Impressive Business Presentations

This is a brief introduction to highlight what will be covered and reflect on the current state of presentations today; and the challenges faced by individuals and organisations. Whilst this not a virtual course, this introduction will lightly-touch on some aspects of virtual presentations and how to overcome regularly faced issues.

The introduction will provide the first exercise in crafting a quick presentation to provide some initial thoughts and feedback to individuals.

This section is not about designing good slides – it’s about writing clear, precise messages for verbal delivery and slide content. Here, participants will learn a more methodical technique of developing content. Writing the summary of each slide for its header- message and using the body of the slide to provide evidence supporting that header-message. This method is both researched and proven to be significantly better for audiences in a presentation environment by improving audience’s understanding, focus and recollection. This form of writing is also widely adopted by consulting firms.

Participants using an assertion-evidence approach will think more deeply about the content during the preparation of the slides than presenters following the typical ‘subject-header’ approach. Studies provide empirical evidence that the structure is effective and will be presented in the workshop.

Participants will re-develop a series of slides (customised for in-house clients based on their own work).

Much has been made about Data Storytelling – but at its heart, its simply providing good insights supported with an easy to decode visualisation. we will explore current and new charts and the tackle the real issue – Data Literacy. Of course, there is much more complexity to it than that. Data visualisation can be seen as a spectrum of visualisation tropes from simple sketches to complex 3D fluid simulations – not to mention the abundance of applications to learn with each of these areas. In this section, we will explore current and new charts and the tackle the real issue – Data Literacy.

Before any house can be constructed – its needs a blueprint – and presentations are no different. This section will introduce the basic methods for ideating key topics based on the type of content and who the audience is.

Using the SEES model (State Point, Evidence, Example, Summary) gives participants the ability to flesh out the identified topic points and build towards a skeleton deck.

Participants will learn: Constructing logic trees, understanding MECE concepts, apply SEES methods and understand the basic story-telling method most used in business environments.

It’s not just design – participants will be shown how this tool should be used productively and shown the cost implications to an organisation if used incorrectly. They will also be shown ‘best practices’ from other companies such as creating ‘Libraries’, ‘Layouts’ and proper use of slides vs reports.

Its not just what you say – but how you say it. Knowing your audience is critical in using the right language, and providing a perspective that resonates with them.

In particular presentation introduction can be a powerful tool for framing the potential outcomes or goals. In this section participants will learn two highly used business framing techniques such as Loss-based framing using SCR (situation-Complication-resolution) and Gain-based framing using and FAB (value propositions) methods.

Presentations usually suffer from weak openings with no content and poor closing and calls for action. Participants must demonstrate that they can effectively use reductively techniques by providing executive summaries at the beginning; giving clear, concrete steps at the end.

Whilst they appear at the beginning of the presentations, they are in fact the last part of the content to be produced. They are designed to be a summary of the governing thoughts, and not a copy-&-paste of the entire data. They serve audiences by letting them know upfront what the presentation is about and the key issues and resolutions.

Participants will learn to understand the different types of executive summaries and take a presentation and distill it to a key executive summary slide.

Groups begin work on a major presentation allowing them to put all the methods they learned in to practice.

Specifically:

• Construct, Frame and Present based on a given scenario
• Develop different introduction techniques
• Use of the Presentation Templates
• Employ Assertion-Evidence models when design slides (flipcharts)
• Employ appropriate language, body language

Each group will be given an analysis of their performance after each presentation and a brief video analysis of themselves towards this final part of the course. In will include elements such as how to handle Q&A.