How to Visualize a Great Presentation – Part Two: The Presentation Spectrum

Today, we’ll cover the second part of Visualization which is how the presenter decides what type of presentation they are giving. 

Have you ever sat through a presentation and wondered, what’s the point?  Felt as though the basic premise of the presentation is flawed and poorly thought out?  One of the chief reasons this happens is that the presenter did not decide what action they are trying to drive with the audience.  And so the presentation is not put together in a cogent way that that engages the audience. 

 

 

Three Types Of Presentations

I’m going to take a bunch of heat for this next statement but it is a critical underpinning of the Modern Presentation Method.  There are only three types of presentations that are ever given.  They are Pitching, Organizing, and Teaching presentations.  And each is very different.  Here they are:

    

Pitching

These are the traditional presentations that so many people think of.  A single presenter stands before an audience of hundreds, thousands, or perhaps just one and pitches his or her product or message.  The goal of the presentation is to activate the audience so they perform some action.  Most of the time that action is either to buy a product or to buy into a certain message. 

This presentation type is very well understood today and some of the giants among presentation experts such as Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds have really moved the state of the art forward with their theories.

Examples:  Advertising, sales presentations, marketing presentations, political speeches.

 

Organizing

The least understood type of presenting is Organizing.  There is not much in the way of literature on this and this will be a big focus of MPM.

Here, the presenter tries to create unified collective action from a team or organization.  If you look back at the Part One post from yesterday, I asked you to define your needs/wants for a presentation and gave you four ways to do that:  Observe/Inform/Status, Orient, Act/Mission, and Decision.

These four action sets map very neatly into what happens in an organizing presentation.

1. Observe / Inform / Status – The goal is to inform a group about what is happening in a particular situation.  “Right now our situation is X”.
   Example:  Status or Staff Meeting
2. Orient – The goal is drive consensus on what the “truth” of a situation is.  “We all agree that X is caused by Y”.
   Example:  Staff Meeting Issue Follow Up
3. Decision – The goal is to drive a decision.  Sometimes this decision is the right of a leadership team or individual and sometimes the decision is a group decision.  That is more about how the organization vests decisions making authority than it is about the presentation type.  “Here is how we are going to solve Y and we need to choose from Courses of Action 1, 2, or 3”.
   Example:  Meeting on solving a specific problem.
4. Act / Mission – The goal is to coordinate action.  Here, the presenter wants to get the team on board and coordinated as they prepare to go execute on some project or plan.  “Now that we have chosen Course of Action 3, here is what each team needs to go do”.
   Example:  All Hands Team Meeting

 Note:  For the management junkies out there, this is an OODA loop, which is a competitive decision making process pioneered by John Boyd back in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  More on this in later posts.

 

 

 Briefing versus Meeting

Before we leave organizing I wanted to make a special distinction between conducting an organizing presentation as part of a briefing or as part of a meeting.

Many organizations are consensus based in today’s world and as such when teams get together they meet and collectively reach a decision.  Ultimate decision making power may rest with one individual but generally everyone in the room is involved in the discussion.  Therefore the presentation must encourage and enhance this discussion.

There are also many other types of organizations that use a briefing culture.  This is where a team or a staff meet and come up with the content and then one person or persons brief a more senior person who then either makes the decision or drives the discussion.  Two notable examples would be the US Army and also the Senior Management and/or Board of Directors of most major corporations.

In the Army case, a staff or subordinate officers will be tasked with driving a particular briefing (Observe / Inform / Status, Orient, Decision, Act / Mission) and they will then come in and deliver that presentation to the commanding officer of the unit who will then presumably make a decision based on the content of the briefing. 

In the Board of Directors case, the same thing happens.  A senior executive will be tasked with appearing before the board and presenting a particular briefing generally on a hot topic of major importance (Observe / Inform / Status, Orient, Decision, Act / Mission) and then the Board will take the information and meet to make whatever decision they are trying to drive.

Regardless, a briefing is a one:few presentation that is often not accompanied with a robust back and forth.  Oftentimes the briefer will be allowed to go through the content very quickly and will simply be asked some pointed questions about the content. 

Best Practice:  Really good presenters almost always send a pre-brief in Word or PowerPoint format for the senior leaders to read in detail beforehand.  They then come in and give a short and tight presentation followed by a rich Q&A as the senior leadership has had some time to ruminate on the presentation beforehand and they generally prepare questions accordingly.

