Powering up boring business presentations: Tips from fiction
Updated: Aug 22
Useful tips for captivating business presentations can be drawn from fiction writing. Foremost: Don’t bore the audience.
Sitting through and/or delivering presentations are a staple of professional life. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? One moment, you’re seated in the gallery eagerly expecting to be wowed by the renowned expert on the podium. The next, when the expert gets his ball rolling, you want out.
Conversely, for many, including yours truly, while wearing the other shoe as a presenter, the interaction with the audience sometimes doesn’t pan out as expected. After fretting and enduring pre-event performance anxiety, one’s A-game can fail to show up when it matters most. The fruits of preparation can get flushed down the toilet, sabotaged by stilted and incoherent delivery. But, hey, in such moments, one is a professional and has to soldier on, right? You bet! Yet, in such scenarios, it is likely that while one plods through their talking points, it only triggers confidence-sapping yawning, phone scrolling, and walkouts from the audience. Like enduring a “failed date”, one can’t wait to flee the stage!
Little surprise that there is a cottage industry of training courses and tons of books aimed at helping presenters up their game. Two that come to mind, which I found enlightening, are BBC presenter and journalist Ros Atkins’s The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence, and Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience, co-authored by Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva.
My own experience writing a financial thriller, Black and White Smoke, also got me thinking about which aspects of fiction writing could be carried over to business presentations.
“Hang on!” you may say. “That’s a stretch. Isn’t fiction all about entertainment?”
And I say, “Yes!” But it’s also about subliminally influencing the audience. In this regard, in addition to paying attention to the psychological aspects of ensuring the best version of yourself shows up at crunch time, below are some fiction-writing pointers which are also applicable to business presentations:
Hook ’em hard. This can be via a quote, joke, or anecdote. Individual comfort and personality should dictate the choice. The context, such as the nature of the audience, should be considered. And play to your strengths. If you can tell a joke and have the timing to nail the punchline to delight your audience, go for it. Or maybe you’re better at freely speaking, telling a yarn and getting your audience swaddled up in the threads as you weave…
End as strong as you begin. A powerful start hooks the audience for what follows. A powerful finish can hook the audience forever. It can even make up for a so-so middle.
Create compelling characters. In fiction, this keeps readers glued to the page, while for technical/business presentations, the characters are the speaker and personalities in the anecdotes shared. Captivating characters are relatable, credible, and authentic. Who they are or what they symbolize gets the audience emotionally invested, regardless of their role as either hero/protagonist or villain/antagonist.
Craft a plot. In fiction, the plot or story arc, along with a seamless opening, middle, and finale, is key. Similarly for technical presentations, a clear, logical, coherent, and evolving thread of content is needed—with a strong closing. This will help you avoid delivering a meandering deluge of information between the start and end.
Have a clear promise—and deliver. Baiting and switching or not meeting expectations are audience put-offs.
It's about the audience, stupid! Novels are written to captivate the reader within the premise of a plot, often within a specific genre. They’re not an outlet for the author’s unchecked expression on all and sundry. Similarly, a presentation is about influencing the audience by delivering digestible content that keeps them thinking. It’s not a forum for the presenter to show off how clever he or she is.
Keep up the pace. In fiction, don’t dawdle when getting to the inciting incident. Readers have little tolerance for lengthy setups, so cut to the chase, while keeping the story entertaining throughout. The same applies to presentations. My patience is stretched when presenters overindulge in frivolous small talk, erroneously presuming their audience is captive.
Avoid cradle-to-grave descriptions. Start with the punch line or key conclusion when presenting, and then expound on the “how we got there.” For instance, if depicting the oratorial brilliance of Martin Luther King, Jr., one can kickstart with the delivery and timeless impact of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, and then touch on the background that led to that barnstorming performance.
Be concise (if you promised to). Irksome are the speakers who pledge to be brief. Yet to their hostage audience’s dismay, they elaborate on each of the fourteen bullet points drafted in full Word-like paragraphs on the slide while explaining every wedge of the five pie charts crammed within. The slow sermon then lingers over the next twenty-eight slides.
Avoid info dumps and overexplaining. In fiction, this turns readers off and signals the author’s mistrust that their audience will “get it.” Similarly, in business presentations, unless essential, skip through background and procedural information and don’t rehash what is self-evident from the slides.
Each slide should serve a clear purpose. The design of each slide is akin to the development of a scene in fiction, where clear thought is given to the objective of the scene, the characters involved, the setting, and the balance of narrative versus dialogue and action.
Pay attention to transitions. In fiction, links across scenes and chapters have to be thought through. Same with talking points across slides. Avoid stumbling into an element of the deck, clueless about of how to seamlessly enter and exit the slide.
Bolster audience engagement via cadence and in delivery and design. Consider voice modulation, varied pace, tonal variety, and the delivery of messages with a conversational tone. Keep content varied, mixing visuals with narrative.
Deliver a presentation that oozes with passion. If you don’t care about what you’re saying or sharing, your audience won’t either.
Twists (unexpected conclusions) are welcome, but gimmickry, inauthentic and confected shocks aren’t. Know your audience to ensure you stick within the bounds of acceptability.
When you step back and look at these similarities, it becomes clear that storytelling principles extend far beyond novels. The techniques that keep readers turning pages are often the very same ones that keep audiences engaged during a presentation. Above all, remember the cardinal rule: Don't bore the audience.
