You will be able to pick a structure for a talk based on its purpose and audience.
Think of a talk you followed easily from start to finish. You probably could not say why it was easy. You just always knew roughly where you were, what the speaker was building towards and how much was left. Now think of one where you got lost by the third slide. The content may have been just as good. What was missing was a shape you could hold on to.
Someone reading a document can see its shape at a glance, from the headings and the page count, and skip ahead whenever they like. Listeners cannot. They get the talk one sentence at a time, so the structure has to be simple enough to carry in their heads and said out loud often enough that they do not lose it.
You do not need to invent a structure for every talk. A few reliable ones cover most of what you will ever present.
This is the structure for proposals. You describe a problem the audience recognises, set out what you propose to do about it, and then say what they get if they agree.
Wei Ling's training proposal from module 1 fits it naturally. Problem: new warehouse hires take too long to become productive, and the trainers' time is stretched. Solution: move most of the classroom training online and keep floor shadowing as it is. Benefit: new hires productive sooner, at no extra cost, with a trial at one site first.
The order matters. Open with the solution and the audience has no reason to care about it yet. Make the problem concrete first, and by the time you reach your proposal they are already wondering what can be done.
This suits updates and strategy talks, where the audience wants to know how things are going. Where did we start, where are we now, and where are we heading?
Arjun uses it for his monthly analytics update. Past: what the team said it would deliver last quarter. Present: what it delivered, with one honest line on what slipped. Future: what comes next and what he needs from the room. It is a familiar shape, which is part of its value. Nobody has to work out how the talk is organised.
The risk with this structure is that the past swells. Keep it short. The audience usually cares most about the present and the future, because those are the parts they can still affect.
This is the structure for recommendations to senior people. It is close to the opening Barbara Minto teaches in The Pyramid Principle, her book on structuring business writing. Minto's version adds a question between the complication and the answer.
The situation is something the audience already knows and agrees with. The complication is what has changed or gone wrong. The resolution is your recommendation. For example: our regional clients have always paid by bank transfer. Over the past year, more of them have asked to pay by card, and two have moved to a competitor that accepts it. We should add card payments for regional clients before the next contract renewals.
Anyone who took Communicate at work met Minto's pyramid in lesson 1.2, Build longer messages as a pyramid: point, reasons, detail, and a spoken talk borrows the same logic. Once you have stated the resolution, the points that follow are the reasons for it, and each reason has its evidence underneath.
Whichever structure you pick, the body of the talk usually comes down to a few main points. Three is a practical limit for most talks. Listeners cannot scroll back, and by the fifth point most of them have lost the first. If you have seven, some of them are probably evidence for others and can be grouped.
Then say the structure out loud as you go. This is called signposting: short phrases that tell the audience where they are. "There are three reasons we should run the trial." "The second reason is cost." "That brings me to the last one." In writing, signposts like these would feel heavy. Spoken, they are what lets a listener who drifted for a moment find their place again.
Signpost the transitions between structure sections too. "So that is where we started. Here is where we are now." It takes four seconds and saves the audience the effort of working it out.
Let the purpose of the talk pick for you. A decision on something new usually sits well in problem, solution and benefit. Progress reports suit past, present and future. When you are recommending something to people more senior than you, reach for situation, complication and resolution, and get to the recommendation early.
Plenty of talks could go two ways. Wei Ling's proposal, for instance, also works as situation, complication and resolution, because the managing director already knows the current training and the complication is the slow start new hires make. When a talk could go either way, sketch it in both shapes and put them side by side on your desk, then pick the version where your core message comes through most plainly.
Outline your upcoming talk in two different structures and choose the one that makes the message clearest.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).