The “Why? How? Prove It!” system of writing presentations and speeches was developed by Graham Jones, a leading British professional speaker, a President of the Professional Speaking Association. The method ensures you can:
- Write a presentation quickly
- Write a presentation that makes your material accessible to the audience
- Write a presentation that is easy to remember
If you use Why? How? Prove It! in your work you will be amazed at how quickly you can put together great presentations that will be easy to say and easy to remember.
STEP ONE: Key Message
Your presentation MUST have a key message. Leave your audience in absolutely no doubt what you came to tell them. Don’t lead them up to your messages – they won’t stay the course. Hit them between the eyes with your message right up front. You should provide your key message within the first 15 seconds of starting your talk. Research shows that if you don’t do this you risk losing the attention of your audience.
Writing your key message should be the most time consuming and difficult part of preparing your talk. Indeed, if you do not spend enough time on thinking through your key message you may well be wasting your time – and that of your audience – when you come to give your presentation. Poorly prepared key messages are frequently the problem that lies behind badly written talks and speeches.
Your key message should contain:
- The main action or change in behaviour you want your audience to take as a result of listening to you
- Reference to the audience
- Reference to an example that you’ll elaborate on
A good key message might be:
Since you are all marketing managers, I’m convinced that by the end of this morning’s talk you’ll be absolutely determined to use our new marketing software that allows you to gain access to research reports in a flash. In fact I’m sure you’ll be so impressed you’ll be wanting a copy in the next 30 minutes.
As you can see this message says:
- WHO it is for – marketing managers
- WHAT they will do – use the new software
- WHY they will do it – to gain access to research
- WHEN they will do it – in the next 30 minutes
This message is also just 55 words long, which means you can say it in 18 seconds. Indeed, if no-one wishes to listen to you after those opening 20 seconds they will still have understood what you have come to tell them. The remainder of your talk would just be the detail – but your message will have hit home without it.
Having said that, a good key message with a ‘call to action‘ like the example (you’ll be wanting a copy in the next 30 minutes) means that your audience will be hungry for more, so they will carry on listening.
To make sure they have got the message, though, make sure you repeat it right at the end of your talk. This helps ensure the late arrivals also know what your message was.
STEP TWO: Why?
Having provided your audience with your key message they will inevitably be asking themselves:
‘Why should I do that?’ or ‘Why should I think that?’ or ‘Why should that be the case?’
In any event, all the questions that follow from an action-oriented key message are of the ‘why?’ kind. That means if the next stage of your presentation sets about answering these questions your talk is following what the audience perceives as its route through the material. The result is that you have them on your side immediately.
Many presenters prepare material that is only logical if you already know the subject or the information that is being presented. But few audiences will know. Hence they become quickly lost and have to work hard to pick their way through the information. Research shows that audiences that have to commit the least mental effort are the ones most likely to accept the material they are given. In other words, if you follow your own logic you are making it much less likely that your material will be accepted or acted upon by the audience.
If your talk follows the audience logic by immediately answering the ‘why’ style questions you will be providing just what the listeners want, mentally. As a result, you will make your material MUCH MORE LIKELY to be accepted and acted upon.
Having constructed your key message you simply have to think of all the reasons why your audience should accept what you are saying or act upon your material. These reasons and the detail behind them will form the first main section of your presentation
In our example, the presentation may go on to consider:
- That marketing managers can’t do their job without market research
- That software makes accessing research easier
- That there is no suitable program that works quickly enough for marketing managers
STEP THREE: How?
So, your audience now knows what you expect them to do and why they should do it. Now you need to answer their next inevitable question – how are they going to achieve what you suggest?
In this section of your talk you need to provide some explanation of how your audience can take the action you suggest or how they might go about changing their minds on a situation.
However, this is the least important part of your presentation. You are merely giving ideas at this stage. Once people have bought into your idea by understanding why your key message is important, the ‘how?’ they might do what you suggest is nice to know, but not need to know material. Hence, the ‘how?’ may only be a couple of sentences of suggestions, nothing very detailed.
Having said that, ‘how’ is an important part of the presentation as it necessarily follows the logical set of questions being asked subconsciously by the audience. Hence to leave it out disturbs the natural logic in the audience’s mind and you lose support, reducing your influence.
But don’t waste too much breath on it. Your audience simply needs to check that ‘how? has been answered. Quite how they achieve tour desires will be up to them after your presentation – you are just providing some guidance.
In our example, the ‘how?’ section might consider:
- Obtaining a copy from the sales team
- Downloading a copy form the Internet
STEP FOUR: Prove It..!
So, you’ve told your audience what you expect them to do, why they should do it and how they can get on with things. But even though you may have got your message across, you haven’t really underlined it as yet. You need to provide evidence for your assertions – prove what you have said is beyond dispute. The ‘prove it’ section of your talk is the most important part you need to write, after the key message. So spend lots of time in planning this.
You can prove your key message in several ways, but the main evidence will come from:
- Personal examples
- Case studies
- Statistics
Individual, personal examples are immensely powerful – especially if you tell them as stories. Case studies are in depth examples and can be useful, but they are more difficult to tell as stories. Statistics are useful to help prove a point, but they do not carry as much weight as examples and case histories. That’s because people know that you can massage the statistics in your favour, so they put less trust in them.
In our example the ‘prove it’ section may go on to consider:
- The story about the marketing manager you met at a conference who said the program had enabled much greater control of marketing programmes
- The case study of the company which used the software and achieved a much happier marketing team as a result
- The figures from several companies that showed marketing efforts were 30% more successful when the software was used
Using WHPI
There are several advantages to the Why? How? Prove It! method:
- Your talk starts and ends with a key message, leaving your audience in no doubt as to what you said – you’ve grabbed their attention
- Writing your talk is easy as you only have to provide a few details and then add some examples to prove your point
- Remembering your talk is easy as it is constructed logically -plus if you forget where you are just reflect on what you have said and work out which is the next phase in the sequence.
- Your talk follows the apparent logic of the audience making it much more influential and persuasive
If you want, you can download our pre-printed form that lets you fill in the blanks using the WHPI method. You can use this form to provide the outline for your presentations.