Both Thinkers and Feelers Together At one level, satisfying both thinkers and feelers is easy. The two different groups are looking for different kinds of data (data about principles, costs, and benefits for the thinkers and data about people for the feelers), and so all you need to do is provide both kinds, and both groups will be happy.

Where it can become difficult, however, is when thinkers are presenting to feelers. Some thinkers have great difficulty addressing “people issues”; it is almost a matter of principle for them not to allow people considerations to interfere with the logic of the recommendation. Anything else, for them, would indicate bias and lack of professionalism.

If you are one of these thinkers, it may help you to keep in mind that people implications are just another form of data—you are merely describing those implications, which does not bias your recommendation in any way. For example, you may be recommending a change to a new, more efficient system for—say—expense reporting. You know that staff are going to resist the change, even though ultimately they will benefit by saving time and avoiding errors. While a thinker might be inclined to dismiss such resistance as irrational, to a feeler this would appear to be a serious flaw in your recommendation. To satisfy the feelers in your audience, you should recognize this potential for resistance as additional data, and show how you are planning to deal with it.

The final dimension is about structure: in dealing with the outside world, do your audience members prefer to decide things right away, or do they prefer to stay open to new

FIGURE 1.3. Good Design: Communicating Both Big Picture and Details Simultaneously

information and options? The two sides of this dimension are referred to as Judgers and Perceivers, respectively.

Judgers Judgers desperately need to know your conclusions up-front. They will not sit happily through any kind of inductive argument, no matter how carefully crafted. They need to know what your main point is, instantly. If you have a boss who is always pushing you to include an executive summary of your presentations or memos up-front, that boss is very likely a judger.

Perceivers Perceivers, on the other hand, want to know that you have considered all available options, and they would like to know what those options are. They want to be sure that you are not being too hasty in your recommendations and jumping to conclusions.

Both Judgers and Perceivers Together It is possible to satisfy both. The way to do this is to present your conclusions and the alternatives you considered, right up-front, on the first page.

All of this attempt to satisfy the various personality types may seem like a lot of effort. The main point of it, as we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, is to avoid defaulting to your own preferences. If you can ensure this without going through this exercise, perhaps just by quickly considering who will be in the room and which personality types are most different from your own, that will probably be sufficient. If you care about communicating effectively with people who do not have the same personality type as you do, then you do need to go through this first step at some level.

Before you move on, there is some further information about your audience that, if you can find it, you will find useful in the subsequent steps of the Extreme Presentation process. For Step 2, it will be helpful to know what your audience knows or believes about the issue that you are presenting. For Step 4 you would also like to know where your audience tends to find their information (e.g., which magazines they read, which blogs they follow) and which authorities they respect, so that you can incorporate information in your presentation that will be credible to them.

Now we know who we’ re presenting to, and how they need to be presented to, but we don’ t necessarily know yet exactly what we ’ re trying to do. We will figure this out next, in Chapter 2.

Step 2: Set Specific Objectives for What You Want Your Audience to Think and Do Differently After Your Presentation

In order to be clear about the objectives for your presentation, ask yourself: “How will the world be different for my audience after I make my presentation?” This question is important, because if the answer is “It won. t be,” then you really need to think hard about whether you should be giving this presentation at all. If nothing will change for your audience as a result of your presentation, then why should they even be there?

The way to do this, with clarity, is to use the “From-To/Think-Do” matrix. (See Figure 2.1; there is also a copy of this matrix in Appendix A, Worksheet A2.) In this matrix, you specify your presentation objective by defining precisely the changes you are seeking in your audience’s attitudes and behaviors: their thoughts and actions. You want to be very clear as to what you want your audience to think and do differently as a result of your presentation.

Fill in the From-To/Think-Do Matrix to clarify your objectives. You should think of this exercise as external scaffolding—something to help you construct your presentation, not something that you will include during the presentation. In this chapter we will cover:

Common advice for presentation objectives is that they should be “ action oriented ” :

they should have lots of verbs. Consider the example in Figure 2.2. This is a disguised

version of a real slide. It is very action oriented; each bullet begins with a verb: review,

> Communicate the importance of understanding techniques and educating employees in the process.

communicate, identify. But there is something fundamentally wrong about this slide. What is wrong with it?

Look at it again. The objectives are all about me, the presenter; what I am going to do: I am going to review, communicate, identify. How useful is such a set of objectives, in terms of knowing whether your presentation has been a success? Not very useful, because even before the presentation begins, you know that, barring something extraordinary such as the roof falling in, you will indeed review, communicate, and identify what you were intending to. But what we need is a way to set objectives that are all about the audience, not the presenter. Only if we measure against this kind of objective can we really know whether our presentation has had an effect.

