It seems intuitive enough. Every presentation should have a "big idea" behind it. But few do. And without it, your audience is likely to get lost (if they ever really engage to start with). In this short episode, we'll show you how to stop wasting time, money and people power, and how to build a powerful idea that resonates with your audience.
No matter if you're in front of a large group or giving a status update to a group of co-workers, your ability to deliver a meaningful presentation rests on the central idea behind it. Let's build your Big Idea!
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Prefer to read? Transcript:
Hi, and welcome to P3, the Perfect Presentations Podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, vice president of Perfect PlanIt.
You might recall in an earlier episode I said that once you started talking about better presentations it was like pulling on a thread of a sweater. It’s all tied together. Today I want to pull on one of those threads and talk in more depth about creating a Big Idea in your presentation, and how to do it.
Let me tell you what a big idea looks like. In 2006, or somewhere in there, I was at a business luncheon, where the guest speaker was nationally recognized investment banker, who was often sought out for his opinion on a variety of topics. But in the past several years, all anyone wanted to know was his opinion on the housing market. The market had been on fire for years, and a lot of people were getting rich, and as happens with most investments, the suckers are the last ones in. Well, that becomes obvious in hindsight, but just like day trading during the internet bubble of the late 90s, or the tulip panic in the 1600s, or bitcoin today, things were hitting a frenzy and everyone wanted a piece. Even investment professionals were afraid they were missing out on the good fortune. So not surprisingly, this presentation was to a packed room, hanging on every word, as if we were listening to a seer about to tell us all our futures. Keep in mind, it wasn’t just investor types interested at this point. A lot of people had bought homes recently, and many had cashed out equity to finance other parts of their lives, or to buy another home. Everyone was riding high, but recently the market has shown signs of topping out, and people were nervous. In hindsight I count myself lucky. I was a homeowner, and had benefited, but I hadn’t bought recently and wasn’t planning on selling, so I was more of a dispassionate observer. But even I felt that twinge of missing out on all of the action.
Well, this guy got up to speak and everyone put down their coffee cups and dessert forks and waited for the latest opinion of the guru. And he brought up a title slide titled (I’m paraphrasing here, but this will be close), “Housing market primed for a soft landing over next 12 months.” That was a big idea. And he knew how to land it. He didn’t make the audience guess, or wait. He simply told them exactly what he was going to say, and now the audience was ready to hear the justification for this conclusion. He’d struck a nerve. Even a nationally recognized figure, who certainly could have extended the drama, decided not to try to drag the audience along and build up to his big reveal. He simply told them “here’s what I’m going to tell you, and how I’m going to tell it. And you know exactly where I stand.” That’s a rare feat in a presenter.
The coda, of course, is that he could not have been more wrong. The market crashed spectacularly and a lot of people—some of whom might have been there that day, lost a lot, and maybe everything. And I love that he continued to be quoted as an authority for years after that, but that’s another story.
Here’s a more typical story.
I was at a conference last week about what the sponsors were calling The Experience Economy. It was about how we interact with customers, clients, patients.
The first speaker was a former biotech researcher, and later an executive at a large data firm. In general I don’t have high expectations when it come...
