Episode #125: Pour On Your Evidence When Presenting

Evidence is good and lot of evidence can be even better, depending on how we present it. Blasting our audience with data is boring. Telling gripping stories highlighting the data is much better.

Your presentation needs both good content and good delivery. If either is missing then the talk will be a dud. The idea that the telling isn’t as important as the showing of the evidence of what you are saying is a fatal error in being persuasive.

There are a number of common structures for giving presentations and one of the most popular is the opening-key points/evidence-closing. We consider the length of the presentation, the audience, the purpose of our talk and then we pour the contents into this structure. Generally, in a 30 minute speech we can only have a few key points we can cover, so we select the most powerful and then look for the evidence which will persuade our audience. This is where a lot of presentations suddenly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The structure flow is a simple one, the analysis of the occasion is straightforward but at this next stage we can get confused about what we are trying to achieve. We might become so engrossed in the evidence assembly component that we forget the crucial “WHY” aspect of this effort. Technically oriented presenters love to bludgeon their audience with detail, usually in font or scale so small, it is barely visible on screen.

No, the WHY is all about persuading the audience of our conclusion or way of thinking. Line charts, pie charts, comparison tables are trotted out to do battle with the perceptions and biases of the audience. The tendency to imagine that this quality data will stand by itself and not require the presenter to do much, is a grave error. “I don’t have to be a good speaker, because the quality of my information is so high”, is a typical, if somewhat pathetic excuse.

Another common error is to invest the vast majority of the time for the presentation preparation on the accompanying slides for the talk. We become quite busy. So busy, in fact, that we forget to practice the delivery of the talk. We find ourselves presenting the content for the first time up at the podium, peering down at our audience.

How should we fix this approach? Some examples of evidence are really powerful when they are numbers but instead of drowning our audience with too many numbers, we can select one and use a very big font to isolate out that one number. We then talk to that number and explain what it means. If we want to use line charts or trend analysis then one chart per slide is a good rule. We don’t split the visual concentration of our audience. We speak to the significance of the trend knowing that our audience can see the trend line for themselves.

To improve our communication effectiveness, we go one step further and we tell stories about these numbers. Who was involved, where, when and what happened. We recall stories more easily than masses of data. This helps to get us around to the WHY of our talk, the key point we want the audience to absorb. And we practice the delivery over and over until we are comfortable we have the cadence right.

We need to produce evidence to back up what we are saying. What we don’t want though is for that evidence to blur the key message. We want it to be aligned with what we are saying. We want to tell the audience in a way that they resonate with and have the evidence to support what we are saying. When both aspects are working well and in harmony we are unbeatable.