Why presentations at the office are so difficult and what you can do about it

Communicating complicated ideas is not an easy endeavour at all. Especially in a corporate setting, you’re pretty much setup for failure from the get go.

Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash

The Challenge

Prior to the presentation

• Multiple parties that have to pre-review your content and may re-shape your intended messaging (everyone has an opinion)
• The message itself you want to convey can be complex to deliver
• You’re tainted.. you know the topic much better than the audience, hence explaining things without implied knowledge that’s in your head is tough

During the presentation

• You’re fighting for attention in a meeting room from people working on email, checking their phones, or just simply zoning out
• Audience members maybe focusing on something else
• Your content is too complex to understand
• Some of your audience members may already have preconceived ideas
• Having a complex slide at the start may throw people off and lose them for the remainder of the session

After the presentation

• Your content will likely be forgotten almost immediately as people move onto the next thing
• Your audience may only takeaway only part of your message
• Or even worse, your audience may take away the wrong message

Lead with a story

This is where it helps enormously to lead with a story. Everyone loves a story. It was how we communicated to each other for thousands of years, and in fact our brains are wired to be more receptive to stories. A far greater part of the brain is activated during listening to a story rather than seeing numbers in a spreadsheet.

Here are some great examples of presentations that have killed it because of leading with stories.

A great story on Tim’s attempt at writing thesis at college

Adam Grant telling about how he missed out…

Three great stories in this talk

So how does this help in a corporate setting?

When you tell a story in a corporate setting, what works well is to have a few simple images only on your slides, but then have the narrative ready to present. With this in mind, lets revisit the above situation — your presentation could very well play out as follows:

Prior to the presentation

Multiple parties that have to pre-review your content and may re-shape your intended messaging (everyone has an opinion)

• Whenever you tell a story, have a large visual with simple content. In your notes, if your boss is really interested, just put down the key message of the story. There will be little challenges on this — so you will get this through the way you want it

The message itself you want to convey can be complex

• It is no surprise that providing a message through a story is much simpler for people to grasp

You’re tainted.. you know the topic much better than the audience, hence explaining things without implied knowledge that’s in your head is tough

• You can only tell a few stories in a given presentation. You must choose one that conveys your core message — hence you’re forced to select messaging careful with full mindfulness of context from your audience

During the presentation:

You’re fighting for attention in a meeting room from people working on email, checking their phones, or just simply zoning out

• People sadly spend an awful lot of time in their day in a blur of meetings. Having a story quickly grabs everyone’s attention as it will be something different

Audience members maybe focusing on something else

• Telling a story, will pique everyone’s interest and they will continue to listen after your story is over. It can be in some ways a very polite slap in the face

Your content is too complex to understand

• Having a simple story forces you to breakdown your complexity into a simple message, and helps make it easier to consume

After the presentation:

Your content will likely be forgotten almost immediately as people move onto the next thing

• I’ve made 100s of presentations, and the ones that people continually remember, even more than a year later are the ones where I had a story to tell

Your audience may only takeaway only part of your message Your content will be forgotten

• This is where you need to be tactical. Usually your story will end with a key message which you then need to segue into your context. For example, if you were trying to convince a team to provide for a funding for new product development which has uncertainty about success, you could tell a story about an unlikely product that was enormously successful but was a long shot (e.g. Zappos — who could ever conceive buying shoes online), or tell a story about how there might be unintended discoveries through the product development process (e.g. Slack, the billion dollar collaboration platform, was never purposely developed as a product, but was a tool that was created on the site to develop a game).

There are plenty of resources on the web about pulling a presentation together, but not many resources on stories that you can use in your presentation. I am convinced, with many others, the power of telling stories.

Some resources that you may find useful includes:

You can find Lead with A Story on Amazon or Audible. It’s a great book which goes through the reasons of why stories are a great to include in your presentation, how to add them, and many examples of stories to include.

Hence, in your next presentation, include a story that will not only grab attention, but help you to deliver the key message and help your audience remember your content.

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