Drop a body on the floor
TL;DR: Sign up for next week’s Presenting w/Confidence workshop.
The following is an excerpt from Design Is a Job, the Necessary Second Edition:
I am a fan of mystery novels, and maybe you are too. A good presentation should start like a good mystery novel: drop a body on the floor as soon as possible. Show people the thing they need to see and then give us the story about how it came to be there.
Most presentations follow a chronological timeline of the designer’s effort. First I did this, then I did this, here we are writing words on post-it notes of different colors, here’s some of the directions we eventually abandoned, etc, etc. It’s an exhaustive comprehensive attempt to be graded on effort. We want to show the room how hard we worked, which puts us at the center of the presentation, and we should never be at the center of a presentation, it should always be about the work. This is, however, how most people learned how to present if you equate presentations with critiques. Everyone in the room wanted to know how we did it, mostly so they could steal it.
Your audience wants the work, they’re itching for it. If you’ve ever looked out at your audience and seen them checking their phones, or worst yet, telling you to get on with it, it’s because you’ve exhausted their patience. Drop a body on the floor. Then, like a good mystery novel, explain how the body came to be. Now that their expectations have been met they’re ready to hear the story. Talk about how the research led you here, talk about how the strategy evolved. Now they feel like they’re meeting the chef after having eaten a good meal, not being dragged through the kitchen on the way to their table. Yes, I’m mixing metaphors. Shut up.
📣 If talking about your work gives you trouble, and yes this very much includes job interviews, Mike’s Presenting w/Confidence workshop will help. The next one is on March 20 and 21. (10–1 PDT each morning.) Sign up!
📕 If that excerpt up there is interesting to you, you might want to buy the book. It’s delightful and it has lots of cuss words. (If you’re thinking I bought that book when it first came out in 2012, I don’t need to buy it again… I assure you the second edition is vastly different.)
🤖 It is also available, for some strange reason that I myself don’t full understand even though I made it, in a Shitty Pulp edition. Trust that you’ll wish you’d bought it. The cover alone is amazing.