Episode #200: Which Data For My Presentations

How much is enough data in a presentation? How much is too much? Generally speaking, most presenters have a problem with too much, rather than too little information. Your slide deck is brimming over with goodness. And you just can’t bring yourself to trim it down. After all the effort you went to assembling that tour de force, you want to get it all out there in the public arena. You have spent hours on the gathering of the detail and making the slides, so you are very heavily invested in the process. You want to show the power of your thought leadership, your intellect, your insights, your experience.

Here is the danger though. We kill our audience with kindness. The kindness of throwing the entire assembly at them. They are now being buffeted by the strong winds of new data, new information, new insights, one after another. The last one is killed off by the succeeding one, and it in turn is killed off by the next one. We go into massive overload of the visual senses and the memory banks are being flooded, like a raging river spilling its banks.

We have forgotten our purpose of doing the presentation and are now firmly fixated on the mechanics, the logistics, the content and not the outcomes we want. There are different key purposes with a presentation: to entertain, to inform, to persuade, to motivate. The majority of business presentations should be to persuade, but are often underperforming and are only hitting the inform button. This is because the presenter hasn’t realised that with the same effort and drawing on the same data resource, they can move up the scale and be highly persuasive. Data, data, data by itself just doesn’t work.

At the end of the session the audience is shredded. They cannot remember any of the information, because there was way too much. They cannot remember the key message, because there were too many key messages. They walk out of there shaking their heads saying “what hit me?”. Was this a success? Did we convert anyone to our way of thinking? Did they leave with any valuable takeaways, so that they feel some value from attending? Or did they leave dazed and diminished?

We need a good structure to carry the presentation. A blockbuster opening to grab attention. A limited number of key points we can make in the time allotted. Strong supporting data and evidence to back up the key points. We need to design powerful close number one as we finish the presentation and also a powerful close number two, for after the Q&A.

We want them to get our key message and have it firmly planted in their brain, so they get it, remember it and believe it. That is different to stuffing the fire hose down their throats and hitting the faucet to turn it on full bore. But this is often what we do, when we lead with data. Always remember when it comes to presenting, less is more baby! You can always flesh out the points more in the Q&A and after the talk, for those most interested in the topic. We want to impress the audience, not bury them under detail. Getting the balance is the presenter’s skill and art and that is why there are so few presenters who are any good.