Ben Pearce: Landing Your Security Message With Impact

This talk, presented by Ben Pierce, focuses on the importance of effective communication in the technology sector, particularly through the concept of technical storytelling. He emphasizes that while technical skills are essential, the ability to convey messages in a compelling manner is often what drives successful outcomes. Pierce introduces the AURIN framework, which includes understanding the audience, clarifying objectives, identifying key messages, creating emotional connections, and defining next steps. He also discusses visual storytelling techniques, encouraging the use of impactful visuals instead of wordy slides to enhance audience engagement. Overall, the session aims to equip tech professionals with skills to influence and persuade stakeholders effectively.

[Music] hopefully enjoyed your snack break hopefully you got a little bit of a leg stretch in and now you're sitting down ready to listen to more of our knowledgeable speakers now the next person is here to talk to us about building compelling content that gets people to engage your message and I think he's going to be successful engaging you guys because I was already at the edge

of my seat just talking to him for a few minutes it's my pleasure to introduce Ben Pierce remember guys if you do have any questions I've been told he's got some very different subjects so keep an eye on it drop your questions whenever they come to your mind because he's going to look to do some uh Midway through Q&A but now it's my pleasure to introduce Ben

Pierce to talk to you guys hey everybody uh thank you so much for the lovely introduction and it is absolutely brilliant to be with you all today um we're gonna be talking about Landing your security message with impact but to be honest if you're joining from any of the other stages the stuff I'm going to go through today really helps land your security message or your data

and AI message or your software Dev message or your business message or in fact any message that you want to land so hopefully it'll be really useful um before I start let me introduce myself so my name is Ben Pierce um and my background is I spent 20 years working at Microsoft and for about 10 of those years I was a deep technical engineer in customer facing

roles so out and about with customers all over Europe Middle East and Africa um and then after about 10 years moved into leadership roles people leadership and in those roles I led security teams and security consultancy data and AI teams Cloud solution architect teams a variety of customer-facing technical roles um so I did that for about 10 years and then I left Microsoft a few years ago

and started my own company elevated you and what I do now is I help people in the tech World develop their human skills their professional skills and and what we're going to be thinking about today is their storytelling skills and how they land messages and that kind of stuff I want to start off with a photo uh it's a photo of me um of basically every project

I think I was ever involved in here we go it's not the most flattering photo I will be honest um but this for me this photo represents me hitting a wall right uh from the walls perspective nearly every time uh we gave some advice to a customer right this is something that you need to to do right to change your security posture these are some things that

you need to change or perhaps it was about deploying a new solution this is the the the new solution that we're going to deploy even when we got sign off to you know to get things going um we hit wall after wall after wall after wall and often the technology was was the straightforward part right not always easy but but pretty straightforward the approach we needed to

take the problem was all the people we needed to work with you know the folks from the security team the networking team the procurement team the business team the CTO the CIO the CDO the every other o you know we had all of these people that we needed to manage take with us on this journey through what was a complex set of technology to to to give

some kind of benefit and and actually that was where spent all of my time and and that's why I founded this company because that skill was so important that I wanted to get out there and help people develop that skill because that was how you got stuff done you needed the technical chops don't get me wrong but you needed the ability to message it and influence people

and drive change and and what I call that is is technical storytelling so this idea that we're in a complex world and we need to be able to persuade people influence people to get stuff done so I think if we uh kind of go through the techniques I'm going to hopefully share with you over the next half an hour or so um it's going to help you

be more influential and and by that I don't mean that you've got a pumping Instagram account that gets you free ice creams at the beach what I mean is that that people listen to you that people have confidence in your position and and in your advice and that people are prepared to act on the things that you recommend on the things that you say so I think

this is going to help you become more influential I also think is going to help you become more memorable so that doesn't mean that you need to turn up to every business meeting sit there on Toms or teams or Zoom you know and stick a cocktail stick through your tongue but but this is about people remembering you about people remembering your message about people not instantly forgetting

the things that you've said about people taking your message to heart and then wanting to do something with it makes you stand out from the crowd and if you get those two things right it's going to make you more successful whether that's people choosing your design choosing your organization people investing time in the technology that you're passionate about or helping you build a community whatever it might

