229: How Can I Leverage My Presentation Content

<p>We go to a lot of effort to prepare for our presentations.  We find the best quality information, assemble the slides to showcase that data and we make big efforts for the successful delivery of the talk. Once it is over, then that is the end of it.  It was a lot of effort for a one time event.  It reminds me of that esoteric Japanese art <em>Sunae</em>, where you craft sand into artistic landscapes and designs and then discard the artwork thereafter.  We craft our artistic efforts and then as the presentation comes to an end we discard the work.  Isn’t this a waste?  Or should each presentation stand alone, representing a point in time in our speaker journey?</p> <p> </p> <p>For me, I try to create the opportunity to give the same presentation a number of times.  Obviously, repetition helps to improve the presentation.  We learn so much from the first time we gave it, that it seems <em>motainai</em> or a complete waste not to be able to use those insights and try again.  The problem is how to create the opportunity to repeat the presentation?  Various host organisations have some degree of requirement for exclusivity and they want their members to have the virgin roll out and not the recycled rendition.  They resist allowing you the opportunity to offer them the new and improved version because they want to differentiate themselves from other organisations.</p> <p> </p> <p>I understand the point but in fact no two presentations are ever the same anyway.  The speech is not being read out aloud (if you are doing that please contact me immediately!), so we are usually talking to the points we bring up.  What we say in the moment may be phrased an entirely different way to last time.  In fact one would hope that was the case, because the idea is we learnt something from last time and now we can offer a better version. </p> <p> </p> <p>We may have supplemented the slide deck or thinned it down based on our last experience with the limits of the time, for the quantity material we prepared.  Hopefully these were not