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Know Your Audience: A Guide to Preparing for Technical Presentations

A structured approach to creating addresses tailored to the stakeholders' needs and concerns

The ability to effectively present complex topics to an organization is a skill that clearly sets data professionals apart in the working world. It’s vital to distill intricate information into clear explanations when working with convoluted topics, and the success of this effort hinges on the ability to bridge the gap between complexity and comprehension. This is particularly true when talking about the difficult topics found in Data Science, for example deep learning algorithms, Bayesian inference, and dimensionality reduction (to name a few).

This article is the first in a series on preparing material for presentations, in which I want to run through the strategies and techniques I use when creating presentations to transform high-level topics into simple summaries. This series will walk through the various methods I use when considering how to structure my presentations to be clear, concise, and effective.

The advice I give in this series can be broken down into 3 simple tenets, which I have laid out below:

  1. Know your audience
  2. Guide your audience
  3. Anticipate and prepare for responses

All of these points are interconnected and interdependent – a successful presentation will incorporate all three, allowing the audience to comprehend your key message, take away information relevant to them, and have their queries and concerns answered in a satisfactory manner. With these 3 key guidelines, you can be assured of success in technical Presentations.

In this article I will focus on the first guideline – how to gain a sufficient understanding of your audience to be able to gauge their key concerns, base level of understanding on the topic at hand, and expectations for the presentation you’re about to give. This level of preparation is essential when dealing with any large audience composed of different stakeholders with differing motivations, all while delivering complicated source material effectively.

Know your audience

In his famous treatise on military strategy, the Chinese General Sun Tzu wrote:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Naturally your audience is not your enemy (with any luck) but the key premise is still the same – gaining a thorough understanding of your audience in advance will allow you to adequately prepare your presentation for whatever might come your way. With this in mind I’d like to suggest some tips and tricks for understanding your audience’s needs before presenting to them.

Map it out

While preparing for your presentation, think about who will be listening to this talk – what is the primary background of your audience? Are they specialists in the field or do they only possess a surface understanding of the material? Is this crowd interested in the inner workings of the project, or are they more concerned with the end result with less focus on the details? Does this audience include high-level decision makers in the organisation?

In order to answer these questions systematically, I like to apply techniques for Stakeholder Management used across a wide variety of fields, from business to engineering— the stakeholder matrix, and the influence-interest grid.

First to define what a stakeholder is – a stakeholder is anyone (person or group) with influence over a project or venture. In the context of delivering a talk, the project is the presentation itself – therefore a stakeholder is anyone who contributes to, or is affected by, the outcome of a presentation. These can range from data analysts who work directly on the data shown in the presentation, to executives who make decisions based on the presentation recommendations – it’s important to identify all individuals or parties who may be affected by a project so that you can capture all relevant concerns in your stakeholder matrix.

A stakeholder matrix is a relatively simple method of mapping out what your key audience members are interested in. It’s a table describing the key concerns, influence and interest levels of each stakeholder, essentially mapping out their positions on the topic at hand and how much influence and interest they have within this field. This becomes useful when deciding what approach to take for your presentation, and how best to display your information.

By way of example, suppose you were giving a talk on tool utilisation trends within a large factory – the most likely attendees will come from the production department, quality control, maintenance & facilities, finance, and senior management. The stakeholder matrix you would prepare for such a talk may look like the one below:

Once you’ve drafted the stakeholder matrix and you’re satisfied with your level of understanding of your audience, you can now map these onto an influence-interest grid to get a visual depiction of where each of your stakeholders stands relative to the topic at hand.

An influence-interest grid is an effective way to plan which stakeholders to tailor your presentation towards – stakeholders on the top right are the most important ones and need to be managed closely, while those on the bottom left of the graph only need to be monitored. The diagram below explains the concept very well:

For this example on tool utilisation, the interest-influence grid would look like the one I’ve prepared below:

Based on this grid above, you would conclude that Production, Quality, and Factory Management are the most important people to keep happy when giving your talk – however Factory Management have a high level of influence but do not have as much interest on the topic as Production or Quality. Finance ranks very low on the grid, so you should not spend too much time on considering their interests for the presentation. Facilities have low influence but high interest – since you would need their help to action any decisions made from this presentation, it’s important to keep them on your side.

