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Planning an Effective Presentation, Part 3
Calibrate Your Presentation’s Importance
It’s obvious that this presentation (see above post) is important for a variety of reasons. While not every presentation is a key strategic intervention, every presentation should be treated as if it were. Organizations have a way of stumbling upon crucial ideas and important strategies when they least expect them. Your presentation might be a treasure waiting to be discovered. In any event, it is important that you calibrate the importance of your presentation. 
Because you’re doing the presentation, it will feel important to you. To determine how important it is to everyone else, seek the opinions and feedback of other people whose judgement you trust.
The best way to find out who tapped you is to ask. Be direct.
• “Aside from you, Sarah, was anyone else involved in making the decision to give me this assignment?
• “Are you comfortable sharing their expectations?�
• “Does anyone have any concerns or goals that I should know about before moving forward?
Like everybody else, I’ve made my own set of bone-headed presentations. When I fearlessly evaluate my failures, I most often conclude that I failed because I didn’t understand what was at stake. I didn’t sufficiently prepare because I thought, “This is no big deal.� Well, sometimes a moment comes along that is a much bigger deal than we think. Big moments take more time to get ready for. Later on in this series, I’ll be talking about how to schedule preparation time. You’ll need to know how much is at stake in order to budget your prep time.
When most people think about returns-on-investment, they think about money. In this case, think about time. Sometimes just 10% more time will triple a return. There’s no better time to find out that a presentation project is going to take a lot of time than right after you’ve learned you’re going to do the project. Calibrating importance early is important, so don’t delay.
Posted on June 13, 2006 06:30 AM | Permalink
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