The way to do this is to use the “From-To/Think-Do” Matrix (Figure 2.1) to set your objective in terms of what you want your audience to think and do differently. In marketing terms, we call this attitudinal and behavioral change. You can, t change their actions unless you first change their minds, and in general there is not much point changing their minds unless you also change their actions. And this is what the From-To/Think-Do matrix is for. Figure 2.3 contains an example of this matrix in use.

In this case, the presenter is delivering some market research about brand strength and wants to convince the audience to invest in a brand advertising test. The top left box, the “ From/Think” box, describes what the audience is probably thinking now about brand advertising: a waste of money, because we can’t measure its effectiveness. Below that, the “From/Do” box, this contains what the audience is—or is not—doing right now. In this case it’ s the latter: they are not investing in brand advertising. At the top right is the “To/Think” box. This is what we want the audience to be thinking once the presentation is over: “Hey, there are actually some very sophisticated ways to measure the value and effect of brands on our business.” But don’t stop there. Below that, the “To/Do” box: “Let’s try to convince them to invest in a brand advertising test.”

Figure 2.4 contains five examples of good presentation objectives developed using the From-To/Think-Do Matrix. Each of these examples is relevant to business, government, academia, and military use: one of them may fit your own situation either as is or with some modification.

1. [Thinking] From thinking that investment in proposed project X would be a waste of money to thinking that it could be very valuable, and [Doing] from not investing in project X to agreeing to make an initial investment

2. [Thinking] From thinking that current staff underperformance is due to inadequate tools to thinking that lack of required skills is the real problem, and [Doing] from planning to invest in new support technology to investing instead in improved staff training

3. [Thinking] From staff being unfamiliar with sexual harassment guidelines and implications of violating them to being familiar with them and their implications, and [Doing] from occasional violations of guidelines to no violations of guidelines

4. [Thinking] From thinking that the current procurement approach has its problems but trying to fix it will cause even bigger problems to believing that there may be a way to streamline it without causing undue disruption, and [Doing] from not making any changes to the procurement process to agreeing to a small scale pilot of the new approach

5. [Thinking] From front-line staff lacking knowledge and understanding of procedures to having a good grasp of procedures, and [Doing] from making mistakes, with heavy call volume to central office for help to fewer mistakes and calls for help

Try to push your objectives to include both attitudinal (thinking) and behavioral (doing) components whenever possible, keeping in mind, on your audience’s behalf, the old saying that “to think but not to do is to never have thought at all.” For example, some organizations have developed a convention of stating whether a particular presentation is an information presentation or a decision presentation. I think there are two problems with this convention. First, announcing that this is an informational presentation is almost a cue to the audience that it can ignore you. (If it’s just informational, how important could it be?) Second, and of more consequence, a presentation that is billed as purely informational takes the presenter off the hook from having to think though what the implications of that information might be for the audience.

A common type of snformational presentation is the “update” presentation: “I’m just here to update you on the project/tracking study/progress to date/etc.” If you begin designing your presentation with this as your goal, you are going to find it difficult to hold your audience’ s attention. I am not saying that you cannot or should not have an “update” presentation, only that update presentations are almost guaranteed to be boring and devoid of impact.

The way to get out of this trap is to force yourself to complete the “From-To/Think-Do” Matrix. What does the information that you want to update your audience about imply about what they need to think and do differently? For example: Where in your project have conditions changed so that some new thinking is needed? What parts of your project have fallen behind schedule and need corrective action? This way you will focus only on the areas that need thought and action, and move very quickly through the rest, or even skip parts of it and refer the audience to an appendix if they need the detail. This makes for a much more interesting presentation, and one that is more likely to have impact. (For more details on how to turn an informational or update presentation compelling, see Figure 3.3 and its associated text in Chapter 3.

The “From-To/Think-Do” discipline is also important for training and educational presentations. Again, ask yourself what your training session will allow participants to think and do differently once they’ ve completed it. This will help you focus on what really matters and avoid bogging it down with superfluous information. The approach works even if you are teaching some liberal arts subject, such as art history. How are the students thinking and acting differently after the class than they were before it? Before the class, they could not tell a Rembrandt from a Rauschenberg; afterward, they can.

If you want your audience to welcome your presentations, then you need to make certain that you are giving them value for the time they are investing listening to you. A critical prerequisite for doing this is to have a clear understanding of how their thoughts and behavior will change as a result of this presentation. This will allow you to ask yourself: Are those changes worth the time they will spend with me?

Once you’ve filled out the matrix, take a look at what you’ve written. If it is written in terms of what you are going to do, then you haven’ t completed it correctly. You need to rewrite it in terms of what you want your audience to think and do.

