Start Somewhere Else

How to start a presentation.

Presenting Wisdom is an event developed by Wellington’s storytelling maestro, DK. It’s a development opportunity which concludes with an event where you have fifteen minutes on stage to present a topic or a story of your choice. No brief, no prescribed format. Just you, something you care about, and fifteen minutes to outline why you care.

I chose Richard Henry. He was a nineteenth-century conservation pioneer who spent years alone on Resolution Island, catching and relocating kākāpō before "conservation" was a consideration in public consciousness. He died in 1929, never knowing if any of it had mattered. In fact, his efforts through fourteen years on Resolution Island were, to put it plainly, a failure. 

Fifty years after his death, he saved the species.

It’s a great story, with a clear arc. In the pursuit of doing it justice, I was stuck on the opening.

That’s the trap of a heavy story. When you want to engage, inform, and entertain, but you also feel the crushing weight of doing a real life justice, the blank page becomes a black hole. How do you summarise a lifetime of isolation in a single sentence? How do you hook an audience without cheapening the sacrifice? The sheer scale of what Richard Henry did paralysed me. I was so terrified of starting poorly that I couldn’t start at all.

I had to stop trying to tell the whole story in the first breath. I just needed a portal - a specific, atmospheric entry point that would drag the audience out of their seats and drop them into Richard Henry’s story alongside the man himself.

As I was looking for a way in, I found was a passage from Camp Life in Fiordland. The book was written by William McHutcheson in 1891, right around the time of Richard Henry's work. Someone else's words, describing someone else's experience of the same landscape. It was atmospheric. It used the kind of language that belongs in a different century. It felt like it could work to help move an audience from downtown Wellington in 2026 to wild, remote Fiordland in the 1890s.

But I knew it wasn't quite working before I finished reading it out loud the first time. 

“...in magnificent disorder, as if the giant billows of some storm-tossed main had been caught in a moment of wildest triumph…”

Too long. Too flowery. 

“...where the lightnings play, and the Storm King loves to dwell…”

Not Richard Henry's voice. Definitely not mine. 

But it set the scene, and it bought me time before the real story started.
I knew what was wrong with it, and I kept it anyway.

When I presented an early draft to DK, he didn't tell me it was wrong - he just told me to write two more openings and see what happened.

This is Pixar's "Three Pitches" rule in practice. The premise is simple: the first idea arrives easily - it’s there, ready to go. The second is often a reaction to the first. By the third, you've exhausted the obvious, and something more honest tends to appear.

My first alternative was better, but still not right.
The next one started with Richard Henry’s death.
Turns out that was the best place to start his story.

I arrived there because, in crafting my Richard Henry presentation, I was loosely following an SCQA structure: Situation, Complication, Question, Answer.

Through the McHutcheson piece, I was starting with the Situation. That’s the starting point for the framework, which makes it appear to be an entirely sensible place to begin. As Julie Andrews sang, "Let's start at the beginning, a very good place to start.”

Except, Julie, in this case, you’re wrong. Sensible doesn’t do a heavy story any justice.

Instead, identifying a man dying alone - a Complication - who saved a species after his death - launching a Question - became the best place to start Richard Henry’s story.

“In 1929, 84-year-old Richard Henry died alone in Auckland.
50 years later, he saved the kākāpō from extinction.”

Or you can listen to it in my voice below.

Kinda makes you want to hear the Answer, right?

Frameworks, like SCQA, are useful in giving you a sequence to follow, a logic to build on, to get familiar with. It’s when you get to familiarity, that frameworks become genuinely useful. You start to see entry points rather than just the sequence. Lead with the Question, and the Situation becomes evidence rather than preamble. Lead with the Answer, and you're using an old presenting trick: tell them what you found, then show them how you found it. 

Most business presentations have a version of that atmospheric McHutcheson passage in them. A slide that sets the scene or a presenter’s preamble. An opening that describes the status quo which everyone knows so well that they don’t have any energy left to care about it. It’s almost a form of presentation manners: giving people the context first, bringing them along slowly. What it actually does is give them time to check their phones and decide they already know where this is going. They’re trapped in the Situation, left waiting for the actual story to begin.

To go beyond this, there are two things to put into practice: bravery and experience. 

My favourite piece of advice around storytelling comes from Stephen King,

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.” 

When you start out creating your story, there will be things you’re attached to. You might think it’s a witty, or smart, or beautiful opening. You know it doesn’t work, but you love it. I’m looking at you and your Storm King, Mr McHutcheson. The bravery comes in making the call to kill it, to take it out of the story before it takes your story out.

The experience element comes from being able to apply frameworks to your stories, and having applied them enough you know where to bend, shuffle, and break them. Pixar’s “Three Pitches” is a framework with creativity built-in. I could use it as intended. On the face of it, SCQA is an established framework built with a firm structure. But experience taught me that SCQA isn't a straight line - it's a deck of cards you can shuffle. By launching with the Complication, the structure became a guideline that led me to a better opening. 

Richard Henry spent years doing work he'd never see the outcome of.
The least we can do is spend a few minutes finding a better opening.

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Jamie is Redvespa's Head of Experience. In a former life, he held a similar title at Auckland Zoo where his key stakeholders were elephants, lions, and tigers instead of business analysts. He wishes to refrain from commenting on any similarities between the two.

Header image: Richard Henry and the object of his labours, a kākāpō. From the Richard Henry Collection held at Dunedin's Hocken Library.