First things first – what is congruence? In short, it’s where things all line up in the same direction to support each other. (I’m not using the maths definitions here, obviously!) They don’t have to be the same, just all ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’, to coin a phrase.
Why is it important in your presentations? That’s easy. Without congruence you’ll have no credibility. Let me give you two examples.
The first example is from the daily safety briefings of a construction company I worked with. I’m sure you’ll applaud the idea of such briefings as much as I did. However, even though the project was nearing completion, the safety-briefing slides still said that the name of the project’s Health & Safety Manager was “TBCâ€. How, people thought, can the company really be serious about health and safety issues if the person responsible for this area is still “To Be Confirmed”?
The upshot was that no one took the briefings seriously.
The second example was at a presentation I went to this week: an accountant was trying to convince us that we wanted to let him be our accountant. Like all accountants he was “reliable, accurate, fast” etc…. and then he went on to talk about what made him special.
So far so good, except that as soon as you looked at his PowerPoint slides he wasn’t reliable, accurate etc…. (God knows he must have been fast though, because those slides can’t have taken more than 10 minutes to knock up!).
Accurate isn’t changing font every couple of slides. Accurate isn’t having your titles mis-aligned. Accurate isn’t having things mis-quoted on your slides and worse still having typos in them! Accurate isn’t having your text in a similar colour to your background. Accurate isn’t having a couple of your bullet points slipping off the right hand side of the screen… You get the picture, I’m sure.
I spoke to him at the end of the eveining. He didn’t feel he needed any presentation skills training, thanks all the same, but he was surprised that his conversion rate for the evening was, accurately, zero.
Anyone got any ideas why that might be, gentle reader? :)
