Image © Jose & MidJourney
I was in a room for an hour with some very high-profile people, I wasn’t presenting, someone from my team was. As the presentation evolved, two things happened that are in so many ways familiar but led me to think. The presentation starts, a story anchored in process unravels, slide three of a compacted 10 slide presentation starts a conversation that keeps treading away into no man’s land like Alice in Wonderland, soon enough most of them go to the last two pages looking for a conclusion, which is not to-the-point as they expected. The poor presenter in the room, after receiving direction and rehearsing his presentation in detail feels powerless and frustrated. Sounds familiar?
There was also another thing, which is the fact that this is a process, and after each phase there is a status, the people in the room wanted the conclusion of phase 2, and this was just the conclusion of phase 1. I told the presenter he did well, and that there was nothing he could do about it, that this was normal, I even explained how I typically prepare the 10 slides and place the two last slides first, leaving the others for when folks ask me how I reached my conclusion.
So, if this is just another design problem — coming up with a solution that requires an understanding of the target user, what they need — how could we do this better. Yes, we can start by showing clearly where we are in the process, we can go directly to the conclusions and be prepared to ask any questions on how we got there. After all, one could say they are paying us to go through process and come up with a conclusion, so they trust we did our work, going directly to the end could be a compliment of sorts. We can also make sure we understand what the target audience is looking for, inquire and engage others that are used to this target audience, learn from them.
But I started thinking when I was in front of customers presenting, how I would take a paper presentation and do all sorts of things to prevent the customer from going to the last pages, some very directly like stating “don’t”, to more subtle, or even separate the process and storytelling from the results. It’s easy to complain about folks that don’t see eye-to-eye with us on process and storytelling, but is it a limitation or setting on their part, or on ours? While people say they care about process and storytelling, does this depend more on people, or context? Does everyone really care about process and storytelling, or are some people more in tune with this than others? Do people that say they care are in fact restless inside, wanting to get to the conclusions, they just don’t show it? Is process and storytelling a luxury of those that have time? Is impatience a consequence of having less time and being accountable for decision making? We certainly know exceptions, but how much is this personality driven, how much job and function related? After all these years, and so many of these encounters, I am still debating internally.