be that you're trying to achieve if you get those things right successful and so I'm going to split today's session into two part Parts two things that I think that you can take away and start using this afternoon uh tomorrow the next time you've got an important meeting the next presentation you need to do these two techniques you you can use and the first one is a

framework called aurin and we're going to go through that first and then the second thing is a little bit about um visual aids and how we do some visual storytelling to to be a little bit more impactful so I'm going to start off by talking about a framework called aurin okay so of course Orin uh is a pneumonic and it's stands for something I always love to

have these like little Frameworks that are just rolling around in the back of my brain and then when I'm called to use them I can remember it and it's a great Foundation a great way to to start so whenever I'm preparing for a presentation like this one or an meeting um I create an aurin template so Orin stands audience objective remembered emotion and next steps so audience

subjective remembered emotion next steps and so I just grab my notebook um write down each of those little bits and and then I start to think about right for this session that I'm about to do who's going to be in my audience what's their objective what do I want them to remember how do I want them to feel and what do I want them to do next

so what I'm going to do is just step through each of these in a little bit more detail now this isn't the flow that you then deliver you know as your presentation it's it's the template that helps you make decisions help you work out the right content the right stories to tell the right demos to show the right slides to build whatever it might be so let's

start by looking at audience okay okay most people think when they're given a presentation and this is weird right because I'm doing one now so I'm telling you how to do it whilst whilst doing it but but most people think right the presentation it's all about me it's my presentation right I'm the one on the camera uh I'm the one with the stories it's my information it's

my demos uh you know it's all about me and I put it to you that that is exactly the wrong mindset the mindset you want to being is that it's all about the audience it's all about the people that are listening to you they are giving you their nonrefundable time right even Bill Gates Elon Musk Larry Ellison whoever it might be um with all of their money

cannot buy time and so therefore if I've got people listening to me I want to put them at the center because if I put them at the center I'm going to give them value and if I'm valuable I'm relevant so really important to think about that the audience is the center okay it's not about me as the presenter it's about the audience and if it's about the

audience you need to know who's in your audience not like a list of names but what sort of people are going to be in the audience have we got a group of techies have we got a group of senior leaders a bunch of graduates season software developers Enterprise Architects a mix you know who's going to be in the audence a now if we understand our audience and

we get to know them and we can empathize with our audience and understand their perspective then we can create messages that are relevant to our audience and if the message is relevant to the audience then that means it's going to be valuable and if it's valuable then you're going to be remembered right you're going to be selected your message is going to be used so the first

thing is to think about who's going to be in um and what's going to be relevant to them so think about and jot down in your little template right who's going to be audience the next thing then is to think objectives I've seen some great presenters and some great communicators that will say right uh this is my objective this is what I want to achieve by the

end of this I want to convince this stakeholder that this solution is the way forward I want to convince this customer that our product is the the best one um and that's great to get clarity on what your objective is some presentations I'm not sure if they knew what their objective was and what they even wanted to say um but I think there's another level and that

level is to try and empathize with your audience as to what their objectives are so if I think about it from from this this perspective that we're in here this this conference okay so my objective right is I want to help folks out because that's what I love doing that's that's my passion uh and also it's how I pay my mortgage right so this is you know

this is my objective is to help you be more successful that's what I want to do um but if I flip that around and think about well what's your objectives you you've come to this this conference um to to be educated to learn new things maybe be you know a bit entertained have a bit of fun whilst you're doing it and and have some tangible things that

you can take away and do differently and help you in your career so I'm trying my best to to to get into your mindset and understand what your objectives for being in this session are and therefore if I can try and speak to those objectives then they're going to be really valuable and going to be really remembered okay so we got to think about who's in our

audience and have Clarity in our mind what our objective is and and what we think that the objective of the audience is going to be and again J that down um in your template now the next remembered there is an important thing transmit is not what is received okay what you transmit is not what is received we're not a TCP protocol here um uh what more UDP

there we go um what you transmit is not received so um that's really important right because a lot of people think okay I've got all of these things in my brain I know so much about this topic whatever topic it is that you know loads about and my job is to now get that into the brains of the people that are listening no that's not the job

