Turn and face the strange: How to deliver better presentations

To make the familiar strange and the strange familiar is an approach taken by anthropologists and sociologists in fieldwork. Their aim is to bridge the ‘them/us’ divide, drawing parallels between one culture and another, while also drawing attention to customs or behaviours that are noteworthy. But it’s something we can use in business, too.

When launching a new product, for example, it helps to make it look familiar. It’s no surprise that self-driving vehicles look like regular cars. To increase the adoption of new technology – to help customers feel comfortable – manufacturers need to normalise what the product looks like.

Apple used this technique when it launched its retail stores. While the stores were a new experience in retail design for electronics, they were also strangely familiar. Why? The stores were based on hotels, complete with someone to greet you at the door and a concierge station. A new experience was also a familiar one.

And anytime you hear someone say they are the “Uber” of whatever, you know they are using familiarity to bridge gaps in understanding.

Of course, advertising is built on making strange things seem familiar. The stranger the product, the more metaphor and even cliche is employed to normalise its adoption. In the 1970s, for example, Pet Rocks took the world by storm. 

Advertisers normalised owning a rock as a pet by packaging them in ventilated cardboard boxes with straw bedding, just like a living, breathing pet would have. Over 1,000,000 pet rocks were sold!

But it’s not products or advertising I want to talk about today. It’s presenting, because to present well you need to engage your audience and transfer knowledge. You need to make the familiar strange, and the strange, familiar.

Making the familiar strange to engage attention

The first thing we need to do is to engage the audience’s attention. To do that, we need to make the familiar strange. How? By looking at the world and flipping it.

In my keynote presentations, I need to convince people that what we think will influence behaviour is not actually what works best. Instead, I want people to use techniques from behavioural science. So how do I get there?

First, I make the familiar strange. This builds my audience’s appetite for new solutions. It creates curiosity and interest.

The familiar, in my case, is the prevailing notion that people use logic to navigate the world. There’s nothing more familiar to us than our own thinking, and every hour or every day a stream of sense-making justification and rationalisation is churning through our minds. It’s therefore very understandable that we think that’s how our own decisions, and those of others, are made.

So how do I make this strange? By using examples of where ‘logic’ has failed. That might be a paved pathway through a park that gets ignored in favour of a grassy shortcut. Or an airport baggage carousel that people crowd close to, making it more difficult to find your bag.

Only once people are open to rethinking what they’ve assumed to be true can we set about embedding the new idea. It’s time to make the strange familiar.

Transfer knowledge by making the strange familiar

The ‘strange’ that I want to make familiar is behavioural science. Sure, I could leave it as ‘strange’, and the presentation might still be interesting. But unless I make it familiar, the audience won’t integrate it into their lives.

So how do I make the strange science of behaviour familiar? Three key ways.

First, I use common language rather than scientific labels. 

Instead of System One, Loss Aversion and Choice Overload, for instance, I talk about people being lazy, scared and confused. The language they’ll feel comfortable talking about at both the dinner table and the conference table.

Second, I developed a model that has easy shapes to draw. A triangle, some lines, and a couple of circles.

And third, to make the strange seem familiar, I ground the science in everyday examples that my audiences are grappling with. This ensures what we talk about is immediately relevant to them.

So when it comes to crafting your next presentation, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is the existing status quo? In other words, what’s familiar?

2. How can you turn this on its head and make it strange so they’ll be interested?

3. What is it you want them to do differently as a result of listening to you?

4. How will you make this new and strange idea familiar enough that they’ll not only remember it but act on it, too?

Oh, by the way, how did I make the familiar strange and the strange familiar in this article?

I started with examples of how Apple and self-driving cars have used familiarity. I then flipped the use in products and advertising to presentations, perhaps a strange concept, which hopefully piqued your interest.

And to make the use of what I’ve shared familiar enough so you may be inclined to use it, I finished with some very grounded, pragmatic questions. Now, that’s not strange at all!