A statistic says that about 90% of presentations are either boring or useless or both! Let me give you a quick tip on how to design an effective presentations without boring your audience to death. Read on!
If you are a regular TED listener, you couldn’t have missed this persuasive talk by Simon Sinek titled How great leaders inspire action.
The core idea of his talk is about the Golden Circle of Why-What-How and how great leaders use a reverse approach to inspire their audience. I strongly recommend you to watch this video.
I couldn’t find a better place than a plaid boring presentation to apply this strategy. Here’s what I propose.
Consider a 30-minute presentation where you are trying to persuade audience on a new concept or approach. A rather standard approach is to dive as fast as possible into the details (the what) with a hope to convince the audience.
But a more prudent and effective approach would be spend more time on the vision (the why) and for how it will have impact on the listeners (the how).
Here is a rough design of a 30-minute presentation:
- 5 minutes – Focus on your vision, dream. Help audience visualize the end goal, the happy state
- 15 minutes – Focus on how you plan to achieve this vision. Put special emphasis on how this will impact the life of your audience. Make them feel the change
- 10 minutes – Focus on the details, what are the steps to make this happen
Apply this in your next meeting and let me know what happens. At least, you won’t hear somebody snoring. That’s for sure!
