What is the most important question technical experts should ask themselves before making a presentation?
I recently facilitated a leadership retreat where many of the presentations were made by technical experts. People who could literally talk for hours and hours about their experience and knowledge. I asked them to think about this question before preparing their presentations. “WHY SHOULD THE AUDIENCE CARE?” What did I mean? When you make a presentation, its not about telling the audience what you know (we know it’s a lot, all you scientists and IT executives). It’s about addressing an issue that the audience cares about. But how do you know what the audience cares about? Simple. What problem does your audience have that your work helps to resolve? That is the starting point of any good presentation and a particularly important one for our technical content masters.