It was August 5th, 2015. I had just gotten the green light to be a speaker at TEDx TampaBay. For those of you who are familiar with TED, and the TEDx talks, this is a big deal. It took me three months of targeting, networking, and sales to get this opportunity. Giving a TED Talk (or even a TEDx Talk) was a Bucket List item for me. It was a big day.
The topic, “Why the Micro-niche is Mighty” was approved after three rounds of interviews and adjustments to make it fit the theme. The message of my TEDx Talk was to about how podcasting was allowing micro-niches to connect in a new and expanding way in many, many niches. Even the very uninteresting topic of government contracting.
The good news is that I had been approved as a speaker.
The bad news, I had to give the Talk on Sept 5, 2015 which was a scant 30 days away. I had to develop, draft, practice, polish and deliver in 30 days. That didn’t seem like much time to give the “talk of my life” (per Talk Like TED author Carmine Gallo).
Sound familiar?
Yup, looking back the parallels to the capture and proposal process are eerily apparent. I had targeted my customer (TEDx TampaBay), I had shaped the final RFP (by getting them to let me talk about podcasting – note there was no TEDx Talk to date about podcasting, until mine), and I had a great solution the Tedsters (the customer) would love. I just had to cram in into a compelling presentation into under 18 minutes (like page limits), with no mistakes. I had to accomplish this in under 30 days.
Easy.
Just like a proposal, right?
I learned a LOT through this TEDx experience. I could write 30,000+ words on all the things I learned through this TED experience. For now though, I’ll focus on just one: the 9-box template I developed while frantically trying to organize my Talk.
Fast forward a few weeks from, a few hundred drafts of the Talk. It was seven days before the TEDx Talk. Even though I knew better from years of writing proposals, I had made the classic proposal mistake of writing my talk first…instead of starting with a blank paper and building from there.
I had been through a half dozen drafts and even gave a practice presentation to my friends and family. I knew I was still not hitting the mark. It just didn’t congeal. It didn’t flow. It didn’t connect with the audience. All that changed when I sat down (6 days before the Talk) and mapped out my three main points against three basic criteria: why, how and what. (Thank you Simon Sinek for that idea from his TEDx Talk). The result was a 3×3 grid that created a map to the flow of the presentation that just jumped off the page for me.
I dubbed it the “9-box” the next morning. For my TEDx Talk, it looks like this
The shaded boxes are the “9-boxes”. You simply customize the three Key Points across the top to fit your paper, presentation, or proposal. Within an hour, you will have the framework of a great presentation with a compelling message in an organized structure.
But wait, there is one more touch that makes it really work well: Stories.
People love stories. In addition, there is significant evidence that stories help us emotionally connect to the content. Think of the things you’ve learned over your life and track how many are tied to a story. We remember stories. To polish the 9-box and make it a compelling presentation (or proposal), add one story to each column.
Note, in proposal lingo, the “story” may be your past performance, but it could also be a great graphic, a perfectly chosen image, or other media that tells a story. However, before you pick the media, you have to decide on what story you want to tell. That decision happens here in the 9-box process.
To finish my TEDx story: with only 6 days before the “talk of my life”, I finally got my ideas down on the 9-box (which I creating on the spot that day). I then spent the next 5 days shaping, practicing, deleting content, removing words, and controlling my rate of speech to keep it under 18 minutes and still hit all the points in my 9-boxes. With that structure, it was easy to decide what could go and what would stay. The final product ended up at about 13.5 minutes. I think it was the “talk of my life”, but I’m biased. What do you think? You can watch it here: Why the Micro-niche is Mighty. Now that you know the 9-box process, you may be able to pick out the content of each box in my Talk.