Presenting to an audience that does not know the topic
Sometimes, we may find ourselves having to present a topic to an audience that is not meant to know all about it, which means that keeping their attention up and ensuring that the message gets through become even more of a channel than usual.
In the context of explaining the design process of Adrian Newey, perhaps the best designer of the history of Formula 1, Tommaso prepared a presentation on his philosophy, a topic that he felt enthusiastic about and did not want to flop.
The challenge of this presentation was twofold:
Make an audience who’s not necessarily familiar with the topic understand the impressiveness of Newey’s achievements in Formula 1.
Make the presentation digestible enough to transmit the speaker’s passion for the topic
To achieve them, we begun by introducing the context in which Newey operates, Formula 1. Describing a sport, which is a form of entertainment, made setting up the narrative for the presentation easier than it would have been if we started with the engineering achievements that Newey reached instead. Furthermore, we kept the look of the slides less corporate than usual, reducing the content per slide and using more animations to catch the attention of the audience.
In fact, the trick was to describe the Pinnacle of Motorsport and set it up as a complex and ultra-competitive game, so that when eventually we got to Newey, and his achievements in it, it was clear to everyone in the audience what it meant. Because everyone was able to grasp the difficulty of even competing in Formula 1 quickly, which is easily done, they could be in awe at the engineering feats of Newey, which would have been much more difficult to achieve.
Because the presentation happened over strinct time constraints, another way we decided to communicate the weight of Newey’s success was by including comments from the F1 community. This made Newey’s reputation intuitive to any potential member of the audience still confused on how to feel about his genius.
Finally, having gained the audience’s attention through a strong, but more importantly, captivating narrative, we got to the real meat of the presentation, explaining in a structured and concise manner the elements of Newey’s philosophy,
The takeaway from this experience is that, while having a narrative is important, crucial even, to presentations, the narrative itself can be whatever we need it to be. If the main topic will not resonate with your audience, look for a proxy that does and make sure that you are on the same wavelenght about it, then use it to give scale to the actual theme of the presentation. At Slaid, we call this anchoring: associating the narrative to a theme that can capture the audience’s attention, and leveraging it to bring that positive interest towards the true content we want to share.
