Presentations,Part,They,are,of business, insurance Presentations Part 1

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They are often usedsimply to fill time and/or for the sake of going through the motions. They areall too often used in places where alternatives would be more efficient. Simplepresenting ‘about’ something can usually be better done by alternatives such as•   emails•   memos•   reportsTo make best use of presentations it’s important to remember thatthey are most effective at passing on ‘emotional’ and ‘conceptual’ information.It is (typically) difficult for audiences to remember information they obtainedin presentations which is of a technical and detailed nature - there isconsiderable research evidence to this effect! Such information is betterpassed on in one of the other formats.What presentations are goodat, however, is exploring the intelligenceheld in such information or getting people interested in the details so thatthey can go and obtain the details for themselves. In an ideal world apresentation would be backed up by documents which•   contain the details thatsupport the presentation; and•   the presentation has madepeople interested in, so that they want to read the details(Obviously also there’s the third option where the presentationgives people enough information to know they don’t want to read the detailed documents! :) )This approach can best be summed up in the idea that one should not think of presentations as being about something (only) but also beingto do something. Presentations whichare merely about something can begenerally done in more efficient ways. This is a simple mental shift but onewhich has profound implications in terms of both whether presentations go aheadin the first place and what kind of information is included in them (as well ashow it is presented).Presentations, in short, are best used when it is important to makea change in behaviour after the presentation.Penetration vs RetentionLike all forms of communication, presentations are based upon twoconcepts: penetration and retention.Penetration is a jargon term for getting information into youraudience’s mind. It involves both physically being able to access theinformation and intellectually being able to process it to understand it.Without penetration, communication cannot be said to have taken place.Using the analogy of reading a newspaper, penetration includes theacts of buying and reading the newspaper, and being able to understand thestories in it. Implicit in these acts are such things as being able to find avendor for the paper, being able to afford it, being able to understand thelanguage it is written in, being able to see the text and so on.Retention is the terms used for the process of keeping theinformation which penetrated in the minds of the audience. Obviously retentionis dependent upon penetration but penetration alone isn’t enough as, generallyspeaking, a person’s behaviour will only be changed by their memory of theinformation - that is, what they retain.Continuing with the analogy of reading the newspaper, this equatesto such things as being able to discuss the stories intelligently over a mealwith friends later or even being able to read a follow-on story the next day(or a contradictory story in a different paper in a meaningful way).In order to affect change in someone’s subsequent behaviour, bothpenetration and retention are necessary.Unfortunately, most presentations concentrate far too heavily onproviding huge amounts of information. While this might increase the amount ofinformation which in the penetration stage it can have the contrary effect onthe amount of information in the retention stage.In other words - by providing too much information in thepresentation there’s actually a reduced chance of audience members accepting,remembering and acting upon that information. As the advertising industry knowsa confused mind never says yes. Forthe presenter this provides the challenge of reducing the amount of informationgiven in a presentation to the minimum necessary to achieve the desired result.Judging this (of course) is the hard part!  Generally speaking, however, the evidence isthat there is a surprising (and disappointingly) low level of retention. Mostpresentations contain a counter-productive amount of information.Occasional presenters (as opposed to those who do it regularly andprofessionally) tend to ‘hide behind’ providing vast amounts of information asa way of both dealing with their fear of knowing what to say and being exposed;and of having to spend time thinking about and designing their presentation.To cut the chase, for presentations - less is more.Deciding what to sayThe more of an expert you are on any given issue, the more temptingit is to simply pass information to your audience without much editing of thatinformation or design in the presentation. The video outlines one very useful approach to doing this, using a flowchart. You can download a free, four-page PDF document from our website at http://www.curved-vision.co.uk/evolution_of_a_slide.pdf.  (Note that the apparent spaces here areactually underscores, ‘_’).Obviously there are alternative ways of doing this kind of thing andit is more important you have asystem than that you use this system.