Making your audience care

'Make me care’ by Martin Sykes, Training Journal, June 2013 

I chose this article to review for two reasons. Firstly the author is from Microsoft and you get so few articles written by people from top companies; secondly, the topic is around the skills of presentation, which often get overlooked with the modern emphasis on interaction and group activities. Certainly our experience of working with top companies is that many of their managers need to improve their presentation skills; in many cases their potentially excellent messages are lost in an excess of data, thrown together on Powerpoint without too much thought. Senior finance people are the worst culprits but they are not alone.

So what is the Microsoft message? The interesting title provides a clue; the author says that more important than preparing technically perfect content or jazzy slides, is thinking about the needs of your audience, caring about what and how they learn. These may be obvious points to the experienced trainer but they are well made here; even those of us who are experienced can fall into the trap of meeting our own needs.

One of the key messages of the article is the importance of relevance and the need to be able to say, right up front, why this learning is important and what it can do for those who are being asked to listen. Again this may seem obvious but it is easy to forget and the discipline of answering that question before each presentation is a good one. Our experience at MTP is that this question is even more effective at the development stage, to ask the programme sponsor what participants will gain from the experience; the WIIFM question – what’s in it for me? The author uses another phrase to make the same point – Cui Bono or ‘for whose benefit?’

The author then moves on to a related point about the need to tailor the material and the messages to each different audience, rather than assuming that you can get away with generic content each time. Again this is a message very close to our hearts at MTP because our whole business is founded upon the need to tailor learning to company culture and practices. In a broader context it is the reason why so many generic, public courses run by Business Schools and Consultancies have ceased to exist.

The author’s further argument is that a key part of tailoring material is knowing what to leave out. So often the presenter - particularly the technical person who loves his subject - wants to show everything, often assuming that others have the same aptitude and affection for the subject. Finance Managers presenting columns of figures are a good example of this problem. The key skill is being able to select material and to do this according to the relevance and learning capacity of the audience.

The article’s other key message is the importance of telling relevant stories as a way of engaging the audience. He encourages presenters to tell stories that are personal to them, as this will engage the emotions more than one about somebody else. However the principle of relevance should ensure that the personal story is not about self-aggrandisement and is restricted to the required learning, with no unnecessary detail. The suggestion is that each story should contain three elements, why, what and how, with the how being the confirmation of relevance and likely action. (This reference to stories reminds me of an occasion in the early days of MTP when I heard a relatively new tutor telling a ‘personal’ story of what had happened to me many years before. I asked him afterwards where he got the story from and he said it was from another MTP tutor who had obviously sat in on one of my sessions!)

Another framework for presentations is suggested by the author and that is CAST. CAST is again no more than good training practice but it allows the author to reinforce the main principles:
• Content that the participants needs to understand
• Audience; relate to their learning style and capacity
• Story with the right structure
• Techniques of learning that are appropriate

The last bullet point adds another valid message. Powerpoint is not always the best medium for learning; sometimes it can be a whiteboard, sometimes a hand out, sometimes nothing at all. I would also have added two other related points; firstly that sometimes the presentation is not the best way of getting the message over, group work or a Q&A session may often be more effective; and secondly, the best results may come from a mix of learning media.

This article may not add much for the experienced and successful presenter and would probably be wasted on those who have been involved in training for some time; one would hope and expect that they have found out these principles for themselves. But for the inexperienced presenter who is failing to meet the needs of audiences, the article could be very valuable. My only criticism would be a failure to emphasise the importance, and the skills, of achieving interaction and generating discussion, but perhaps that would require another article.

Read the article here