Page 92 - The New Articulate Executive_ Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader

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THE 18-MINUTE WALL

Audience Attention Span

ll your planning, talents, and good execution will be in
A vain if you fail to recognize one simple—and critical—law of
nature.

In the 1970s the U.S. Navy did a study to find out how long
people can listen to other people talk. The objective was to best use
the time of instructors and students throughout the Navy’s educa-
tion system. The answer surprised a lot of people. The answer was
not an hour nor even half an hour. The answer was just eighteen
minutes. The Navy found that in a classroom, presentation, or lec-
ture environment, an audience’s ability to focus on what the speaker
is saying and then remember what was said drops off at eighteen
minutes like the continental shelf plunging straight down into the
abyss. Unhappily, very few people today are aware of that study or
the resulting vital number. If they were, we would save tens of mil-
lions of wasted hours and untold lost productivity in business in the
United States every year.
But what if we are unable, for any number of different reasons,
to limit what we must say to eighteen minutes? In real life, particu-
larly in business, we find that presentations often go longer than

eighteen minutes. Frequently we see, for example, board presenta-

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