because they cut that that's not how human brains work what you want to do is say okay what are the things I want them to remember what are the few things that I want them to remember maybe the three things that I want them to take away and I'm going to build everything else about reinforcing those three things I'm not just going to try and get everything

out of my brain into that of the audience because they're not going to remember it um they might might not be listening and I'm guessing right we're on a digital conference there's probably some people listening to me whilst Heaven above they might be doing email at the same time or web browsing or looking at slack people have given me a little bit of their attention um there's

a lot of people on here that have perhaps got English as a second language so therefore they're translating in their mind so they might not understand the some of the things that I'm going to say um it might be that Midway through like they start getting a load of WhatsApp you know reminders binging um beeping and binging there's a million reasons they might just be bored and

thinking about what they're going to eat for dinner tonight so there's a million reasons why people will will not receive what you transmit so you've got to figure out what you want them to remember so that you can repeat Parts you can amplify parts and you can really focus on driving home things so think what do you want your audience to remember from your session that you're

giving okay think about what what the key message is and get clarity in your mind what is that key message so again if I think about what I'm trying to do with you the key message is that being relevant and clear and memorable is vital for your success that's the message that you know the key message that I'm trying to give you and then I've got a

couple of points right I've got two sub themes that I'm gonna go I'm going through this aurin sub theme one and I'm going to go through visil a that's going to be my sub my sub theme two so I've got those two things three is often best that works with the mind but I'm going for two um and they need to support that key message they're not

separate topics they all point back to that key message and if you can get clarity in your mind and get down write down what are those three things that you want people to remember then they will leave that that communication remembering those three things not the 157 things that you peppered them with and overwhelmed them with so that's the uh remembered section so we thought you need

to understand your audience you need to have Clarity what your objective is and what their objective is we need to get them to think what is it that they remember okay you want them to remember and then the next thing is how do you want to make them feel I put it to you that there are not many technical presentations out there where the individual that's presenting

says well how do I want my audience to feel but it's really important because everybody listening is a human okay and um we're going to go back to ancient Greece we're going to go back to Aristotle Aristotle said that there are three things that help persuade people he said firstly you need some credibility okay what's your background what what gives you the right uh to talk to

me about this and how do you deliver that message right so that was the first bit all about your credibility the second thing was the rationale the logic behind your argument the strength of your argument re really important but the third bit was the emotional connection creating an emotion response with that person and so if you just work factor and think about data logic facts you're missing

the whole emotional connection and actually that's the third bit that helps you really persuade and influence people and not only that but it helps people remember your message and there is this great quote it's by Meer Angelou people will forget what you said people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel so people will forget all the you'll all forget

the things I've said right um you'll forget any demos that you might have done you know you're going to forget you know um what what I said what I did but how I made you feel that's the bit that remember and and how do we make people feel right bored overwhelmed um stupid because they don't understand this thing you know what what is the emotion that that

we're trying to generate maybe we're trying to make him feel confident that this technology is the way forward and have confidence in me because I I know how to help take you forward maybe we want people to feel shock at the problem you know of the urgency of the situation they have and we want them to make them feel that but then have hope that there is

a way forward know think about how you want them to feel and make sure that you think about how you create that emotional connection when you're talking to people you know these are three faces avoid you know the complete disinterest face um or on the the face on the right you know just keep going and let's see what happens you know I'm angry now because of of

of the things that you just keep boring me with you know all all bad fa pieces when when you're giving a so audience objective remembered how do you want them to feel and then what do you want them to do next there's a great book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People I imagine some of you might have read it one of the habits there is

begin with the end in mind normally a presentation or a meeting that you're in is not the end it is the means to the end okay it's the presentation that we do that convinces the stakeholder that means we can deploy the product and solve the problem okay or it's the conversation we need to have to get group a make a group decision and decide our path going

forward um it's it's very rarely presentation is very rarely the end in itself so think about what you want to happen next the strategy that I often see in Tech is we deliver a presentation and then we say I'll send you the slides right and that that's it right that that that is it so we send them a 70 megabyte document or a link to a 70

do 70 megabyte document full of pictures and that is our strategy and and that's not a strategy to get things done and to drive action and push things forward so be intentional on what you want your audience to do next so what are the things so if it's a bear of a broadcast so like this at a conference where interaction's a bit limited it's a it's a

