We’ve probably all had the displeasure of sitting through a bad presentation. Which makes me wonder, why do bad presentations happen? Why are speakers still making common presentation mistakes? Most people who stand in front of an audience have done a lot of work to get there. They are incredibly knowledgeable about their topic. And yet the presentation is lacking. In the most minor cases, something just seems to fall flat—the presentation doesn’t resonate. In the worst cases, the speaker bores the audience out of their ever-lovin’ minds.
This serves as a reminder that being able to give an effective presentation is both an art and a skill. And just because you’re an expert on something doesn’t mean you can communicate well with an audience. Public speaking is not easy. But it can be taught and developed with both theory (learning the underlying concepts) and practice (training through the action).
So today, we are going to look at a two common mistakes presenters make. It has something to do with oysters and backpacks. Once you rid your presentations of these two mistakes, you’ll be able to communicate more effectively with your audience. Ready to talk about oysters?
Mistake #1: Giving exploratory content rather than explanatory content
In the beginning of a truly great text called Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualizaton Guide for Business Professionals, the author, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, shares an incredibly helpful concept. She says we must distinguish between exploration and explanation.
She says, “When we do exploratory analysis, it’s like hunting for pearls in oysters. We might have to open 100 oysters . . . to find perhaps two pearls. When we’re at the point of communicating our analysis to our audience, we really want to be in the explanatory space, meaning you have a specific thing you want to explain, a specific story you want to tell—probably about those two pearls.”
But she goes on to say that many presenters make the mistake of hashing through all of the exploratory process again during their presentations. They slodge through the details and bore their audience with the process of opening up 98 pearl-less oysters. Knaflic says this is an understandable mistake. After all, those presenters have done a lot of work to get to the presentation. So they want to show or prove to the audience all the work that has been done to get to this point. But she says to “resist this urge.” Focus on the 2 pearls you did find, not on the work it took to find them.
Is this a hard and fast rule? No. Few things ever are. There may be some instances in which you’ll want to include some of the exploratory content as a way to build suspense or take the audience on the adventure of the hunt. But make sure that you can distinguish between what is interesting to you and what is interesting to your audience. Those two things may be very, very different.
Mistake #2: Not respecting your audience’s cognitive load
We all have something called a cognitive load. Basically, it’s how much our brains have to work to understand something. In presenting, it’s how hard you ask your audience to work to understand the information you are presenting to them.
The thing about cognitive load, though, is that we only have so much of it. Think of it kind of like your physical strength. Say you are wearing a huge empty backpack. Someone starts putting weight in your pack 5 lbs. at a time. For a while, you’ll be just fine. But there will come a point eventually when your back gives out or your knees buckle. When you simply can’t stand it any longer. The same is true of our mental strength or mental load. When the information gets too detailed, too tough, or too monotonous, we check out or give up because our cognitive load has been exhausted.
So we need to find ways to present information while respecting the cognitive loads of our audience members. Here are a few ways to do that:
Get rid of unnecessary content.
We’ve already talked about exploratory versus explanatory content. One of the easiest ways to reduce the cognitive load of your audience is to edit out any details that don’t matter to them or to the overall message you are trying to get across. Editing is tough. You might have to lose some things that feel important to you. But remember to view the information through the eyes of your audience. Don’t make the common presentation mistake of including unnecessary content.
Reframe how you talk about numbers.
Most people don’t process numbers as easily as we process words. Research has proven that even highly educated people often struggle with basic statistics. Ann Wylie of Wylie Communications has some great tips for getting around this. She says when it comes to statistics, we should communicate in frequencies, not probabilities. What does that mean?
It means if you are telling your audience a story about opening 100 oysters, you should tell them you found 2 pearls rather than telling them you found pearls in 2% of the oysters. Or say you conduct a survey of 232 customers and find that 219 of them are highly satisfied with your company. Don’t say, “we have a 94% satisfactory rate.” Instead, say, “Out of 232 customers surveyed, 219 were highly satisfied.” Why does the distinction matter?
Because it places the emphasis on the pearls and on the people. On the treasure. Think about how you’d feel if you have 100 oysters in front of you. Would you rather be told you have a 2% chance of finding a treasure or that frequencies show there are 2 pearls in your pile waiting to be found? Keep reminding your audience of what the numbers represent. Keep tying numbers back to their actual referents; show us what they stand for.
Simplify your slides.
When you are giving a presentation, keep your slides simple. Jerry Weissman reminds us not to try to turn our presentation media or slide decks into documents. He says this is an increasingly common presentation mistake, but slides aren’t meant to function like text-heavy documents like emails or handouts. Slides should be attractive and easy to understand at a glance. They should be reserved for information that is hard to explain with words (pictures, graphs, numerical data, etc.). But if you fill them full of text or complicated data, you’ll burn out your audience’s cognitive load quickly.
Pause more often.
One of the quickest ways to reduce the burden on your audience is to work more silence into your presentation. We need pauses. They are part of communication. (You can read more about the science behind why we pause here.) But we simply don’t use them enough. The main reason for that is that we, as speakers, tend to be a lot less comfortable with gaps in speaking than our audience members are. So instead of viewing silence as something negative (as in, we should be speaking right now but we aren’t), we should view silence and pauses as small gifts we give to our audience. Little moments of respite in which they can rest for just a moment before continuing on.
So the next time you are preparing a presentation, I hope you’ll remember oysters and backpacks and avoid these common presentation mistakes. Remember to focus on explanatory content, the two pearls you found, not on the exploratory process it took to find them. And remember there is only so much your audience can carry. Their cognitive load is limited. Respect it.
Come back next Monday when we revisit Knaflic’s text for some great guidelines about how and how not to use data visualizations (you know, charts and graphs). And in the meantime, check out our full line of presentation resources—from development to design to delivery.
