How to Give a Remote Talk with No Slides

I have decades of experience giving keynotes, talks, leading workshops, and design sprints. I would always follow the same formula— sketch out an outline of the talk in rough blocks, translate the points into slides, design a gorgeous slide deck, and build out the slides while populating the talk content. I’d then rehearse the content, often running through the talk 20+ times until I was satisfied with the language and rhythm. I was going for the effortless knowing of the content that comes after intense memorization and internalizing the talking points. This approach served me well through many conferences. But it was time-consuming and exhausting. While I loved being onstage and giving the talk, I started to hate the weeks of preparation.

This carefully controlled and planned approach to talks was an accurate reflection of my former leadership style. It felt like I had to be perfect and the consummate professional. I liked to be confident, prepared, and meticulously detail-oriented. Which really meant that I was massively over-prepared and obsessively controlling every aspect of the experience. As you can imagine, this resulted in a lot of stress and the inevitable panic when something goes slightly off course, whether it’s a crashed laptop, A/V issues, or your co-presenter not showing up.

This past year, I’ve embraced a different path where I’m paying much more attention to connecting with the audience and our shared experience rather than the beautifully crafted story arc of my slides. This path is a different path of ease and flow where I embrace spontaneity and get excited by interruptions and deviations from the set course. Perfection has been replaced by planned messiness.

My personal transition came with learning and honing the craft of coaching. Each coaching conversation is a 3-part container where the coachee brings in a particular challenge, we end with co-created actions & experiments, and the magic happens in the free-form middle. The juicy, luscious middle is a meandering exploration of deep listening, powerful questions, embodiment, and ideation all wrapped up in a swirling soup of emotions. As a coach, I’m paying exquisite attention to the coachee’s words, body language, emotions, our interplay, and also the unnamable space of what wasn’t said. I’ve transitioned from being a designer of digital products to being a designer of human experiences.

“In improvisation, there are no mistakes.” —Miles Davis

After March 2020, when in-person events were cancelled and everything moved to zoom, I took the opportunity to revamp my rigorously planned approach to speaking. As I look back through my calendar, I’ve given 9 talks, 6 workshops, and run dozens of group coaching sessions since March. The first talk was the only one with slides.

This is what I’ve learned about how to craft a remote talk with no slides.

1. Know your audience

Before prepping the talk, have a clear understanding of who the audience is. Spend some time with the event organizers. Dig into more than the audience demographics, and seek a deeper understanding of why they’re interested in your talk and what the #1 takeaway for them would be. It could be something practical, e.g. they want to hone their design or leadership skills, or perhaps they simply want to be inspired, entertained, or distracted with a good laugh.

2. Have a clear intention

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”― Maya Angelou

How would you like people to feel at the end of your talk? What emotion do you want them to leave with? If it’s a practical talk, you may want to leave them activated and motivated to try things out or perhaps hopeful that things could be different if they use these tools you share. You may want to leave people peeing in their pants laughing and seeing the humor in every situation. You may want to leave them falling in love with typography or appreciating the beauty of nature. Be intentional with how you want your people to feel.

3. Meet Your Audience Where They Are

When you start your talk, know the context of the day. Are there larger country- or world-level breaking news that has just happened, whether it’s the death of a leader, a natural disaster, the Nobel prize awards, or national elections? Your audience will implicitly bring in this context of the day, so it helps to reference the events.

Part of the magic of a remote talk with no slides is also being able to make it more interactive. We’ve all been in lectures where no matter how engaging the speaker, it’s tough to focus on a single voice for an extended period of time. As part of meeting the audience where they’re at, kickoff the talk with a series of questions to get everyone participating:

If it’s a workshop with less than 12 people, you can ask everyone to share two words of emotion for how they’re feeling right now. Or make it contextual to your talk and ask them to share a one sentence challenge that they’re facing. This works well both in-person or remote.
If it’s a larger group of 20+ or even 100s of people, ask a series of questions to gauge the mood of your audience. It only takes 3–5 minutes to get user feedback and learn more about your audience. These can vary from: “Who’s nervous right now?” to a post-lunch crowd of “Who needs coffee to work through this mid-afternoon slump?” and get more specific into demographics or shared experiences. e.g. “Raise your hand if you’ve built and launched a product” or “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been fired” (you might want to build up to this last one).
This is easier to do on zoom than in-person when you may not have a visual on the entire audience. On zoom, ask people to turn their cameras on (and you can scroll through the screens of little squares) or have them use emojis to respond to the questions.

4. Outline Your Points

More practically, if you don’t have a slide deck, you start with an outline or storyboard of the beginning / middle / end of your talk. You should have a sense of the ending intention & emotion. The beginning should have some of your intro, which should help answer the question — why am I here speaking about X today? Other common intros are sharing a story or anecdote.

Outline the middle in a series of bullet points. You can capture the 5 or 7 points you want to make. People will forget more than that.

Alternately, if writing an outline doesn’t work for you, try improv speaking. You can turn on your camera and record a selfie video of your trying this unscripted talk. Watch it afterwards and pull out the top points, or send it to a close friend for instantaneous feedback.

5. Collect Stories

We all have stories that we’ve told throughout our lives from memorable disasters, learning moments, or incidents of pure hilarity. Start collecting stories from your personal and work life. There’s different types of stories that could be useful:

Life stories with a lesson or self-deprecating humor
Case studies of work projects
Stories of memorable people & interactions
Lessons from elders or mentors

Think of these stories as tools in your toolbox that you can pull out at any point in time to sprinkle throughout your talk to make a point.

6. Pull the Audience in

One huge benefit of no-slides on zoom is that your video will be up and center allowing your audience to better connect with you. Throughout the talk, pull the audience in to interact with you. Figure out how you want the flow of the talk to run as you outline your points and consider if you’d like Q&A or feedback throughout the talk rather than at the end. Tips and tricks include:

Asking the audience to share their key insight from the talk via chat
Starting with a short poll
Planting a friend in the audience to ask the first question. Typically after the first question is asked, then Q&A starts to flow

7. Breathe, Loosen Up, and Have Fun

Finally, try it out with the spirit of “Yes And” from improv. The first time you try something new is always the hardest. There’s a comfort in having slides as a plan to follow. Instead, think of the talk as a casual chat. Try to approach it with a spirit of curiosity and have fun.

Bottom-Line

Have you always been curious about giving an unscripted talk? Why not try it out for your next presentation during pandemic times? Much of this works especially well on zoom and has the bonus of being unexpected for the audience. I’m finding myself really loving this way of presenting and am looking forward to playing & adapting this style for in-person events… hopefully to come in 2021.

Tutti TaygerlyOctober 22, 2020