178: Understanding Using Data When Presenting In Japan

<p>How much is enough data in a presentation?  How much is too much?  Generally speaking, most presenters have a problem with too much, rather than too little information.  Your slide deck is brimming over with goodness.  And you just can’t bring yourself to trim it down. After all the effort you went to assembling that tour de force, you want to get it all out there in the public arena.  You have spent hours on the gathering of the detail and making the slides, so you are very heavily invested in the process.  You want to show the power of your thought leadership, your intellect, your insights, your experience.</p> <p> </p> <p>Here is the danger though.  We kill our audience with kindness.  The kindness of throwing the entire assembly at them.  They are now being buffeted by the strong winds of new data, new information, new insights, one after another.  The last one is killed by the succeeding one, and it in turn is killed by the next one.  We go into massive overload of the visual senses and the memory banks are being broken through, like a raging river spilling its banks.  Are we self aware about what we are doing?  No, we are caught up in data mania, where more is better.  We can’t thow that graph out because it took a lot to create it.  We need to have that extra bullet point, even though it is not adding any extra dimension to the presentation. </p> <p> </p> <p>We have forgotten our purpose of doing the presentation and are now firmly fixated on the mechanics, the logistics, the content and not the outcomes we want.  There are different key purposes with a presentation: to entertain, to inform, to persuade.  The majority of business presentations should be to persuade but are often underperforming and are only hitting the inform button.  This is because the presenter hasn’t realised that with the same effort and drawing on the same data resource, they can move up the scale and be highly persuasive.  Data, data, data just doesn’t work though</p> <p> </p> <p>At the end of the session the audience is shredded