Presenting a company in front of its employees
We found ourselves presenting in front of an audience of students and the marketing team at Uriach, a large company trying to compete in the medicine industry through natural remedies; the catch? We were supposed to present their own company profile to them, and raise interesting questions without questioning their values.
Obviously, the key element for this presentation was to strike a balance between raising critical points that students could reflect and build on, and putting the company employees in a situation where they would feel open to addressing them. Thus, there are two faces to the same presentation, based on the audience:
The employees, who want to feel represented fairly before addressing questions
The student audience, who is trying to learn about what challenges the company is facing, and make up an opinion on what they think the pros are doing right/wrong.
The plan to achieve this was to begin by setting the context in which the students could interpret the information about Uriach that would follow. We decided to achieve that by constructing a narrative on the company’s values, since that would let the students understand constraints, as well as opportunities, that come with them.
This would be a borderline impossible task, but luckily, cognitive biases come to the rescue - specifically, confirmation bias! Because we know each audience member will be more prone to picking up on the information that they were looking forward to, we knew we could affort more slack in walking this fine line. In practice, this mean that the employees would notice and take pride in the positive points, and students would catch on the more critical elements of the presentation and feel engaged.
From that point onward, it was a matter of informing and engaging the audience while presenting the critical points, which proved interesting for a discussion, as big hurdles that the employees had been tackling fiercely, which was the reality of things.
