Facts Don't Matter: 4 Tips To Create Memorable Presentations
#1 Ignore The Facts
Carmen Simon, who wrote Impossible To Ignore, one of the best books on creating memorable content
“It is difficult for our audiences to remember many facts, unless we repeat them regularly and repetition is often hard in business contexts”
For analytical thinkers, it can often be an overwhelming impulse to want to “show your work.” Part of this may be wanting to prove how much effort you put into something and another part may just be a misunderstanding of how to craft a compelling story.
Does this mean not to use any facts? No, but if you are going to share them, figure out what the most important ones you want your audience to remember and then make sure they are communicated in the most simple way possible.
For example, instead of saying “only 34% of people are engaged with their jobs” you could say “out of a group of 100 people, only 34 say they are engaged with their jobs” or “slightly more than 3 out of every 10 people are engaged with their jobs.”
#2 If you want to use facts, put them in context
Carmen Simon also points out a second drawback to facts in her book ‘Impossible to Ignore’:
“… when we present facts, abstract ideas, and meanings – essentially conclusions – it is difficult to control those conclusions. People are more inclined to act if they believe they reached a conclusion. And it’s harder to reach a conclusion when they don’t see what you saw.”
To deal with this challenge, she recommends helping the audience see what you saw. The best way to do this is to be very explicit and descriptive about the sensory details of the experience – what you saw, heard, felt and tasted.
Compare the following two stories, one with sensory details and one without:
Story 1: She drank a glass of red wine.
Story 2: After a long day of travel, she settled into her waterfront villa in Fiji. She slowly poured herself a glass of red wine and sat down in a hand-crafted chair, where she spend the next 30 minutes watching the sun slowly set. Right before it set, It ignited the sky in a red and orange glow. As she put the glass of wine to her nose and sniffed the smell of a perfect red wine, she thought about how lucky she was.
Both stories are factual accounts of the events, but one is more memorable and offers an experience and sensory anchors in which the data is embedded into, allowing your audience to connect with and remember the facts.
I don’t think I need to tell you which is which.
#3 Pictures Are Only worth 1.5 words
The line “pictures are worth 1,000 words” seems to be repeated so often that it must be fact, right? Turns out pictures are only worth about 1.5 words, or at least that is the finding of Professors Paul W. Foos and Paula Goolkasian.
What they actually found is that some pictures are more powerful than others – pictures that are easy to label. However, text or language that is easy to picture can also easy to remember. It’s quite easy to picture a purple elephant, just like its easy to label the yellow fruit in the below image.
#4 Pair the abstract with the concrete to make it more memorable.
So we know that pictures are not worth 1,000 words, but everyone says you should use pictures over lots of text, right? The problem is that pictures are often complex and an audience of 100 people may ascribe 100 different meanings to the picture. Take a look at the following picture:
What do you see? Some people might see “people on their phone” others might see “loneliness” or “addiction.” Without giving the audience guidance on what you are trying to show with the picture, they are going to draw their own meaning:
Socializing…or something else?
The opposite is also true. The business world uses many abstract words like efficiency, value, impact, improvement, productivity, innovation and success. If you are giving a presentation, try to be very specific about what you mean when you say something like impact – does it mean everyone on the team is doing great work or the boss is getting paid?