But what if you are just trying to reinforce something they already know? In this case, try very hard to identify what they will do differently after your presentation; if nothing, maybe you don’t need to give the presentation.

What if you just have to give them more details that they can use? The answer is the same here: focus on what will be different for them once you give them those details.

How will their thoughts or actions change as a result of receiving these new details from you? If neither their thoughts nor their actions will change because of your presentation, then really, why are you bothering? The answer to the question of “How will my audience think or act differently as a result of receiving the information I want to present to them?” is your presentation objective.

What if you don’ t know what they think right now? Try to find out. There is usually no need—and no time—so do an all-out needs assessment. A simple email with one or two questions to a member of your prospective audience should usually do the trick. For example: “I am preparing next week ’s presentation on project X. What do you and your colleagues think about project X—are you in favor of implementing it right now?”

You don ’t want to waste your time and theirs trying to persuade them of something they are already convinced about. If you really can’t find out, you might want to consider creating two versions of your presentation. In the first few minutes of your presentation, you will quickly find out what they think, and then you can switch accordingly.

Now that we know the objective of your presentation, the next question is what is actually going to be in your presentation? We will begin to answer this in Part II of this book, next.

IN THE NEXT TWO CHAPTERS we will cover the logic dimension of designing a presentation. This includes the business problem that your presentation is going to help your audience solve and the information you will provide to support that solution.

* Clarify why you should always focus your presentation on a serious problem that your audience has

* Argue against the common belief that style is more important than substance, and demonstrate how important the quality of your evidence is to the success of your presentation

* Introduce and explain the Reality Principle, which states that you should always prefer to present evidence that is concrete and particular rather than conceptual and general

Focusing your presentation on a serious problem that your audience has is essential— this is the way that you get their attention. Unless you are solving a problem for your audience, why should they listen to you? You’re just another waste of time for them. If you follow just this one idea—of focusing your presentation on solving a problem that your audience has—then you will see a substantive improvement in the success of your presentations. The reason that drawing your audience’s attention to a threatening problem works, in part, is that fear is a reliable motivator when the issue is a serious one and you are offering a helpful solution.¹

¹Witte and Allen’s (2000) meta-analysis of fifty years of research into fear appeals attests to their effectiveness when they present a significant and relevant threat and when they offer achievable and effective responses.

Think about the problems that your audience has, and then ask yourself: “Which of those problems will the information that I want to present to them help them solve?” For example, you might be providing a project update or details from an ongoing research study. Instead of just saying, “I’m going to give you an update on the construction project” or “I’m going to tell you the findings from this quarter’s tracking study,” think about what new information you have learned since the last update. What will this new information allow your audience to do? What problem of theirs will it contribute to solving? You’ll then organize your entire presentation around this new information. You can still cover the rest of the update, but it will be in the context of something very helpful to them. The goal here is, instead of having them say, “Oh great, here comes Dr. Abela

with another boring update,” you want them to think, “Every time this person presents to us, we learn something useful.”

President John F. Kennedy apparently once said “The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.” We will paraphrase that and say that the only reason to give a presentation is to solve a problem.

This is crucially important. If you don’t know what problems your audience has and how your presentation could help solve them, find out before you do anything else. Phone or email one of your audience members, or someone who knows them, and ask. “I’m just presenting a project update” is not good enough anymore—everyone is too busy. Your presentation has to help to solve an important problem for your audience if you want to get their attention. Chapter 3 will go into more details about how to identify your audience’s problems.

²A study of engineering students found that presentation professionalism training tended to focus on “how to gesture appropriately, to project their voice, or to eliminate the ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ from their speech” (Dannels 2003, pp. 165-166).

There is a common assumption that style trumps substance in presentations—that communication is mostly about sizzle, not steak.² Research in the late 1960s provided some support for this assumption, showing that under certain conditions, the inclusion of good evidence in a communication did not have much immediate effect on changing people’s minds. James McCroskey’s (1969) summary of several studies found that when either the credibility of the presenter was high or delivery of the communication was poor, then including good evidence did not make much difference on immediate attitude change in the audience. There is also research that has been badly misapplied, such as the “conclusion” that only 7 percent of communication comes from words, with the other 93 percent supposedly coming from non-verbal signals—the implication of this being that your evidence counts at most for 7 percent of your communication. (But as we have seen, this is false; see the Introduction to this book for a debunking of this myth.) Because of these assumptions, there is a temptation to spend time trying to embellish your slides.

