How to present a big, complex diagram
How do you go about presenting a complex image to an audience that, regardless of how knowledgeable on a topic, has never seen it before? Surely, just putting it full screen on a slide is not going to suffice, so keep reading to learn about one potential approach.
During his academic studies, Tommaso found himself having to present a large conceptual map to an audience which, though expert on the topic, could not be asked to digest being shown the diagram at full scale on just a simple slide.
To provide minimal background information, the presentation aimed at using system mapping to understand the crucial points of the US student loan system’s impact on racial wealth gap.
The challenge of the presentation was to get an audience up to speed on work that took weeks, in just a few minutes. Inevitably, they would have had to digest a lot of info fast, but this does not mean that Tommaso could not help ease the process.
We are going to skip over the introduction part, which clarified all the basics of the discussion and introduced the audience to the topic and the presentation. By this, you shouldn’t assume that it is not an absolutely crucial part of the presentation, because it is, but just that this is not the lesson that we want to learn today.
The approach Tommaso used to reflect together with the audience on the system map was:
present it all at once, not to elaborate on it, but just to give the audience an idea on what they could expect from the next few minutes of explanation.
zoom in on the color-coded sections by the use of the evergreen morph transition
not give the takeaways immediately, but include the audience in the thought process that the team went through during the project, including dead ends.
This helped immensely to keep the presentation engaging, and make the audience feel part of the team that created the map, which made conclusions and limitations far easier to understand, and kickstarted an interesting conversation of knowledge creation.
