Means and ends in your presentations

I spent very nearly two and a half decades as a university researcher. My post – in fact more or less my entire research unit, the largest social science research unit in the UK and the second most influential in the world – was funded by taking contracts to investigate specific questions. Many of these research contracts were to Central Government in Whitehall (for American presenters, that’s the our equivalent to Federal rather than State).

They were big questions, asked for big reasons, which could make big changes to the way the UK was run.

There were two elements to the research – getting the research done and presenting the findings to Ministers or Civil Servants to that they ‘got’ what we’d found and knew how to change the law to implement improvements.  We knew we’d done a good job of the latter if the law was changed. It didn’t have much (anything?) to do with how well we felt the presentation had gone ‘in the room’.  What matters wasn’t how slickly we felt the presentation had gone but how effectively it had gone.

Of course, being slick made it more likely that a presentation was also effective, but slick wasn’t the important thing – the presentation was the means to the end.

So why do so many presenters (professional speakers are excluded here!) get hung up on the “mere” mechanics of ‘did my hair look good when I was speaking?”.

Your presentation is supposed to change your world, not make you feel good as you deliver it.

So if your presentation is a ‘means’ not an ‘end’ in itself, what do you need to know before you start to design it? Simple…

  • What is my presentation supposed to change?
  • How will I know if it has?

After that you can start to think about how to make the changes you want to see in the world. After.

[jbox color=’red’] Yes, I know – this isn’t what a presentation skills trainer is supposed to be saying as I risk stopping you hiring me, but so what – this is how presentations are mainly used and use-able in the real world![/jbox]

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *