I was running a workshop on presentation skills for an engineering team in Milan, Italy recently. They were an absolutely brilliant bunch of people, and they clearly knew their content inside and out. Aside from one person, however, they all found it challenging to decide what to leave in their presentations, and what to leave out.
When we had a discussion to get to the bottom of this problem, it turned out that the overriding feeling was that they needed to show ALL the detail to demonstrate their rigour.
This isn’t unusual. When researchers and scientists move from the academic world to the business world (or “industry” as I often hear it called), leading with the finding without front-loading all the technical detail can seem wrong.
But in business, when “time is money”, and a round-robin presentation series with 10-15 people in the room with a mix of leaders, colleagues, and suppliers, getting to the point quickly and staying open to expand on the detail on request, is often a better use of time. We explored ways to do this, as well as ways to adapt one presentation for different audiences, being ready to show more or less detail depending on context.
What was really interesting was the one exception: she was a bit older than the other people in the room, and she had worked for a few years in marketing, whilst doing her BSC via a distance learning course. She then completed her MSC in a brick and mortar university. So she came to her academic career with knowledge of putting the audience at the heart of the communication, and that gave her an advantage in the business world.
Ironic, really, when I think of how often folks in academia seem wary of anything marketing-related!
