Venn Tarting for Business Presentations

Making presentations isn’t exactly rocket science. The principles of how to design a good presentation are very simple

But simple doesn’t mean easy. Ask anyone on a diet. To lose weight all you have to do is eat less and exercise more, so to speak, but actually doing that in the face of friends-bearing-chocolate is actually quite tricky.

That’s the problem with writing articles about how to make business presentations: such articles look trite. Try it for yourself – just google ‘presentation tips’ and read half a dozen pages. They tend to say things like “Make eye contact with your audience”. The good ones will give you some tactics for how to do that and the really good ones will give you tactics that work. (Beware of wiki-trainers who tell you what works for them, not knowing that it doesn’t work for everyone!)

As a result of not wanting to be too simplistic about designing a business presentation, I’m going to tart this article up with a Venn Diagram. Stay with me.

The most common problem I experience when I train people is that they try and tell people the wrong things in their presentation – usually they try to tell them too much. Simply stopping to think for a while before getting stuck in to the process of designing the presentation would be very helpful to everyone concerned – but few people do. So here’s a simple tool to try and help – and to make this article look a little less trite!

Consider this Venn Diagram of your relationship with your audience:

The big, thick-lined rectangle represents the topic in question: the blue circle represents things you know. Some of it will be relevant to the topic and some won’t. The red circle can be thought of as representing those things your audience needs to know. Once again, some of it is relevant to the topic and some isn’t.

Your job, as a presenter is to cover as much as you can of the area where all three shapes overlap. There’s no point in telling your audience stuff it doesn’t need to know, even if it is about the top in question (a). There’s no point in telling your audience stuff it needs to know that’s nothing to do with the issues in hand (b) – but you’d be surprised at how many presenters I’ve seen are seduced into doing exactly that.

Presenters talking about things the audience don’t need to know are wasting everyone’s time (c) obviously and the presenter can’t help with what they don’t know about (which doesn’t stop some people trying (generally senior managers, in my experience!) (d).

Only in the area marked (e) is there even the chance of a worthwhile presentation.

It’s not rocket science. I know it’s not – but it might be useful. The next time you need (or want) to make a presentation I urge you to challenge yourself for every slide, every fact, every anecdote, every joke, every word… and see if it’s an (e) word. I’ve been known to go as far as transferring a slide deck onto post-it notes, drawing a version of this diagramme on the whiteboard in the office and then sticking the post-it notes, one at a time, onto the diagramme after discussion with the people around me.

It turned out to be a salutary lesson!

The trick, of course, is not that the diagramme is so complex or novel in its own right – any Key Stage 2 school child could handle it! – but the existence (and therefore the use) of such a tool might encourage people to stop and think before they start to design their presentations…

Not all of you, please, or else I’d be out of a job!

I’ll talk a little more about this tool in my next article.

Simon Raybould is one of the country's most widely read and regarded providers of voice and presentation skills training.