{"id":86,"date":"2007-07-28T17:18:45","date_gmt":"2007-07-28T16:18:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2007\/07\/28\/critical-congruence\/"},"modified":"2007-07-28T17:18:45","modified_gmt":"2007-07-28T16:18:45","slug":"critical-congruence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/critical-congruence\/","title":{"rendered":"Critical Congruence"},"content":{"rendered":"

First things first \u00e2\u20ac\u201c what is<\/strong> congruence? In short, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s where things all line up in the same direction to support each other. (I’m not using the maths definitions here<\/a>, obviously!) They don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be the same<\/em>, just all \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsinging from the same hymn sheet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, to coin a phrase.<\/p>\n

Why is it important in your presentations? That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy. Without congruence you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll have no credibility. Let me give you two examples.<\/p>\n

The first example is from the daily safety briefings of a construction company I worked with. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll applaud the idea of such briefings as much as I did. However, even though the project\u00c2\u00a0 was nearing completion, the safety-briefing slides still<\/em> said that the name of the project’s Health & Safety Manager was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153TBC\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. How, people thought, can the company really be serious about health and safety issues if the person responsible for this area is still “T<\/strong>o B<\/strong>e C<\/strong>onfirmed”?<\/p>\n

The upshot was that no one took the briefings seriously.<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>accountant. Like all accountants he was “reliable, accurate, fast” etc\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6. and then he went on to talk about what made him special.<\/p>\n

So far so good, except that as soon as you looked at his PowerPoint slides he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t <\/strong>reliable, accurate etc\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6. (God knows he must have been fast though, because those slides can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have taken more than 10 minutes to knock up!).<\/p>\n

Accurate<\/em> isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t changing font every couple of slides. Accurate<\/em> isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t having your titles mis-aligned. Accurate<\/em> isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t having things mis-quoted on your slides and worse still having typos in them! Accurate<\/em> isn’t having your text in a similar colour to your background.\u00c2\u00a0 Accurate<\/em> isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t having a couple of your bullet points slipping off the right hand side of the screen… You get the picture, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure.<\/p>\n

I spoke to him at the end of the eveining.\u00c2\u00a0 He didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t<\/strong> feel he needed any presentation skills training, thanks all the same, but he was<\/strong> surprised that his conversion rate for the evening was, accurately, zero.<\/p>\n

Anyone got any ideas why that might be, gentle reader?\u00c2\u00a0 :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First things first \u00e2\u20ac\u201c what is congruence? In short, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s where things all line up in the same direction to support each other. (I’m not using the maths definitions here, obviously!) They don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips","category-reviews-case-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}