Episode #152: Unleash The Power Of Your Theories And Data When Presenting

It has been a while since I attended a business school presentation. From time to time the prominent foreign business schools fly in one of their big gun professors to rustle up some business in Japan by delivering a lecture on a topical subject. They are always good because the professors are either proving insights from their own research or are curating the best of what other specialists have to say on the subject. I was at one the other day on the subject of leadership. We all need help in the leadership arena so I was all ears for some pearls of insight and wisdom.

Being a business school, we had theoretical constructs, lots of groovy diagrams and a mountain of data. The presenter was very well spoken and well presented. He looked and sounded the part. I was sitting there thinking that something was missing. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the sense of incompleteness was strong. I moved on and went back to work and got back into it. Later it dawned on me what was the missing piece on the business school presentation puzzle. It was devoid of life.

The talk took place in a mental “clean room” like you see on television when they show how high tech memory chips are made, hermetically sealed off from any polluting elements. The expectation of a presentation from a business school should be that there will theory aspects aplenty and there were. There was no “dirt” though. By that I mean no stories from the coal face about how things got very messy or failed. No tales of woe, despair or desperation. No leadership meltdowns that destroyed the business. No lessons to the wise about what not to do.

This is the danger of giving “lectures” when we are presenting. We might have tremendous expert knowledge and experience. We are easily led into pontificating about how things should be done. We can provide sufficient data to sink a small island, we can back it all up with well researched theories explaining the rationale. The content though sort of hangs in the air. It starts to resemble hydroponic plant cultivation. Lot of nutrients and water going into the development stage, but no solid connection to the ground. The tomatoes are juicy and red, but the taste is a bit shallow and disappointing.

We should go high and have theories and constructs but we also need to provide context and this is where the blood and the mud of the stories comes into it. There is no doubt that the good professors presenting this content didn’t just dream it up together over a couple of beers down at the academic’s dining hall. They visited companies, talked with real people, collected the data, captured stories of what actually happened and then weaved their theory out of the detail.

Giving the audience a glimpse into that chaotic world in those companies researched, where things didn’t go so well and where the mistakes were coming fast and furious, would be an exciting whirlwind ride for the audience. Significantly, I will guarantee that we won’t remember the inner construct of the theory, but we will remember the meltdown at the headquarters of that company before they crashed and burned.

The lesson for the rest of us is to always make sure we are populating our presentations with stories from the front line, telling the tales of the survivors and adding plenty of graphic colour, when describing the corporate gore. When you are doing your planning and get to a point of importance in your talk make a note “inject story here” in the text or in the slide deck. This will be a good reminder to ground your potential frothy excesses in fact and reality from the front line. These stories will linger long on the memory banks of the audience, much longer than their recall of your data, theory or you.

The secret is to keep asking yourself, “how do I know this to be true”. Invariably we know this to be true because of something which has happened and that is the story we need to tell, in a short form version, during our talk. Go back to the source of data or theory. Also, tell stories involving yourself. If you screwed it up, then tell us about it. We will love you for it and feel a stronger bond with you as a person, rather than as a distant and remote “presenter”. I am a very private person, so it took me a long time to get over sharing my experiences with others, particularly the failures. What I found was a strong positive reaction to me and an increase in my credibility with my audience. So inject your stories into your talks and you will find the audience will go for it and do so every time.