lot more of a broadcast then then create your next steps to be as frictionless as possible as easy as possible and and Drive some action okay but if you're in one of those types of presentation meeting type environments where it's very interactive and decisions haven't been made yet and and we're going to decide what the next steps are are in there make sure at the end you've

got five minutes to go right what are the actions what are the actions when are they going to be done by and who's going to do them and that then helps turn it from just a presentation and a meeting into to something that drives action so in this broadcast type setting that we're in today what might I do well I'll I'll give you a sneak peak of

what I'll you know I'll pop up at the end as my next steps so I've tried to make this as simple and frictionless as possible so there's a nice web link there could have popped a QR code in maybe um that takes you to one place and in there there's four things that I'm trying to make as easy you know come and connect with me on LinkedIn

I pop loads of free stuff on there there's a podcast that I've got with loads of episodes about this type of stuff if you like it you can get a newsletter every week uh if you like prefer written content and if you want me to come and work with you book an appointment from that website from that link you know so in this example those are the

you know the the frictionless next steps that I'd encourage people to do so what would that be if you're broadcasting or in a meeting and and and working with stakeholders so I'm going to pause there that that's the first half covered um orur and framework so just to summarize it's a framework that helps you make decisions write down the the details of what they are and then

as you're choosing the points to make the demos you might want to do the slides you might want to create the stories you might want to tell use those as a North star as a Guiding Light to help you select stuff that will make it more influential and more memorable now I'm I'm going to pause there Darren um I'm going to come to you whilst I have

a swig of tea um any questions have any questions come in or has anybody want to put any questions in now I don't think we've had any come through just yet reminder folks you need to use the Q&A tabs if you click across you can type your questions out there um I did have one that came to mind for me when you were talking through this you

know I love the the fact that you're saying you know look at your audience compel the audience focus on what the audience wants from what they're watching y one big issue in that is the classic kind of confirmation bias right like you know we've all been there you've written someone out like you know I I do a lot of content creation on YouTube and I Make This

brilliant thumbnail my mind is the best thumbnail ever everyone's going to love it it's going to be fantastic I spend three hours optimizing it and then it goes live and no one cares yeah the question I've got is how do you deal with your own bias infecting the truth of what the audience wants great question great question so for me and this is an easy answer but

it's hard to say it's hard to do in practice right the easy answer is empathy right um so empathy is to take the perspective and understand the position of the other person right the question is how the heck do you do that right that that's that's the hit so different scenarios different techniques come out so sometimes it might be that we find ourselves um needing to influence

the same stakeholders like we know who the ceso is we know who the CTO is or the chief data officer whatever and actually we can try and get in their mindset a little bit and we understand what works for them what doesn't work for them so we can talk to them ask them questions so so that's the first thing is if you're in a position where you

can ask people questions then that's a really beneficial way to be but do ask and and and get empathy for their perspective now when you may be if you're starting to talk about bigger crowds then you can start to use the Persona model where you start to build persona of who the people are going to be that are going to be consuming this um and again then

maybe you could talk to people from that Persona and you know actually talk to them and and find out that's a great way to do it um or you could go to those personas and see what they're popping on uh you know different forums what they're sharing on LinkedIn what they're popping on X whatever it might be you can see what they're doing to see what the

issues that they're talking about so so get a list of those personas that you can use to to help inform that and then the other way which I use a little bit is of course using AI you know and you can take chat GPT and and give it a Persona and say right you are the ceso of a of an Airlines company because let's imagine that's that's

who you're Focus right you're the seeso of an Airlines company you are resistant to change you have been in that role for 20 years and you're a bit grumpy right you could you can give you can you could build that Persona in chat GPT and then start asking it questions what are the most uh what are the you know key priorities for you at the moment now

it might um hallucinate it might not be the most accurate but it also might give you a nugget of gold you know it'll list three things and you go I hadn't thought about that and then that gives you a train of thought to go in and investigate so I find that can be quite useful to do as well I'm never going to take it as written in

