Working with clients, I regularly hear the following comment when we’re talking about presentation structure:  “Tell ‘em what you’re going to say, say it, then tell ‘em what you said.”  The client will nod enthusiastically at me while saying this, expecting me to agree wholeheartedly. 

My heart sinks.

This is lousy advice for 2008. 

Why?  Let’s look at what it means in practice.  It means an agenda slide.  And if the agenda is complicated, it means a long agenda slide, filled with words.  I’ve even seen agenda slides with the breaks highlighted, as if those were the most important moments of the day.  Of course, given the thinking of the people involved, they probably are. 

Then comes the actual talk, filled with dense information.  Then, at the end, everything’s repeated.  The summary can often last 5 or 10 minutes. 

The problem is that our minds don’t work this way.  It’s not the right order.  It’s not the way we need to hear things. 

And it’s boring. 

If you’re going to hold people's interest in this information-saturated age, with its shrinking attention spans and increased demands on time, then you’re going to have to present your case in the right way. 

We’ve all become very smart about absorbing information, and we recognize moments when we don’t have to listen.  An agenda slide is one of those moments.  If you start with one, you’ll find that most of the audience will be on their BlackBerrys.  Because you haven’t really started yet.  They’ll check out in the same way at the end, when you start your summary.  Or worse – they’ll ignore the middle and only listen during the summary. 

Instead, begin by framing the discussion, preferably with a compelling, 1 – 3 minute story or anecdote, one that sets up the problem but does not give the rest of the talk (or day) away.  Jump right in – Aristotle called it beginning in the middle of things – in medias res.  Think about movies and TV today – they don’t begin with a long list of credits.  They hook you first with explosions, murders, and the like.  The credits come later, if at all.  That’s your competition.  Ignore it at your peril.    

If you don’t have a great story, then talk about the issue in a high-level way:  “We’re going to show you why widgets are not the right way to go in this market, and we’re going to follow that up with some recommendations that may surprise you.  We think you’ll find them exciting.  We’re certainly excited to talk about them with you.” 

That’s in lieu of an agenda slide. 

Then, answer the question, what’s in it for me? – where ‘me’ is the audience.  Go into a problem that the audience has for which your information is the solution.  After you’ve shown the audience you understand its problem, then and only then are you entitled to offer your solution.  If you do it in this way, you’ll find happy, receptive audiences. 

The ‘tell ‘em what you said’ idea came from World War II, when the armed services had to give identical instructions to large numbers of people so that they would all fight the war in the same way.  It didn’t matter if it was boring.  They were orders.  Then, everyone who survived the war came back and went to work in the corporate world.  They used the same mental template for speeches and presentations.  Bad idea if you have to be interesting, but who was going to tell ‘em different?  They were war heroes. 

Today, you have to be interesting.  So don’t repeat in this way.  Repetition is important, but in different ways.  Next time I’ll talk about repeating in interesting ways.  Let me say that again:  my next blog is about repetition.