Over the years I see a number of presenters make references and jokes which their audience just doesn’t ‘get’. There’s no ‘communality of cultural understanding‘ between the presenter and his (or her) audience: something similar happens a lot for technical presentations, of course, when the presenter may slip into jargon and assumptions that the audience isn’t party to but it’s a significant problem for less technical ones too.
Without a shared social context, not only can people not understand you, they won’t remember you – because memory is often based upon hooks to what we already know. Think about it for a moment – how much easier is it for you to remember a list of random facts and figurs, unrelated to anything you know, compared to remember the same number of facts which make sense to you because they apply (for example) to a car engine you’re working on (yes, okay, it’s a silly example!).
You may remember the last Indiana Jones film: I went with my family and the elder of my daughters (who is half way through qualifying as a doctor, so she’s not exactly stupid!) simply didn’t understand it! Why not? Because it contains extended references to an age of fear of ‘The Bomb’ and an action sequence based upon a test nuclear explosion in a mocked up town. My daughter has not grown up afraid of The Bomb and simply didn’t understand that whole sequence, assuming it was some kind of hallucination. After that, none of the film made sense. She had no cultural understanding of that kind of fear and of how bomb tests were carried out.
Many years ago I directed a production of Macbeth. I used a whole host of symbols on and around the stage whenever my witches were on stage – and even when they weren’t (implying their influence). A group from South Africa who came to see it failed to understand any of those allusions because they didn’t share my UK-based association of witches with pentagrams and so on.
If you’ve failed to understand that last paragraph it proves my point – I wrote it with the implicit assumption that you know the story of Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth” and the significance within it of three witches… :)
On another note, a recent JLS video (forgive me, I had little choice but to watch it at the gym this morning) features an old-style (as in World War 2) contact mine for use in the sea. Unless the people watching this video have also watched plenty of WW2 navel movies, the chances are that reference is wasted!
What what has all this got to do with presentations?
Well I’m kind of hoping it’s pretty obvious – presenters need to make sure any cultural references they use are understood in the same way by their audience as it is in their heads! Without a shared frame of reference, your audience may understand your words (in a litteral sense) but they simply won’t ‘get it‘.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…. start designing your presentation from where your audience are!
