Lesson Learned #20
There is a pretty funny story about a lesson learned by a consultant. It was told to us by a client who himself was an ex-consultant so we have never been sure if it really happened or it is some kind of urban legend. In any case, a consultant was doing a presentation to a number of managers, including the President of the organization. At one point the President started to get bored and asked the consultant to get the point and let her know the net impact of the recommendations. Not wanting to be thrown off his agenda, the consultant replied, “Great question but you’re one step ahead of me, I will be covering that off a little later in the presentation.” So the President collected her notebook, got up and walked to the door and turning briefly as she was leaving said, “someone come and get me when he gets to that section.”
There are a couple of lessons or maybe broader questions we can derive from this story:
1) Should you answer a direct question when asked in a presentation, knowing that you will be discussing the issue later? And (2) should you structure your presentations by answering the main question up front and then supporting it, or build a case to reach a hopefully obvious conclusion at the end? In our experience these are actually fairly interrelated questions.
Many of our senior clients are results-based individuals. It tends to be in their nature to want to know the answer up front and then have it supported with arguments. They don’t like it when we present arguments leading up to a conclusion because they feel slightly manipulated. They want the answer early on so they can have a chance to balance our arguments and see if they would draw the same conclusions. So as a general rule we always give away the punchline up front and then support it. In the story above, we would suggest that it is better to answer the President’s question directly, even if it will be repeated later in the presentation.
So, should you always give the answer up front? Like everything, there are some exceptions. The best advice may be to tailor your presentations to your audience. While our preference is to give the answer at the beginning, if we are presenting to an audience specific information that we know will not be well received, or we know the audience is pre-disposed to be hostile to the recommendations, we will sometimes build the case first. In these instances building the case gives you a chance to present a few arguments that may get the audience to at least consider the logic of why the recommendations were developed. It doesn’t always help, emotional feelings usually trump logical arguments.