  

Teaching

The last presentation type is teaching.  The goal here is transfer knowledge to the students in the audience, spur their creative thinking, and give them the skills to help expand the body of knowledge through their future work. 

 

Don’t Mix Them Up

Now that we have defined the types I’m going to give the single most important piece of advice about them which is DON’T MIX THEM UP.  A single presentation should only be one type.  Period!

Why?  Because you will fail to drive the type of action you want if you do this.  Here are some examples:

• Pitching To An Organization In A Decision Presentation – This is simply the most common mistake I see.  The presenter’s job is to come back to a group and do a decision presentation.  Whether it’s a briefing or a meeting does not matter.  What does matter is that the presenter chooses to pitch rather than actually delve into all of the potential courses of action. 
  So the presenter comes in, already has his or her favorite course of action, and simply presents to that conclusion rather than laying out all available courses of action for a cogent decision by the stakeholders.  Eduard Tufte, one of our fiercest critics, makes this one of his cornerstone pillars when he talks about PowerPoint but I fear the good professor misses the point.  It is not the tool causing the problem, but rather the intention of the presenter.  I have a strong feeling that this particular problem is one of the root causes for the problems that the US Army has been having with PowerPoint as of late.
  
• Pitching Instead Of Teaching – Here is another common error.  In the course of teaching students, a professor or instructor fails to convey all of the facts.  Again, another point that Tufte extols and he calls it “cherry picking”.  In this case the good professor is right on.  A good instructor never cherry picks and doesn’t present a skewed set of facts.  This is purely intellectual laziness at its best and outright fraud at its worst.
  
• Mixing Observe and Orient in an Organizing Presentation– This is a subtle problem but one that has huge consequences.  In an Observation presentation the goal is to bring to light the status of a particular situation.  “Our sales for Q1 are this in categories 1 through 30”.  This is very different from understanding and Orienting on what is causing sales to be up or down in categories 1 through 30.
  Many teams will try to get together and do both actions in a single briefing and they often fail.  This is because it is often easy to get the status data but it is hard to find the underlying causes of what caused a particular situation to arise.  So the team spends most of its time talking about the status and makes half-baked decisions about the underlying causes.  Once the logic of a situation is corrupted oftentimes Groupthink creeps in and the poorly thought out assumptions become organizationally recognized “facts” that later decisions are based on.  This is bad, bad stuff as it leads to bad follow on decisions.

Best Practice:  When I run a major project, I almost always separate these into two separate meetings.  In the first, we look at our status and decide what we need more info on.  In the second, we come together and talk through what our fact finding has uncovered about what caused each particular issue.  This simple process is one of the best ways to avoid Groupthink because it imposes a rigorous review process on what the particular “truth” is of a single situation.

 

Which Type Is Most Common?

One of the reasons I’m spending so much time on the Presentations Spectrum and the three types of presentations is because I believe one of the core problems in the current state of the art on presenting is that it is skewed so heavily to Pitching and away from the other two types.  I believe there are far more Organizing and Teaching presentations every day than there are Pitching Presentations which means we really need to move the dial to help those presenters for whom there isn’t a great deal of material to learn from.

If you don’t believe me, go look at your work calendar and see how many of each type of presentation you have had over the last two weeks.  I looked at mine and it was about 8:1:1 for Organizing:Pitching:Teaching.  And about fifty percent of my job is Pitching! 

On its face it wouldn’t surprise me if sixty plus percent of all presentations that happen each day are Organizing, and the remainder split between Pitching and Teaching.  More on this later in the posts on how to Build and Refine.

 Here’s a quick summary of each presentation type along with their various stengths and weaknesses.

 

 

Summary

Later on in the Build and Refine process I will talk about how to build specifically to each of the three types.  The purpose of today’s post is to introduce the Presentation Spectrum so that during the Visualization Process you can pick which particular presentation type you plan to give based on what actions you want the audience to take and what your goal is.

1. Decide your goal first.
2. Determine what you want the audience to do.
3. Pick your presentation type.

Tomorrow I will introduce the remaining steps of Visualization.  Thanks for tuning in.

Have a good day. 

DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com