Hi Steemians, welcome to my post!
When I was in engineering major, where I worked for several projects,I remember I was just a fresh graduate who were looking for experiences and I tried to give my best to get project's objective result. So, I plug in data, process the data and analyze the data to be given to my client. I made sophisticated and complete analysis in order to satisfy my client. Once I had finished the report, I made it to the power point presentation and gave it to my boss.
When the meeting time came, it turned out that my boss just brought a 5 pages presentation consist of summary, instead of the power point that I had prepared!
Then, He just talked a little to the client about what problem that the client have and how we can solve it, and after that they spent much more time talking about family, work life and other unrelated things. The meeting went very smooth and the client went home happily, even without seeing any detail of the proposed solution! I felt disappointed that I didn't even need to present the data with so much effort since the very first place! But it leave me a question, What is the best way to present your idea or result to satisfy people? Do we have a common pattern to be used in our presentation?
Now I have read the book titled Great Presentation, I've just known that to be complete and sophisticated is not the way to gain trust and respect from the audience. You can even gain trust and satisfy the audience with just 5 pages of presentation! the important thing is more than just what is the content of the slides, but it is more about how you present your idea.
There are 3 reasons to present your idea:
- to give information
- to persuade
- to motivate
These three goals should be achieved in each presentation and should be balanced to create the most satisfying experience for the audience. Most of the uninteresting presentation focus on only one of these aspects, instead of trying to balance them. In my case, where I put a lot of data to my presentation, I only focused on how to give a lot information to my client and didn't care about the other 2 reasons to satisfy the audience. We'll discuss them so you can present your idea interestingly after reading this blog, practice a better presentation and become more confident in presenting your idea. So let's get deeper to each aspect of these reasons.
1. To give information
This is one of the aspect that most people are focused on. Not only by the presenter but also the audience. When people gather in a room, investing their time to hear something from you, it's better if you have significant information that worth their time. This is the aspect that people always want to show to their client in engineering, science, finance, etc. but sometimes neglected by people presenting in term of marketing, selling product, or human interest.
2. To Persuade
This is often neglected by the presenter, especially if you are presenting data. persuading people through presentation means you have to focus on to what the audience should do after the presentation. Sometimes people love to show how great their product is, how accurate their calculation, or how amazing their idea is, and lack of recommendation of what the audience should do after the presentation. The presenter might never explicitly say how to implement the idea for the benefit of the audience, while it is one of the term that is needed by the audience. If you are presenting an innovative product, show them explicitly how to use it in their daily activity through picture, sketch or video. If you are presenting scientific data, show them what to do with the data and how to get profit from the data. This goal are mostly known in term of social science such as marketing or psychology, but people working in natural science should learn to add persuasion to their presentation
2. To Motivate
This is also neglected by most of "boring presenter", especially if they are presenting data. motivating people through presentation means you have to focus on to what the audience feel after the presentation. This could be some unrelated joke but very interesting to the audience, such as linking the presentation to the recent trending event, appropriate joke about daily life, or simply praise them how lucky they are to hear your valuable idea.
Those are several review from the book, please share your thought about it, I would be very happy to discuss!
Also, These are several blog post from me for you to enjoy
With Love,
Irianto