Yet in general, the empirical research contradicts the assumption that style is more important than substance. Although McCroskey found that, under the conditions mentioned above, including good evidence does not increase immediate attitude change, he also found that, regardless of those conditions, the inclusion of evidence is likely to increase sustained attitude change. So if you want to persuade your audience, and keep them persuaded, then one of the most important things you can do is include strong evidence.¹

The reality principle states that you should always prefer to present evidence that is concrete and particular rather than conceptual and general. Real things, real people, and specific details are more interesting, memorable, and persuasive. Good copywriters know this:

“Specific claims increase believability. Do NOT write in your advertising, ‘This car gets great gas mileage.’ DO write, ‘This car gets 41 mpg in the city and 52 mpg on road trips’.”⁴

When summarizing customer research, for example, show a picture of an actual subject and provide specific, real details about the person (to the extent that this is possible without violating the confidentiality of your research). Show photographs of the things or people you are talking about, maps of locations, and diagrams or plans.⁵

Don’t be afraid to provide lots of detail; it increases credibility. This is true regardless of audience personality type. Certainly, detail-oriented people have a strong need to see all the details. But even people who are more conceptually oriented will find your presentation more credible if you include details—even if they do not read any of the details, which they probably won’t, anyway.⁶

In every case, be sure to explain where your details come from. When you make it clear that your facts could be easily verified, people become more confident in them, even if they don’t ever bother to check them.⁷

There is also a broader—and equally important—application of the reality principle, which concerns how your recommendations fit with your audiences’ lives. In addition to trying always to present concrete and particular information, you should also try always to ensure that the problems and recommendations you discuss in your presentations fit in with the concrete and particular realities in your audiences’ lives. It is easy to slip into a habit of blaming your audience for their lack of attention to you or respect for your ideas. It is useful to remember that, although it may sometimes seem to be the case, this apparent indifference is not typically based on malice toward you or a desire to spoil your day. More likely, it arises because there are constraints in their own situations that inhibit them from embracing your presentation fully.

And often enough it is not a question of trying to find out what these constraints are, because usually you already know what they are. In most cases you already know, for example, that this department is under extreme cost-cutting pressure, or that that person has been putting in fourteen-hour days for several weeks now. It is therefore usually more a matter of trying to adjust your presentation to address these realities. Informing your audience up-front that you know what cost constraints they are under, and therefore that you are about to propose a very slimmed-down solution, for example, will help overcome their initial skepticism and avoid their writing you off before your presentation begins. In doing so you improve the chances of your proposal being accepted.

There is a danger, particularly in larger organizations where bureaucracy is more widespread, that the practice of presentation becomes part of a larger game in which we go through the motions of saying what we are expected to say, while the audience goes through the motions of listening to us. And then nothing happens. Making a deliberate effort to incorporate a clear understanding of the realities in your audience’s lives into the details of your recommendations goes a long way toward breaking out of this game, because they will quickly become aware that you are speaking to them personally and

⁴Gary Bencivenga, http:// bencivengabullets.com/bullets.asp? id=23; accessed 6/20/07.

⁵Eye-tracking research found that pictures of real people and things draw more attention and are remembered more (Glick, 2004). Research on print advertising found that photographs gain more attention than artwork (Finn, 1988, p. 172).

⁶These findings are based on experiments reported in Artz and Tybout (1999) and Rossiter and Percy (1980). See Chapter 8 for more on these experiments.

⁷Ford, Smith, and Swasy’s (1990) research on advertising claims found that people are less skeptical of claims that could be verified.

that what you are saying has real relevance for their own work, and therefore they will be more likely to consider it. In this way you will actually be getting something useful done—and this is a much more fulfilling way to go through ones career and life, isn’t it?

The two chapters in this part will show you the “how” of using evidence persuasively in your presentation. Chapter 3 will show you how to choose the right problem and compose a persuasive solution. Chapter 4 contains a discussion on what kinds of evidence to include in your presentation—and some of it is quite counter-intuitive and surprising.

Step 3: Identify a Problem Your Audience Has That Your Presentation Will Contribute to Solving

If you want to capture and keep your audience’s attention every time, then make sure that every presentation you make focuses on helping them to solve an important problem of theirs. This is critically important: if you’ re not helping to solve a problem for your audience, then why are they listening to you?

The problem that you choose to focus on must be a real one, one that is likely going to cause pain for your audience, professionally and perhaps personally, if it is not solved. Ideally, there should be clear risks and real dollars at stake; for example, their business profits are going to suffer, so their bonuses will be reduced or eliminated, and their career prospects will be hurt. Or they are not going to complete their project on time, and therefore they will not be able to request the additional resources they are hoping for. Or, at minimum, they are going to be stressed while they struggle with the problem. They do not have to already be aware that they have this problem, if you are able to convince them that it is important.

