Five days ago, Geoffrey Hinton, who spent a decade at Google developing AI technology, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discoveries in machine learning and artificial neural networks. On this day, sixty-four years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in America.
What Hinton and King have in common is that, in their acceptances, each man gave dire warnings about the challenging circumstances in his respective field; a contrast with William Faulkner’s famous Nobel speech (as discussed in this Forbes blog) in which he focused on perseverance.
Last week, upon receiving the news of his award, Hinton told an interviewer, “with respect to the existential threat of these things getting out of control and taking over, I think we’re at a kind of bifurcation point in history where, in the next few years, we need to figure out if there’s a way to deal with that threat.”
Hinton will not be delivering his full acceptance speech for a couple of months but, given his warning about the dangers of AI when he left Google last year, he is likely to repeat them.
In the formal acceptance speech King gave two months later, he warned about the “the long night of racial injustice.” He then went on to describe what must be done to meet that challenge using a powerful rhetorical technique that you can use in any business presentation:
Prolepsis, a technique that dates back to the Greek and Roman orators Aristotle and Cicero, starts with a negative premise and then proceeds to refute it.
King’s negative premise was, “I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize.”
That sentence is an echo of the famous speech in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which Marc Antony refutes Brutus’ charge against Caesar, “The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious. If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.”
You can use prolepsis by beginning a business presentation with a negative premise:
- “You might ask why our product/service is more expensive than…”
- “You might ask how we can compete against…”
- “You might ask what we are doing to prevent further…”
Then, in the balance of your presentation, you can proceed to refute that negative premise.
- “Our product/service has the following advantages…”
- “We can compete effectively by…”
- “We have put new controls in place that…”
King refuted “the long night of racial injustice” in the balance of his speech by refusing to accept that racial injustice will continue and then offered his belief that nonviolent protest can end racial injustice. He did so by using repetitive phrases—just as he repeated the phrase “I have a dream” eight times in his famous 1963 speech on the mall in Washington, D.C.—with five consecutive sentences that began with “I refuse to accept…” followed by four sentences that began with “I believe that…”
In Hinton’s refutation, he told the interviewer, “I think it’s very important right now for people to be working on the issue of how we will keep control.”
Prolepsis—with or without repetitious phrases (such as your company’s slogan)—is an excellent technique for handling objections, the essential sales technique.
One important caution about prolepsis: Keep your negative premise short and spend most of your time on your refutation—the positive.
If prolepsis worked for Aristotle, Cicero, Shakespeare, MLK, and Geoffrey Hinton, it can work for you.