When overwhelmed people deliver underwhelming presentations

We’ve seen them and been bombarded by them, those dense presentations of data, dot points, slabs of text and diagrams with .... aarrghhh our brain is fried! Sometimes we overwhelm people, overloading them with too many ideas and messages, jamming it all in one deck or pack of information.

It doesn’t make sense. This can drown people; not save them.

So beware; if you’re overwhelmed, busy, running from meeting to meeting, struggling to get clarity in your own mind ... what you create and deliver to others may well be just as messy and overwhelming. It could turn out to be underwhelming though, disappointing, confusing.

It's then easier to just ignore and disengage.

In times of major change, when people are waiting to hear, needing to see and curious to know what the heck is going on, it’s vital we manage our own state of information overload and cognitive load so we're not just passing the chaos on to everyone else.

We’ve got to 'get our head around' our own information before we can begin to think about transferring it to others. Blog posts included 😁

Time spent making things clearer ... is time very well spent. 

Why engagement is harder to do these days

If you’ve watched a movie, tv series or binge-watched anything, you’d know how compelling and enticing this entertainment and communication medium is. Filmmakers are like sensemakers and storytellers on steroids or high performance supplements.

So every day in the workplace, we’re now dealing with a tougher audience.

Our meetings, workshops, planning and strategy sessions have a tough audience who are used to higher quality productions, scintillating storylines and rich and complex characters who do weird and intriguing stuff. It's engaging and entertaining!

No wonder people are bored in everyday boring meetings and workshops. They’re comparatively... boring. Nothing exciting happens; it’s the same meeting as last time; and it doesn’t engage or excite us the way these other drugs of engagement do.

We must lift our game.

To be engaging we must be more engaging.

We don’t have months to work on a script, lighting, story arc or edits. We need to think, design and engage people in ways they now like to be engaged.

The stuff we used to do isn’t doing what it used to do. Next episode starts in 5 4 3 2 1….

The cost of waffle

In the battle for people’s attention, why do we waffle?

🔆 Did we run out of time to read and edit?

🔆 Do we think more words sound smarter, clever, impressive?

🔆 Do we feel our idea or content is ‘weak’ and so more words might bolster it?

Waffle, jargon and filler is wasteful. Visually in a report or document, it looks like too much hard work to read. Our eyes tire and our brains are exhausted from working through slabs of wordy text.

Long sentences lose people.

If it’s too much hard work, your audience will go into cognitive overload and they'll distract (or rescue) themselves, looking away, disengaging and disconnecting. Keep it clear, clean, as many words as needed. No filler.

Q: What does wordy waffle do to you?

"You probably can’t read this slide but ..."

How often do we hear this from a leader at a conference or meeting. It’s blah blah ... non-sense.

After the wall of data comes clichéd statements, oh and those quotes from Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Henry Ford!

When leaders are speaking it soon becomes clear whether or not they’re making sense.

The ‘Blah Blaster’ - here with 3 mouths! - is the leader who waffles on and on, losing you along the way.

Baffling with data and details or sharing screens of spreadsheets you can’t see, these leaders, speakers and presenters don’t make sense and in turn, don’t help us make sense.

Too much detail.

Missing the point.

Or the point is buried.

Making sense isn’t just about doing presentation skills training. You’ve got to help people work out

🌕 what’s going on, and

🌕 what we need to do about it.

More words don’t make more sense.

Quotable quotes

At this, or any conference, it’s easy to be swamped, firehose style with content, topics, presentations, models and references. The key in distilling information is to get up higher in context, out of the detail of a case study for example, so you can take a key message and share it or explore it further.

Here’s a tapas of some quotable quotes from today:

🔸The culture of any organisation is shaped by the worst behaviour the leader is willing to tolerate (Gruenert & Whitaker)

🔸 Rules for inquiry: turn judgement into curiosity; conflict to shared exploration; defensiveness to self reflection; assumption to questions (Jeremy Lightsmith & Glenda Eoyang)

🔸 Great managers manage themselves first (Johanne Rothman)

🔸 When someone is in flight, fight, freeze - that’s not a time to coach. It’s not a teachable moment (Cailtlin Walker and Andrea Chiou)

🔸 Setting an objective that is impossible to achieve won’t motivate employees (Mariya Breyter)

🔸 Pay attention. Learn to see. Sense and Respond (Woody Zuill)

What's a quotable quote you live by or use as a guide for thinking and acting?