Having recently emerged from a multi-day, post holiday coma, I am newly determined to practice the art of brevity. Like a third helping of turkey, the fluff in presentations today is doing nothing for productivity in the workforce. Audiences are induced to sleep through the same immobilizing concoction of over-saturation. It’s as if a second-rate college football game were droning in the background while they reclined in the fabled La-Z-Boy a grandpa saved and saved for back when they were children.
Of course, we’re happy to drive hundreds of miles for the experience of Thanksgiving overload. And while we may drive hundreds of miles for a presentation, the reaction is somewhat less pacifying when the consumption is of charts, graphs, and dull statements and not turkey, dressing, and pie. Sure, there is sleep, but it is fitful and vindictive in nature, not comfortingly regressive.
It follows that gluttony is reserved for positive things: we eat more delicious foods with joy, but when it’s horrible information we’re digesting, we feel ornery. Thus, if you want your audience to take your message with joy (not with a grain of salt), you better make it simple and good. No more digressions, no more sterile data. Find the story in whatever it is you’re talking about. Boring is a state of mind, not of content.
And in the end, as you map your message, it’s the call to action that matters. Your call to action determines your introduction. It determines your core. It determines your angle, and which stories you tell. When you know what you need people to do once you step off the stage, you can know what to say the whole way through.
After all, there is more than a minor difference between a third plate at Thanksgiving and being force fed against your will. When you step on stage, you control the experience. Make it good, and they’ll be coming back for more.
