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In
order to get your audience to buy in to your message, you must
prepare and deliver it in a way consistent with adult learning
theory. That means
you must understand the limits to how much information an
audience member can absorb at one time, and what form that
information must take in order to first attract, and then keep,
their attention.
Of
the literally thousands of slides our firm receives for review
and revision each year, almost all share the same basic problem:
Too Much Information!
TMI leads directly to too little retention. And
to make matters worse, when your presentation kicks off with a
bunch of TMI slides, you gear them up to retain even less.
Too
much, too soon, keys the audience’s brains to brace for
overload. That jumps starts their natural defense mechanisms
into action. Rather than allow you
to control their information uptake, overloaded audiences begin
to pick and choose what information they will absorb, based on
the parts of your message they view as meaningful to them.
You, of course, never know what they have rejected or
ignored.
The
rules of proper presentation design that we preach all exist to
ensure that neither you nor your audience suffers from the
effects of trying to deal with too much information at any one
time. Because when
both the presenter and the listeners are overwhelmed,
information transfer stutters and stops, and nobody has any fun.
Fred
Pryor, often billed as ‘the father of the one-day seminar’,
and a considered expert on adult learning, was fond of saying,
“Training is selling, and selling is training”.
That is, if you’re doing it right, you never lose sight
of the fact that while training adults, you must be constantly
checking your audience for buy-in. In the same way, to sell effectively, you want others to
reach conclusions ‘on their own’; the best way to do this is
to lead them to the conclusion you want by ‘educating’ them
as to what course provides their best solution.
PowerPoint is a really marvelous tool for creating this
training/selling environment, because when used properly, the
presenter can lead the audience down the desired path one step
at a time. Just as
a good trial attorney “builds” his case by laying out the
facts one on top of the other, a good presenter can use the
tools of proper presentation design to win the case every time.
But
like many customers who become overwhelmed when presented with
too many choices, audience members can reach overloaded when
presented with too much information to decipher, and end up
choosing not to “buy” any of it. Most presenters assume that
the audience willingly awaits their escort through the
intricacies of a complicated slide, when in fact, that’s the
last thing they do!
As
computer-based presentations have become the norm, audiences are
being overwhelmed with productions that seem to use every
feature and font that the presenter can find.
You may think your presentation skills are great and the
audience is with you as they politely nod their heads and smile,
but beware: the emperor believed that only a "fool"
couldn't see his beautiful new clothes!
Few
corporate audience members are willing to stand up and declare
that they really can't see anything they understand in your
presentation. In fact, those polite smiles are often masking the
fact that most people would rather avoid the controversy of
taking you to task. Sadly,
some even smile to hide the fact that they don’t have a clue
what you’re trying to say, but believe it their
fault – obviously all those smiling, nodding heads must understand you, and they’re the only dumb ones in the group!
If you couldn't follow
the last slide show you sat through, much less stay awake, it
might just be that you were an audience to a typical TMI
presentation. But you might want to ask yourself if your own
presentation designs might use a little help, too.
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