You will be able to replace abstract statements with concrete examples from the audience's world.
"We need to improve customer experience across touchpoints." Everyone nods. Nobody pictures anything. Now compare: "A customer who calls us about a late delivery gets transferred three times before anyone can tell them where the parcel is." Same idea, but now the room can see it, and some of them are wincing because they have been that customer.
Abstract sentences are easy to write and easy to agree with. They are also easy to forget, because they give the listener nothing to hold. A concrete example turns a claim into something people can see, and what people can see, they tend to remember.
An abstract statement talks about categories: stakeholders, processes, efficiency, engagement. A concrete one talks about a particular instance: a named type of customer, a real step in a process, a place the audience knows.
Here is what the shift looks like in practice:
"Our onboarding is inefficient" turns into "a new picker spends four days in a classroom before touching a pallet". Where a draft says "clients have concerns about pricing", the concrete version says "two clients asked last month why our fee is higher than the firm across the road". And "response times need improvement" becomes "a patient who emails on Friday evening hears back on Tuesday".
Notice that none of the concrete versions uses a named individual. They use a type of person in a specific situation. That is usually enough to make the picture clear, and it avoids the problem of identifying anyone, which we come back to below.
When you edit a talk, look for any sentence that could be pasted unchanged into someone else's presentation, because that is how you spot an abstract one, and each of them is a place where an example could go.
The best example is one the audience recognises from their own experience. That means choosing differently for different rooms.
Arjun used his missed appointments analysis twice: once with the clinic managers, once with the finance team. For the clinic managers, his example was a Monday morning with three empty slots in a row and a doctor waiting, something every one of them had lived through. For finance he described the cost of an unused consultation slot, multiplied across the clinics over a month, and he said clearly that the figures were estimates. The finding stayed the same while the picture changed, because each room cared about a different part of it.
For a general audience in Singapore, everyday shared reference points work well: the commute, the lunchtime queue at a hawker centre, a renewal letter in the mail, a group chat that never stops. They earn their place when they fit the point. Watch for examples that assume one shared background, though. In a multicultural room, an example that only makes sense to some people leaves everyone else outside the talk for as long as it lasts.
When an idea feels important, speakers tend to pile up examples. "This affects retail, logistics, healthcare, education, government." By the third one, the audience has stopped picturing anything. A quick list of examples is just another abstract statement with more words.
One vivid example, told with enough detail to see, usually does more. Pick the one closest to your audience and give it a few sentences. If the room needs to know the idea applies more widely, add one line afterwards: "The same pattern shows up in our other two business lines."
Wei Ling had five examples of slow onboarding in her draft. She kept one, the picker who froze in front of the reach truck, which you met in lesson 3.1, The shape of a short story that makes a point. The other four went into a single sentence: "Supervisors at all three sites have told me similar stories."
Concrete examples carry a risk that abstract ones do not: they can point at real people.
Before you use an example, ask two questions. Could anyone in the room, or anyone who later sees the slides, identify the client, patient or colleague involved? And would the person in the example be embarrassed if they heard it told this way?
If the answer to either is yes, change the details. Swap the industry, the size of the company or the time of year, or combine two cases into one. Remove names, and anything that works like a name, such as a unique job title or a well-known project. Arjun's elderly patient had no name, no clinic named and no age given, and that was deliberate. This comes up most in healthcare, finance and HR, where your company may already have rules on what can be shared, and those rules come first.
Colleagues deserve the same care. A story about a teammate's mistake might be funny to you and humiliating to them, especially if they are in the room. When in doubt, make yourself the one who made the mistake.
Now go back to your own outline. In the activity you will find three abstract sentences in it and give each one an example your audience would recognise.
Find three abstract sentences in your talk and replace each with a concrete example the audience would recognise.
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