Giving an Update as “Headline, Questions and Answers”
Your Task
- Think of an update you will be giving to your team or internal target audience in the near future.
- Give it a catchy headline. Use the headline templates below for inspiration.
- Ask three sub-questions and answer them — you can elaborate on the answers.
- Sum up each answer as a balanced one-liner.
- Build a short presentation around your one headline, your three questions and three one-liners.
Performance direction
- You must perform this as a “self-interview” where you ask and answer questions yourself.
- When presenting, you must “place” your questions in the space in front of you with your hands – like the columns of the illustration.
Headline Templates
[X] better ways to …
[X] reasons why [something]
[X] must have …
How to start …
How to stop …
Here’s a quick way to …
How to … without …
How to … the right way …
How to get rid of …
[Something happened] … Now what?
[X] vs [Y] … which is better?
Forget [X], try this instead
Surprising insights about …
Are we making this [adjective] mistake?
Why [group of things] fail
A new [approach] – how to [goal]
HeadlineS: Real-world examples
“How to be faster and more agile — without feeling out of control!”
“A new health hazard to substance X — how to be in control?”
“3 better ways to be emotional in selling”
Balanced one-liners
Any statement like: “we must do X” stands on its own, it can be made stronger as a balanced statement by setting it against something else: “we must do X, not Y”. In the words of Simon Lancaster, Tony Blair’s speech writer: “If the sentence sounds as if it’s balanced, we imagine that the underlying thinking is balanced and our brain is tuned to like things that are balanced.”
Balanced one-liners: examples
You won’t be different. You will be changed
It’s not about what what we do, it’s about what we don’t do.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country
A tiny heart, a big breakthrough
Doing everything. Standing for nothing.
Technologies emerge, markets shift, opportunities arise.
Change the course, get ahead
I didn’t go into politics to change the party. I went into politics to change the country.
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.
A great man is always willing to be little.
Don’t count the days, make the days count.
Well done is better than well said.
It always seems impossible until it’s done.
That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