The important thing is that the problem must be your audience’s problem, not your problem. For example, if you are a researcher and your internal clients are not taking advantage of the insights that you have identified for them, that is your problem, not theirs, because it is making you look ineffective. On the other hand, the fact that they are missing out on new business opportunities identified by your research, for example, and therefore they are less successful because they are not acting on your insights: now that’s their problem. Notice the subtlety here—these are really two aspects of the same issue. The important thing is to be able to highlight why your audience is likely to suffer if they do not listen to you. If you refocus your presentation on the problem that they have, then your audience will be more willing to listen to you. The substance of your presentation may be much the same either way, but by focusing on a problem that they have, you are much more likely to win their interest and attention.

If you already understand the importance of concentrating your entire presentation on addressing a problem facing your audience, and you know the problem you wish to focus on, then write it down, along with a one-sentence summary of the solution.

The rest of this chapter will answer the following questions about articulating problems and solutions:

— What if all I can come up with are a bunch of small problems rather than one big one?

— What if there is clearly a problem, but the audience I am trying to engage just does not seem to be interested?

— What if I just can’t get my thoughts straight on what solution to recommend?

One of the most common causes of a failed presentation occurs even before you begin designing the presentation: inadequate problem solving. As a result, many people develop presentations with substandard content and then try to improve the presentation by adding fancy ornamentation, such as animations or transitions.

Ironically, almost all presentation approaches assume that your thinking is already complete and solid before you begin to design your presentation. Yet, in my experience, this assumption is usually false. People are very busy, and will often start writing their presentations before their thinking is complete. This is why the problem-solution step is built right into the beginning of the Extreme Presentation process. It ensures that you push your thinking as far as you can before you start drawing any slides.

By focusing your presentation on helping to solve a problem that your audience has, you ensure that you capture their attention. Henry Boettinger wrote, “Rule 1: The only reason

for the existence of a presentation of an idea is that it be an answer to a problem’ . . . If you think you can break this rule, you are better than the best essayists, novelists, and dramatists in history. So far, none of them has ever done so successfully.”¹

Effective salespeople know this. In fact focusing on an important problem that prospective clients have, and helping them solve it, is a core tenet of the empirically validated and highly successful SPIN Selling® technique. If you are trying to persuade your audience to take action on your recommendations—if you want to “sell” your ideas—then it makes sense to do what successful salespeople do, and focus on solving your audience’s problem.²

You need to focus your presentation on a problem that your audience has and that you will provide some contribution towards solving. The problem needs to be big enough to be worth their attention, and yet small enough that your presentation makes a meaningful contribution to solving it.

To find out whether you are focusing on the real problem, you can use the six- sigma technique of the “Five Why’s.” Ask “Why is this a problem?” When you get the answer, ask again, “And why is this a problem?” Five times is usually enough to get you to the core problem. For example: the problem is that our project is delayed. Why is this a problem (number 1)? Because we can ’ t seem to be able to decide which new supplier to go with. Why can’t you decide (number 2)? Because the different suppliers have different, incompatible technologies. Why is this a problem (number 3)? Because we are afraid to commit to a particular technology. Why are you afraid to commit (number 4)? Because we don’ t know, longer term, which technology is going to help us get the most productivity from our staff. And why is this a problem (number 5)? Because we don ’ t fully understand the drivers of productivity in our staff. Aha. Now you know the real problem, so you can focus your presentation on it and have a much greater chance of getting your audience to make some progress toward solving it.

Many problems can be defined at different levels, and the challenge then is figuring out which level to choose. For example, at the highest level, the problem could be that the company is not making enough money. At a level below that, this could be because it is not bringing in enough new customers. More specifically, this in turn could be because there are not enough customers from a particularly important segment (e.g., teenage girls, for the clothing department of a department store). And the problem at the heart of this could be that the current advertising does not appeal to teenage girls.

The way to decide what level of problem to address is to ask, “What is the highest level of the problem toward which I can make a significant contribution to solving in my presentation? ”

¹Henry Boettinger, Moving Mountains (1969, p. 41), one of the best books on presentations ever

²See Rackham (1988) for details on the SPIN method. A study of thousands of sales transactions found that price premiums are usually earned because the salesperson was able to help the buyer identify a problem and/or help solve it (Snyder, 2007).

³Gigerenzer (2004) notes that, although following the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks many people avoided flying, more people died in the resulting increase in traffic accidents in the first three months after the attacks than actually died in the hijacked aircraft.

⁴Witte and Allen (2000), in their meta-analysis of fear appeals cited in the introduction to this Part, noted that, to be effective, fear appeals need to be accompanied by solutions that are perceived to be credible.

