Okay, here – as they say – is your starter for ten.
Try and interpret this picture. 
Without the context, it’s more less impossible (congratulations to you if you’re one of those odd people who immediately said “It’s a sign on the door of a Metro in Rome, warning you not to fall out”. See a doctor, ‘cos you’re too clever for your own good! :)
Of course, once I zoom out and show you the bigger picture, it’s obvious. Please excuse the reflection of me – I was only carrying my iPhone when I noticed the sign and had to use what I’d got with me or miss the moment!
What’s that got to do with presentations? This…
All to often I see presenters just throwing information at the audience, with no reference to the context in which they’re listening.
And that context comes in a number of different ways. Obviously there’s the physical one – if they’re not comfortable they’re not going to listen to you words of wisdom. (And yet so often presenters just talk and talk and talk.. and talk… without trying to figure out if the audience is sufficiently comfortable to pay attention. Do they need a break? Is the sun in their eyes? Is the room too cold? Too hot? Are the slides big enough? Bright enough?
[callout title=Physiological context is important too]Thinking about things like whether your audience has just had a break, or a meal, or is sitting in the dark can also be a handy starting point for looking at how likely they are to pay attention.[/callout]
What I’m most interested in at the moment though is this: intellectual context. What the hell is intellectual context you ask? I’m glad you did.
Intellectual Context is a fancy jargon term (I’ve just invented it!) for thinking about what the audience already knows. Many years ago, my younger daughter asked me in the car on the way to school if I thought she “Should do something about Mr Andrews”. Without knowing how Mr Andrews was, what subject he taught or what sin my daughter thought he’d committed there wasn’t much I could say, to be honest. And yet presenters do it all the time.
We make references to things the audience doesn’t know – in fact to things that they can’t possibly know, almost by definition! Jargon is the most obvious example, but it’s not the biggest problem.
The biggest problem I’ve seen is akin to my photographs above. Without explaining how what we’re saying fits into the bigger world, the world of our audience members, nothing works. Without a presenter explaining why they should care, they won’t. Just throwing facts at them doesn’t make them stick; it doesn’t make your audience listen… it just means you’ve thrown lots of facts in the air.
Tell you what, go outside and try an experiment (don’t really, I’m illustrating a point here). Throw some vases up in the air and see if anyone tries to cat them. I doubt they will.
But tell people they’re fabulously expensive Ming Vases before you throw them and people might pay more attention. In the same way in your presentations you’ve got to give them a context, a reason to care, before you can start to tell them the things they should care about.
Of course, sometimes that’s done for you by the subject matter and the title of your presentation (“How to cure the common cold using only an empty jam jar” might be a sure-fire winner, for example) but you can’t make assumptions like that!
What’s your experience? Have you ever sat through a presentation and wondered “What’s this got to do with me? Why am I here?”
