Question
What is a good goal for a presentation when you talk to well-educated and motivated people?
What’s so special about this audience?
✤ They pay more attention to what you say
✤ And less attention to how you say it (gestures, tone of voice, your Brioni suit etc)
✤ Pop psychology tricks are unlikely to work with them
To entertainIf informing is boring — let’s entertain! Let’s do standup comedy! With PowerPoint! Now it’s a highly entertaining waste of time.
To motivateMotivating, persuading to buy seems kinda fine. But is it really?
To informIt’s where most people start, the goal is “to tell” or “to explain”. The problem is that it’s BORING.
THREE GOALS ACCORDING TO CICERO
Problems with “the goal is to motivate”
✤ Ethically questionable: the’s no line between “soft sell” and “hard sell”
✤ Takes a lot of emotional effort and may lead to emotional burnout
✤ You don’t learn to do it on a two-day seminar
Question
Why do people *listen* to presentations?
Answer
They want to make a decision—and a good one.
✤ Should I read this book?
✤ Should I attend this seminar?
✤ Is the quarterly goal realistic?
✤ Should we buy this new equipment?
✤ Can we approve this loan?
For example…?
To motivateHere’s a particular thing or idea that I want you to buy and all the data in my presentation aligned to support my conclusion
Helping to make a good decision
Here’s a decision-making process, here are my results but you should re-examine everything and make your own choice
To inform
Here’s your information, you do what you want with it
Frequently asked question
What's more convincing, a story or a piece of statistical evidence?
Answer
That’s a wrong question to ask. We should be
asking “what helps us make a better decision”?
The key question
How do we make good decisions?
A very vague answer
It depends on a) importance and b) resources
available
Not important, few resourcesCoin flip
Intuition
Periphery cues
Very importantMathematical models
Important, some resourcesNaturalistic decision-making
✤ Commons space
✤ Problem
✤ Success Criteria
✤ Alternatives
✤ Simulations
✤ Choice
Sample decision-making modelThere are dozens of them: GOPHER, DECIDE, и т.д.
THIS IS YOUR PRESENTATION STRUCTURE!
✤ The question we should be asking ourselves as presenters:
what’s the best decision-making process here? This
should be the structure of our argument.
✤ We need to think about audiences’ long-term interests and
try to make decisions based on that
✤ The presentation title should be set in terms of decision-
making
✤ I think this approach makes a lot of sense for motivated
and educated audience
In conclusion
www.kapterev.com
+7 495 764 1898
Presentations, etc.
m
Alexei Kapterev