stone what comes out but it's maybe gonna give me some insight and help me Leap Frog to bet to a better place that that was a fantastic answer I I think uh you hit on the head right like it it's the classic one that comes to mind that I always remember is the whole idea of like you know because I come from a game design background worst

thing you can do is hold an idea in your closet and not tell anyone about it and worry that someone's going to steal it whatever or someone's going to shame it you need to get people out there kind of engaging with it whether they are real people or AI driven um but I think that is all the questions we have for now so I'll let you get

into the second part of the talk brilliant thank you let's let's do an experiment Let's do an experiment right if you are multitasking while you're listen to me stop multitasking for this for this second come in and and look at this get me on the screen and get this on the screen because I want to do an experiment with you um the thing that I'm about to

tell you now is the most important thing okay super so what I'm about to tell you that is so important has nothing to do with this slide in fact I'm going to turn it off because and I'm leaving you deliberately with a black slide now with nothing uh nothing there because what I've shown you there is what I call the split brain and if we' done this

face to face and I've done this experiment many times right the point of the experiment is I say I'm going to give you something really important and try and bring you in and listen then I pop a typical text slide up right which is full of bullet points um I bet everybody if you're honest with yourself started to read what was on that slide okay it was

quite text Heavy let me just pop it up again it's quite text heavy and I bet people started looking at it now that created what I call the split brain problem so the split brain problem is where the visual aid that you are distracts and reduces the power of your message and does not amplify it okay so all I do is I split your brain I split

your int your attention and you you are neither concentrating on my narrative the important things I want to say nor the the text that's on the slide I'm splitting your intention and that just reduces impact reduces memorability and reduces the effectiveness and yet it is what everybody in Tech does the reason they often do it is because they treat their slides as their notes okay visual aids

are there to Aid the thing that you're saying not distract from the thing that you're saying but we've kind of taken that with PowerPoint and turned it into our visual notes which then distract from what we're saying and I'm going to talk about that in two settings the first setting is wordy slides so what what I just showed you and the second thing is well what about

when we need to talk about complex stuff and complicated diagrams and Architectural diagrams and that kind of stuff how does it apply to that so so let's start off and let's have a little think about wordy slides and I am going to pop up that slide that I put there okay I'm G to let people have a little read because I know people are nosy uh not

nosy but people are interested and and that that's what they want to think about but the point is the stuff that I've put on there is really interesting right um there are some stats that I found on the web they might be a few months old now um but uh if I take the second bullet point cyber criminals can penetrate 93% of company networks so let's imagine

right I'm giving a talk and and this is the you know the narrative that I want to go through the thing is I'm there talking about bullet point two right cyber criminals can penetrate 93% of company networks um but at the same time somebody else is red ahead and they're on bullet point 1 2 3 4 5 okay and they're sat there reading that data breaches caused

by negligence may lead to jail time for corporate Executives and so there they're going oh should should people go to jail for their security you know what that security negligence is that what they should do you know so so I'm trying to talk about corporate networks and they're thinking about jail all it does is reduce the impact what what I should do is talk about that Network

piece and amplify that with my visual aids and then later talk about the jail bit and then amplify that with the visual aids so I should basically take those bullet points and put them in my notes put them in PowerPoint presenter viw or on some flashcards or whatever it might be and move to to a visil a so what would I do if I was presenting something

like that what I would do is let's maybe take this first and I would pop up something like this right so let let me just talk you through what I've done what I've done here so firstly um I've just gone to a royaltyfree source so this one's pexels.com there's there's lots of different places pixabay unsplash Wikimedia Commons um even PowerPoint itself has got some great stuff there

are loads of places where you can get images that you can use for free so I've just typed in hacker and of course it's someone with a hood because we all know hackers always wear hoods um so but as soon as you've got somebody in a hood oh there's something going on there and then I love this picture I think it's the Toronto skyline and it's just

this idea that there's a hacker surveying the skyline and he can get into any network that he wants and it's just quite nonchalant sat there um on the edge of a skyscraper so it's really for me I love that image and then all I've done because I'm not a designer right I'm not very good at Art I'm I'm not a great visual person at designing stuff all

