Presentation – Check!
When you really get down to it there are only two kinds of presentations, speeches, training sessions, etc. I am going to use the term presentation to represent all of these events.
The Necessary Presentation – This type of presentation means something. You want the audience to take action or learn something that they can put to good use. Success lies in having an educated or motivated audience — an audience that does something as a result of the experience.
When I was a trainer this was our standard. Whether the class was held in a physical room or over the Web we cared that people learned, really learned, the important points of the topics we taught. In fact, we loved receiving e-mails from students reporting what they were able to accomplish using SAS simply because they attended our training.
I call this the necessary presentation because that’s what it is. You need to accomplish something and the presentation will help you do that.
The Check Mark Presentation – Sadly, this is category where most of the world’s presentations fall. Someone decides that the project plan has a presentation task on it. You may not even know why it’s there. The goal here is not “to change the world” but for someone higher up on the food chain to be able to say, “my group delivered this presentation.” Effectiveness isn’t the priority. It’s usually timeliness. Granted, the difference between the two types of presentations can be subtle but you know a “check mark” presentation when you see one.
Here are the classic calling cards of the “check mark” presentation: tons of bullet points, sloppy, boring, long-winded, etc. I could go on-and-on but I won’t; This isn’t a “check mark” blog posting. These types of presentations are the way they are because they are taken for granted or very little time is allotted to their creation. You may hear things like, “we always have a status WebEx on Friday. It’s no big deal” or “we have to get this information out there fast.” I have a theory that many “check mark” presentations are nothing more than documents that would take too long to write. It’s much easier to throw bullet points on slides and verbally bore people to death than it is to create a proper document.
There will be times you may have to deliver “check mark” presentations. If you are an employee you have no choice. You do have a choice regarding the quality. With a little creativity you can turn a “check mark” presentation into something that entertains, motivates, educates and is perhaps — necessary.