You want to address as big a problem as possible, because that makes your presentation more interesting for your audience. Interestingly, people appear to be more afraid of—and hence more captivated by—something that is catastrophic but rare, than they are of something that is less dramatic but more common.³

At the same time, you want to make sure that the problem you raise is one that can in fact be addressed. You do not want to use a sensational problem to attract people’s attention and then have to admit that there is nothing credible that can be done to solve it.⁴

So you want to locate the problem at a high enough level to capture your audience’ s attention, but not any higher than you can actually deliver some value on. One way to identify the right business problem to address is to use the Hierarchy of Business Problems (Figure 3.1). The way this works is that you begin at the top of the hierarchy and work your way down, until you find the most relevant problem. (If you work in a different type of environment, such as in a not-for-profit organization or in the military, see the other hierarchies in Figures 3.2a and b.)

At the top of the business hierarchy is the most general problem that businesses face: they are not making enough money. Their ROI (return on investment) is inadequate; it’ s not where they want it to be. Then you work your way down the hierarchy to find the specific business problem. For example, if ROI is inadequate, this could be either

Actual

cost

high

Inappropriate

overhead

allocation

because the returns—profits—are inadequate, or it could be that investment levels are inappropriate: too high for the given profits or too low. For the sake of our example, assume that the problem is with profit levels. If these are too low, then—continuing down the hierarchy—this could be either because sales (in absolute levels or in terms of growth rates) are too low or because costs are too high. If sales are too low, this could be because your market is too small or because your share of that market is too small. If the latter, this is either because you have a low share of the total number of customers or because you have low revenue per customer. If you have low revenue per customer, this is because you have either a low share of each customer’s purchases or you are getting too low of a price per customer.

Work your way through this hierarchy, and find the most likely business problem that you are facing. When you have identified the problem, write it in Worksheet A3 (Appendix A) ’ Phrase it as a statement, not as a question, beginning something like, “The problem that my audience has is . . .”

The government/not-for-profit problem-solving hierarchy (see Figure 3.2a) starts at the top with the broadest problem typically faced in such organizations, namely, that the

Mission

requires

major

updating

Mission

requires

minor

updating

Not

understood

management

Management

giving

inadequate

direction

Management

giving

incorrect

direction

Management

giving

insufficient

direction

Staff personally able to execute but not receiving required cooperation from other staff

Work Compensation and Environment itself is benefits perceived perceived to unmotivating as inadequate be hostile

sources not sources identified assumptions made but strategic identified but not accessed made yet demonstrably objectives

Solution

not

generated

Inability

access

Solution

not

evaluated

organization is not fulfilling its mission. Below that, this is either because the mission itself is unclear, or else because the mission is clear but it is not being executed well. Each of these possibilities is then disaggregated further.

The military problem solving hierarchy (see Figure 3.2b) begins with a threat to national security. It is true that the military, like other not- for- profit institutions, is also mission -based, but when looking for a specific problem to which to anchor a presentation, it seems to be more productive to focus on a threat. The nature of the problem- solving approach is going to depend first on whether the threat is clear or not. If the threat is not clear, then the problem will likely be about the availability of facts or useful assumptions. If the threat is clear, then the issue is more likely to be about whether the desired end state has been defined or not. In each of these cases, the possibilities are again disaggregated further.

What if the problem that you have identified is so big that you can make very l ittle contribution to solving it? First, recognize that simply making your audience aware

that they have a serious problem, which they were not aware of before, could still be a valuable contribution to them, even if you do not offer a solution.⁵

Next, try to outline some preliminary steps for beginning to address the problem. Let’s say that the problem your audience is facing is declining enrollment in a school. You could suggest some additional research to help define the problem further, such as digging into the data to understand whether the declines are broad- based or concentrated in one or a few areas, and to where departing students are transferring. Or you could provide a few case examples of organizations that have faced similar problems and how they addressed them. If these preliminary steps do not seem like they will satisfy your audience, then consider using a facilitated discussion approach instead. This is described below in the reply to the question, “What do I do if there really isn’ t a clear solution to the problem?”

⁵Buyers tend to reward salespeople who bring their attention to a problem they were unaware of (Snyder, 2007).

What If All I Can Come Up With Are a Bunch of Small Problems Rather Than One Big One?

Sometimes it appears that your material is relevant to several small issues rather than one big problem. There are a number of ways to deal with this. If any one of them looks like it could grow into much larger problem if it is not addressed, then concentrate on that one. Alternatively, if you can combine all the smaller issues conceptually into a larger problem, then do so. If all of the smaller issues are related to plant maintenance, for example, you might offer your presentation as addressing a serious problem with maintenance. If you can also quantify the impact of each of the smaller problems and sum them up, then this will allow you to have even more impact, saying something like “ I would like to talk to you about how maintenance problems are costing us $5 million annually.” Even if the smaller issues are completely unrelated—one is about staff, another about insurance, another about vacation planning, for example—if you can quantify each and then add them all together, you can still present them as $X million in unnecessary expenditure, for example.

