You attend numerous presentations and meetings a year, filled with the typical dense and disorganised PowerPoint slides and leave most of them thinking, "Well, that's an hour of my life I'll never get back." But out of this sea of mediocrity, a rare few rise up, captivating you and driving you to action. What makes these few so special?
Such a lack of structure leads to two inevitable results. The first is that the presenter loses the audience. The second result is that nothing sticks. Random information will not stick in the human mind, and clearly that's the bigger problem.
This story, illustrates a critical point that's decidedly easy to miss. You have excellent content, but excellent content isn't the issue. If that content isn't properly organised, it's hard to process in the moment - and almost impossible to retain.
The vital point is, you take your material and find the overarching storyline that's hidden within it. It's a critical step in the design of any presentation, and it's fun to do.
How Your Brain Stores Information
There's no new brain science in play here; this is a principle that has been understood for centuries. The key to human learning is context. The brain requires context as it seeks to absorb and retain information.
Learning theory has known that humans learn sequentially. We absorb a piece of information, which then becomes the context for, and the basis of, processing all the information to follow. Context creates comprehension. Which raises a question: If context creates comprehension, how do we create that context in our presentations?
Your presentation should arrive at a question the exact moment that question arrives in the audience's mind. In any presentation, be ready to speak the phrase "You're probably wondering," because it tells the audience that their logic is explicitly tracking with the presenter.
As long as you've identified a reasonable question and run with that, the flow will make total sense and the audience will still track with you. This approach to structuring an argument is well-understood, and known in scholarly circles as the "diatribe," in which authors play out just such an imagined conversation.
Despite what most people think, it's not because they were delivered well. It's because they were crafted in a way that deeply aligned with how your brain wants to consume information. The presentations that failed did so precisely because they violated the largely unknown "natural laws" that govern how people actually learn.
In the book released in December 2016, ‘The Compelling Communicator’, you will learn a proven process for designing presentations that touch your audience in a highly impactful way, motivating them to take your desired action by:
• Building around a small number of powerful ideas
• Keeping content within the audience's "brain bandwidth"
• Developing logical narrative structure
• Anchoring communication in the listener's priorities
• Creating "mind-sticky" storytelling and visuals
• Crafting handouts that allow your presentation to live on after the handshakes.
Filled with examples of exceptional - and the not so exceptional - presentations, along with clear explanations of why they do and don't work, this comprehensive guidebook provides every tool you need to become a standout presenter whose message is certain to leave a powerful, lasting impression.
Reference: Tim Pollard: ‘The Compelling Communicator: Mastering the Art and Science of Exceptional Presentation Design’.
