Winning The Room

Preface

You're part of a high‐performing team that has some great data‐driven results to share. After months of effort, the team's work on a major project is finished and you're ready to present the results to the senior leaders in your organization. You and the entire team are energized and excited about the upcoming presentation and spend substantial time pulling together the necessary facts and figures. Those facts and figures are impressive and leave you no doubt that what your team has found will yield massive benefits for the organization once the executives act on the findings. As you step to the front of the room, turn on your laptop, and start your data‐driven presentation for the audience, you're feeling confident and proud.

The first information presented is a list of the key milestones of the project. To make sure that you accurately summarize the milestones, you turn to read the dates and descriptions from the screen. As you discuss the project's methodology, you provide the technical details behind each phase so that the executives understand the extent of the work your team did. You don't want the presentation to appear too long, so you keep your slide count to a minimum by putting as many points as possible on each slide. As the presentation progresses, questions indicate that audience members aren't understanding the technical details, so you go over all the details again, frustrated that they don't understand such simple concepts.

In preparing the presentation, ...