What if—after all your best efforts—it appears that there is just one small problem that you are focusing on? In this case, think about downgrading from a full-blown presentation to some less time- and resource-consuming form of communication. Consider instead a shorter presentation to fewer people, a conference call, or a brief memo or email. People will thank you for saving their time and the organization’s resources.

Presentations are time-consuming, both for the person developing the presentation and for the audience. Twenty people attending a forty’ five-minute presentation spend the equivalent of two full days of work for one person. A forty-slide presentation that takes thirty minutes per slide to create is almost three days’ work on the part of the presenter, for a total of one person-week of work. Can your organization really afford to waste the equivalent of a week’s work on a small issue?

Create presentations only when you have something particularly new or challenging to communicate. The rest of the time, deliver your material in a way that your audience will

find it easy to consume: in a well-organized memo or reference document, or a simple email. Many of the techniques in this book apply also to memos and reference documents. Later in this chapter we will cover how to write a one-page memo.

What if you are a researcher giving an update on the latest wave of an ongoing study, for example—do you still have to focus your presentation on an audience problem? If you begin working on your presentation convinced that you are designing a “purely informational” presentation, then you are going to have a very difficult time capturing and keeping your audience’ s attention. If you want their attention, then you must help them solve a problem. Everyone is very busy, and dedicating forty- five minutes to receiving some information (which they suspect—perhaps rightly—they could have received in five minutes by skimming a memo or an email) does not feel like an attractive prospect.

As we discussed in Chapter 2 , the solution to this is to find the problem that is implied in a purely “informational” presentation. The way to find the problem is to ask yourself: Why does my audience need this information? (If they don’t need your information, then you really shouldn’ t be giving this presentation). If they do need your information, it is probably because they are going to use it for something, and that something is usually some kind of a problem to be solved (or an opportunity to be pursued). What is it that they need or want to do and cannot do or do well without your information? Whatever that is, that is the problem that you are addressing. Refocus your presentation on that problem, and it will be much more interesting and compelling for your audience. (Figure 3.3 summarizes this approach.)

This is particularly true if you are asked to develop a presentation to “just provide an update.” In this case, don’t just bombard your audience with say, all the numbers from this quarter and how they have changed from last quarter. Instead, focus on the few most newsworthy changes in this quarter’ s data, and ask yourself the kinds of questions included in Figure 3.3 below: Why would my audience want this newsworthy information?

How to turn an informational or “update” presentation into a more interesting problem-solving presentation.

1. Why does the audience need the information or update that I am going to present to them?

3. Could they do it without my information? If so, would my information allow them to do it better? Faster? Cheaper?

Whatever it is that your information allows your audience to do that they could not have done otherwise—or do better than they could have—is a problem that your presentation is solving for your audience.

What does it allow them to start doing, stop doing, or continue doing that would be difficult or impossible without this information? Whatever that is, that is the problem you should be focusing on in this presentation. For example, let’s say that you are asked to present an update on the Alpha project, and your main message is that everything is currently on track, but that there is one area that might slip behind in the next month. What is the problem that you are solving for your audience with this presentation? Work through the questions in Figure 3.3 :

1. Why does the audience need the information or update that I am going to present to them? They need to know whether things are on track, and where things are or might be falling behind.

2. What does this information allow them to do? It allows them to take action to prevent the project from falling behind.

3. Could they do it without my information? Ifso, would my information allow them to do it better, faster, cheaper? They would eventually find out that the project was falling behind, but that won’ t be until later, by which time it will be more expensive to fix the problem. My presentation will allow them to fix the problem earlier and hence more cheaply.

What this exercise has allowed you to see is that the audience has a problem that project Alpha is about to be delayed and they do not even know it yet. You can now focus the presentation on this threatened delay and what can be done about it. As a result of this shift of focus, you will now have a much more interesting presentation than if you were merely giving them this month ’s update on project Alpha. (The “before and after” Extreme Presentation makeover example in Appendix B is also an informational update that was turned into a powerful problem-solving presentation.)

Finally, if you do not think that it is worth your effort to think through this, then perhaps you should cancel the presentation and just email them the findings instead. They can always email you back with any questions.

Should you still focus on a problem if you are creating a training presentation? Certainly. The reason people are being trained is that they have some kind of problem, which your training session will help them solve. Ask yourself what they will be able to do differently once they have taken your training. Not being able to do this thing is then the problem that you are addressing for them. If it is not a big problem, then you should also ask yourself whether the effort you and they are putting into the training is worthwhile.

For example, the problem that the Extreme Presentation workshop addresses is that participants have not been obtaining the impact from their presentations that they think they should. The workshop, by teaching them the ten- s tep process described in this book, solves that problem. After the workshop, the participants are able to design presentations that get their audiences to act on the information they receive.