I've done is taken a a black box right or a black rectangle I've turned the opacity down a little bit and then I've just taken the quote and put it in White in there that's all I've done right so there's not much design so you you go to a royaltyfree website or or buy a stock image pop it in there put a black box change its opacity

copy and paste the quote in done looks really impactful um and so rather than use those slides so what I'd then use is I'd use a slide per point right so I might have another slide let's say where I was talking about the jail and maybe I can get a picture of somebody in handcuffs and then just have another quote in there and what it does is

it amplifies the thing that I'm trying to say makes it a bit more interesting but doesn't ract and take away from the thing that saying so that's a great way um to to use visual aids but what about when we have to talk about something a bit more complicated because we do right we're talking about complex Tech difficult business problems we can't just put a picture of

somebody in a hood and wave our hands around we often need to help people understand more complicated things so let's think about complex diagrams okay the first thing you can do is of course you can download icon packs from Microsoft from Cisco from AWS from whoever it might be you can download icon packs and generate your own diagrams okay that are nice and simple but sometimes we

don't have time to do that and so we just want to get from the website you know the reference architecture diagram and we want to talk through it so so this is what I've got so I'm going to I'm going to pop it up on the screen and actually this will do an experiment as well because as this goes up on the screen there's no title on

it so I imagine some of you are going oh what what what's this now you're listen not listening to me you're looking at the architecture you're trying to work out what it is it's a data warehouse on Azure for for anybody and then you're going oh but is it old or is it new oh that surface is that service has been retired and oh there's this new

service fabric that everybody's talking about where's that on there so straight away you get the point I've I've put this thing up here and everybody's disappearing off onto their own school of thought and I've managed to overwhelm but I do need to go through this detail I do need to get people to understand this so so how would I do it so what I do firstly is

is I'd start off at a high level I always find when we need to go from perhaps those big pictures nice images and we need to transition into something more complex Le let's do it a bit more gradually um and also that means if we've got people that are deeply technical in the audience and people that are less technical in the audience I can help them all

come together with me but without being patronizing so for example I instead of going straight to this reference architecture I would do something like this right this is what we're going to talk about a modern data warehouse for small and medium businesses again this is a couple of months old so some of the services might be a bit um uh might have been retired now but um

I'd simplify it and go right when we're talking about a data warehouse firstly we've got this data that's coming in from all of these different sources that might be iot iot sensors that might be feedback from customers structured data unstructured data we've got all this data coming in so we need to get hold of that data and get it in and bring it onto our platform then

um sorry once we've identified that data we then need to load it we need to ingest it we need to bring all of that data onto our platform so once we've got that data in our platform then we need to secure it uh store it and we need to store that securely and we need to store that so it performs at the right level then what we

can do is we can start to process that data manipulate that data clean that data make that data suitable for us to start to get business and then what we can do is we can collaborate on that to generate the business Insight that we want to get from that data um and we can get our data scientists and or we could create our machine learning models whatever

we want to do and then we can then serve that data out to our end users so that they can get the Insight they need to make the decisions they need to make so maybe I'd start off doing something like that I've simplified it and then all I've done is now taken that image that was just downloaded off the Microsoft website and I've cropped it I've just

chopped it using the crop feature so I can start to go to that next level of detail and say right okay so we've got this stream of data coming in from iot sensors or this non-structured or semi-structured or we've got databases whatever it is okay so we've got that data um we then bring it in and we now load and ingest it using event hubs and pipelines

then and and all I've done just behind the scenes is I've got a different slide so each of these is a different slide and I've just cropped the picture and dragged the crop and and resized the crop that's all I'm doing there's nothing complicated here and then I've just got a transition between the two slides I think it's the morph transition between the two slides so I've

just got so far three slides with a different cropped picture at a morph transition between them and so then I can talk about how you store the data Maybe in SQL then we can talk about how you process and manipulate that data how you can then collaborate and consume on that data and then finally how you might serve that data so what I've done is I've taken

something that could be overwhelming um that would definitely cause the split brain and would reduce the amount that people were listening to me and I've then managed the flow and revealed it a little bit more slowly that means I can go through the narrative keep people with me and that increases the impact and really importantly helps people recall it if I had just slammed this on this

