Making a Presentation for a Meeting
What’s considered an effective or persuasive presentation structure has similarities to storytelling. The story begins with a problem, follows a logical sequence of events from beginning to end, and ends with a resolution.
In a business context, a good presentation achieves its intended outcome. To achieve a specific outcome or objective, you need to know what it is.
Before you start building your presentation, you need to consider three things:
- The purpose of your presentation
- Your audience
- Your (one) message
The 3-Part Presentation Structure
To build our presentation, we’ll use presentation expert Nancy Duarte’s interpretation of the classic 3-part story structure illustrated below.
The Beginning
The story starts with “What is”—the current state. Describe this baseline state in a way that is recognizable to the audience. This allows you and the audience to get in sync. And with this base level of agreement, your audience will be more receptive to your proposed change.
The second step is to introduce “What could be.” The gap between what is and what could be adds tension and drama to your story and largely determines the significance of your presentation. If there’s no conflict or no proposed change, what’s the point of the presentation?
Let’s say you’re an analyst on the new product development team of a retailer known for exclusive, trend-forward “house” branded products. Your company’s reputation and revenue depend on the consistent introduction of new consumer goods. Marketing and distribution are key strengths, but new-product performance is off, revenue is below expectations and the company’s stock price recently fell 30 percent. Within your company, R&D (research & development) is strictly an insider’s game; any ideas or innovations that weren’t developed in-house are blocked. The problem is, you can’t innovate fast enough—or with enough market demand accuracy—to meet financial and stock market expectations. You and the other analysts on your team have been tracking innovation trends and successes and you think the answer is opening the R&D works to outside ideas and innovations. Here’s how you might lay out your presentation:
- What Is: We missed our quarterly earnings numbers, largely due to a failure to meet our innovation success targets over the last six months.
- What Could Be: Initial data suggests we could get back on track by modifying our R&D model to incorporate external innovations.
The Middle
The bulk of your presentation is developing the contrast between what is and what could be in order to set up your proposed resolution of the conflict or challenge. The objective is also to establish the validity of your arguments, so your proposed call to action is perceived as a logical and inevitable conclusion to the conflict.
- What Is: We currently bear the full cost and risk of developing new products and our innovation success rate—the percentage of new products that meet financial objectives—is running 25 percent below target.
- What Could Be: Sourcing promising innovations from outside the company could reduce R&D costs and risk while also increasing our innovation success rate.
- What Is: Our R&D process is taking so long that we’re missing trends and losing our market-leading brand reputation.
- What Could Be: We could license or buy promising innovations for a fraction of the cost it would take to develop them from scratch and leverage our marketing and distribution strengths to claim shelf and market share.
- What Is: Our below-plan performance and new product pipeline are costing us political capital with executive management, and we’re at risk of losing budget and/or layoffs.
- What Could Be: Adopting an open innovation culture would allow us to create partnerships that leverage our strengths and drive revenue, regaining a position of value within the company.
The End
To craft a powerful close, Duarte’s advice is to avoid a list of bullet-point to-dos. Your objective here is to achieve a resolution of the conflict introduced at the beginning, to issue a call to action that inspires your audience to support your vision of what could be, a state Duarte refers to as the “new bliss.”
Call to Action
To recover our position as a source of revenue and brand value, we need to start working to build a culture and networks that support open innovation and accelerate the development of new products, regardless of the source of the idea.
New Bliss
Our ability to drive value secures our position and reputations in the company, and in the marketplace, and pays off in employee stock value and profit sharing.
The new bliss articulates the proposed—and a desired future state—incorporating the WIIFM, what’s in it for me, that motivates your audience to buy into and work to support the required change.
Finally, before presenting, test your presentation. Ask colleagues, friends, or family to listen to a practice run and rate you on your 3-part structure and the seven principles of business communication. In particular, identify and address any words or images that may represent a barrier to effective communication.
The seven principles of business communication are being clear, concise, objective, consistent, complete, relevant, and considerate of audience knowledge.