[ftio]

I’d take that one step further. “Preparing, being clear in communications, and thinking about how your audience will hear the message” are critical for all presentations.

I present to all kinds of audiences all the time. Yesterday it was SVPs, tomorrow it’s the engineers on my team.

I know firsthand how easy it can be to get wrapped up in the formalism of presentation — does the internal logic of my argument make sense, is this a nice theoretical framework, is the framing pithy and memorable enough? But it can all go to shit if you don’t design your presentation for your audience. You need to be thinking from One about the kinds of language your audience is accustomed to, about potential baggage associated with particular concepts or even specific words, about the kinds of information they’re used to consuming (and the mechanisms by which they consume it), and first and foremost: what is my audience motivated or incentivized by? How can I make sure that the message I present is aligned with their goals and their values? Alternatively, if I’m delivering a message that I know to be counter to their existing worldview, how do I empathetically demonstrate that I actually understand their worldview, that I’ve considered it deeply, and that new data or a larger shift have necessitated a change in thinking?

I’ve seen so many presentations (as recently as yesterday) in the other direction (to high-level executives) that fall into essentially the same trap: they have a really important message to deliver, but the message falls on its face because the presenter frames the conversation from their perspective, ignoring that their audience comes to the table with potentially very different wants/needs and a substantially different contextual lens.