.
When’s your next presentation?
Why not put the slides on hold. And start with your story, first.
Why not SPQR it?
So smart. Thanks for posting this, Rob.