on the screen in front of everybody you'd be overwhelmed and then wouldn't remember it whereas if I've talked it through built it crafted a narrative and Amplified that narrative with the visual aid then that means people will have maybe followed it understood it and then can recall it end so we have to talk about complicated stuff visual aids are a great way to help people learn complicated

stuff but think about the split brain think about how you use animations to Marshall that flow so that you help people learn and help people recall the content that well those are the two main topics that I wanted to cover so so I'm just going to summarize and if you've got any questions whilst I'm summarizing pop them in the Q&A and then we can go through any

questions that we've got at the end and I'm just going to summarize half the battle if not more than half the battle of of dri of deploying a technical solution or driving some technical change is not the technology it's about the people you will have to influence all of these different stakeholders and every time it's like hitting a wall when you've got their opinions their perspectives their

agenda their feelings and you need to be able to persuade and influence people to do that so if you can build your influencing skills and people then remember the things that you've said then you are more likely to be successful and when I was you know leading teams and I sort of looked at the people I've LED hundreds of people over the years and I think about

the ones that were really successful and really got stuff done they were people that were able to to technically they had the technical chops but also had the ability to influence people and to take their opinions and use their opinions so I think it's a great skill that you can learn it's not something you're just born with it's something that you can develop and that will make

you more successful so then we thought about the aurin framework so the aurin framework is a great little template to write down to help you think about the decisions that you're going to make in the when you when you generate that presentation or prepare for that meeting or write those Communications who is in the audience how can I build empathy with them in the audience so that

I can build valuable relevant messages for them okay what is my objective what do I want to achieve from this and what do what do they want to get from this and how can I speak to the things that they want to remember what I transmit is not what is received um I need to therefore decide what I want them to remember and try and use repetition

and structure um and reduce the number of things that I want them to remember I want them to remember away or maybe four things or maybe two things not 17 things not 35 things I just want them to take these key things and my key message away I want to think about how do they feel how are going I how can I make an emotional connection to

them how can I use humor how can I use Intrigue how can I use conflict how can I use sadness shock how can I put these sorts of things in that are G to change people's emotional um perspective which which helps persuade them and helps them remember stuff and there's Neuroscience studies that that sort of show that that that is the case but then remember the the

presentation is not the end okay so what are the next steps how do we drive action how do we turn it from a from a lovely session online into something that drives some action that generates energy that generates momentum so the aurin framework is a great way to to think about that and then we then started to think about visual storytelling so how do we use visuals

to amplify our message and to step away from Death by bullet points which is what we do so often in the tech World think about how we can amplify the things that we're saying how we control the flow of what comes up on the screen to amplify our message and how we can use really Simple Resources like pexels.com unsplash.com canva PowerPoint you don't need to be an

amazing designer you just need to think is what I'm going to say going to distract people from what I'm saying or is it going to amplify what I'm saying and so next steps from my perspective I've already given away the punchline there I've already shown you this um so if you have enjoyed the session or you find this kind of stuff useful I pop loads of it

for free on LinkedIn so so connect with me on LinkedIn it would be lovely to to connect with you and and listen and see to see what you're up to um I've got a podcast that comes out every fortnite the last one um was how to learn stuff fast uh Whitney Lee was talking about how she learns stuff really quickly which of course we need to do

in Tech all the time if you prefer to read stuff I've got a newsletter that comes out every week and if you'd love me to come and work with your organization and do a deeper dive session with any of you you can book an appointment with me and I would love to come and work with you it would be brilliant all from that link there that is

everything that I wanted to say so hope it has been really useful for you Darren if we could come back to you one last time um are there any questions at all that come in I think uh people are just soaking in the knowledge right now my friend I think it actually comes out quite nicely thanks to our little mids session Q&A I think we're just about

coming over our time for the slot um okay so what I'd say to people and I'm sure you'll agree if they want to reach out to you if they got questions you seem like a very receptive fellow and you kindly provided all these methods on getting in contact so I think with that in mind we'll get ready to close this one out but Ben absolute pleasure to

hear from you some really cool insights there and remember folks questions all these could answer them for you or you can just reach out to Ben directly uh he has got I think a few links on his profile on the pine app brilliant thank you everybody lovely to chat to you thanks for listening thanks folks