It’s good advice about many things, including presentations.
I actually heard it while at the gym, on a cross-trainer with the earphones plugged into some morning TV… and the advice was actually about sex – but so what, it works for presentations, too!
In the context of presentations, I’m taking it like this: your audience shouldn’t be in the same place at the end of your presentation as they are at the start of it. If they are, you’ve wasted your time and theirs. The former is a shame and a waste, the other just rude!
Of course, to make that move happen you need to have decent presentation skills, obviously – but before you get a chance to use any of those you need to have a very clear objective. You need to know what the change is that you’re aspiring to make. After all, if you don’t know what a successful presentation looks like, how are you going to make one?!
So, before you do anything else – before you you sit down to write your presentation, before you turn on your computer, before you even pick up your pen – ask yourself one simple question: by the end of the presentation, what do I need to have changed? (Slightly tongue-in-cheek, I’d add that if it takes more than one short sentence to do this, you’re too vague and you don’t really know what you’re trying to achieve in your presentation… :) )
I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’ve managed to change in your presentations:
Great post. It is so important to have a clearly defined message before you begin planning a presentation – if you don’t know what the presentation is going to do, how can you do it effectively?
We always begin by asking the questions:
What do your audience think/do now, and
What do you want them to think/do at the end of the presentation?
It makes a lot of sense. Best advice on presentations I’ve read in a long time.
I like the idea of “change” as it goes beyond the fairly obvious “Have an objective”