What If There Is Clearly a Problem, But the Audience I Am Trying to Engage Just Does Not Seem to Want to Hear About It?

When the problem is clear to you, but you know that your audience is not interested in hearing about it—perhaps because you’ve already tried to engage them about it in preliminary conversations—the common reaction is to conclude that your audience are just burying their heads in the sand, pretending that what they don’ t know can’ t hurt them.

This may indeed be the case, but before concluding so, it is a good idea to think about why they do not seem to be interested. Often, the real reason that they do not appear to be interested is that you have not found the aspect of the problem that is most relevant to them right now, given their particular goals and constraints. This is another application of the reality principle outlined in the introduction to the Logic section: to always ensure that the problems and recommendations that you discuss in your presentations are relevant to the concrete and particular realities of your audiences’ lives.

For example, a market research manager in one of my workshops at a very large organization was struggling with getting her clients to be interested in an important business problem that she was working on. The business problem, as she first expressed it, was that the client she was serving— an advertising team—was not taking advantage of the lessons learned from research on the previous advertising campaign, and therefore they were in danger of repeating some of the same mistakes. This is clearly an important business problem—those mistakes are going to be quite costly, and yet they could be avoided.

As we discussed her challenge, the reasons why it was not very motivating to her clients became clear. First, the advertising team had moved on from the previous project on which the research was based to something quite different, so they did not think that the research from that project would be relevant to the new one. Second, they were already so far advanced into the new project that it was too late to incorporate the lessons from the previous project. What to do?

The manager decided instead to focus on the larger problem of avoiding mistakes in future campaigns, and decided instead to address the next campaign coming up, beyond the current one. It was the reality principle at work: by recognizing the specific realities of the pressures her clients were facing, she was able to modify the problem that her presentation focused on into something that was more compelling to those clients. The content is still the same—the lessons learned from previous advertising research—but the probability that the client would actually act on those lessons had now increased tremendously.

I n an attempt to promote positive thinking, some companies have forbidden the use of the word “problem,” insisting instead that staff use the word “ opportunity. ” In one organization, this rule died a quick death when one manager addressed a meeting using

the words of Pogo, Walt Kelly’s famous cartoon character: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.”

Focusing on problems does not mean that you have to be negative and pessimistic throughout your presentation. It does mean that you will unmistakably attach your presentation to a problem that your audience has. But the bulk of your presentation will typically be focused on the solution.

Does it make a difference if you are offering an opportunity instead of a problem? In general, problems are more motivating than opportunities, because—all other things being equal—people tend to be more concerned about losing something than gaining something.⁶ If you ignore an opportunity, people may not notice, but if you ignore a problem, it could explode in your face. Most opportunities can be redefined as a solution to another problem. For example, a growth opportunity in a new business segment can be recast as a solution to the problem of how to meet company growth goals. In the end, though, whether you call what you are presenting a “problem” or an “opportunity” will depend on your own judgment about what you think will be most motivating to your audience.

Nobel - Prizewinning Prospect Theory states, among other things, that when amounts are identical, human beings weigh losses more heavily than gains.

In this section we will discuss how to define the scope of the solution you are offering and how to generate and test your solution ideas.

Often the problems you are addressing are very large, so it is unreasonable to expect that you will resolve them in a single presentation. And that is okay; the solution you offer does not have to completely resolve your audience’ s problem. Solving only part of a problem can still be very helpful; even merely informing your audience that they have a problem can be a contribution, as we noted earlier.

What is critically important is that you define clearly what kind of solution contribution you are offering. Partial solutions will be seen as helpful contributions, so long as you set your audience’ s expectations correctly; if your audience is expecting you to solve the problem completely, a partial solution will seem inadequate. Figure 3.4 lays out a cumulative spectrum of possible solution contributions.

Read the spectrum in Figure 3.4 from right to left. If you are indeed able to solve the whole problem in this presentation, then you will be at the far right end of the spectrum. If you intend to solve only part of the problem, then move one step to the left of that. This is still very helpful, so long as you set expectations correctly. One step back from that, you could help them define the solution space—the range of possible options. If they are aware of the problem, but have no idea what to do about it, then explaining to them what the possible options are, even if you cannot yet tell them which one would be best for them, is a welcome contribution. Sometimes though, all you can offer are the

two options to the left of Figure 3.4: defining their problem more clearly or helping them to recognize that they do have a problem. (A blank version of this figure is available in Worksheet A4, Appendix A.)

Reinard (1988), reviewing fifty years of research on the use of evidence in persuasive communication, found a consistent positive effect (see also Reinard, 1998).

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