Consider the context

Now that you’ve prepared your stakeholder analysis, consider what the most pressing concerns are for your audience at large – be sure to address these when giving your talk. Understand the purpose of your presentation to get an idea of what tone to use when delivering the information – are you informing, persuading, or educating your audience? Each of these objectives leads to a slightly different approach to your topic:

  1. Informing – Stay objective in the delivery and stick to the data, prioritise clarity and accuracy, avoid drawing concrete conclusions
  2. Persuading – use more subjective language, back up claims using data and statistics, demonstrate why this perspective is best in contrast to others.
  3. Educating – Explain terms in detail, prioritise simplicity and clarity in your delivery, use analogies or metaphors to explain difficult concepts

Continuing with the previous example of tool utilisation, suppose the context was low tool utilisation across the factory – is the purpose of your presentation to inform stakeholders of the issue, and display the metrics tracking this problem? Is it to persuade tool owners to utilise their tools more effectively? Or is it to educate engineering teams on best practices for maintaining high tool utilisation? Consider these questions and feed this into your stakeholder analysis, to ensure your presentation delivers the appropriate tone and message for the required task.

Secondly, be mindful of the allotted time you’ve been given to present your subject matter – this will dictate the level of detail you’re able to go into when giving this talk. If you are scheduled for an hour then aim to fill up the hour with important details and elaborate on content as needed. However if you’re only able to speak for 5 or 10 minutes, then it’s essential to stick to the most pertinent details, addressing the most important points immediately and thoroughly. Don’t retread old ground if you’re in a time crunch – instead, state that these details are addressed in other forums (and provide this material if requested) then move on with the most current information.

Lastly, it’s important to consider the audience’s base level of understanding when preparing the material – avoid spending too much time on well-known points but skim over these, instead prioritising new and impactful information which is more relevant to the discussion. Ask the question, would this information lead to new or important takeaways from this presentation – if so then it’s important to prioritise it in your slides.

Adjust your Language Accordingly

Generally it’s not as simple as picking one tone and sticking to it for the whole presentation – each point in your presentation may require a shift in tone and a change in approach to achieve the desired response. In some parts of your address you may be informing the audience of statistical findings – in describing other details you may switch to a more instructive tone to ensure those concepts are well understood before proceeding. You may switch briefly to a persuasive tone to argue a more contentious point, before returning to an informative stance for more well-agreed statements.

Tying this all together in our earlier analogy – in preparing your stakeholder matrix and mapping this onto an influence-interest grid, you know that Production, Quality, and Senior Management are the most important stakeholders to appease for this presentation. Maintenance are also highly interested but don’t have as much power as these groups. Finance is low priority on the influence-interest grid and do not merit much consideration.

Production want the tools to run as efficiently as possible to maximise output, while Quality want the tools to run as precisely as possible to minimise potential defects in the product. Senior Management are concerned with both outcomes, their objective being to output a large volume of high-quality product from the factory. Let’s assume your end goal is to drive higher utilisation across the factory – based on this information, what data do you need to prepare, and what tone do you need to use, to ensure a successful outcome from this presentation?

Since the question in this hypothetical scenario ultimately comes down to volume vs. quality, these are the focal points you should emphasise in delivering your address – prepare data to show where improvements in utilisation do not lead to a negative quality impact. You will be informing the key stakeholders of these opportunities (in particular, Production and Factory Management) and _educating M_aintenance on how to improve utilisation on these tools.

Where utilisation gains would lead to a quality impact, the language of your address must become more persuasive to convince Quality of giving concessions in tool precision. Prepare data quantifying the tradeoff between volume output vs quality impact, and identify what the most optimal balance would be between these two metrics to achieve the highest volume of quality product out of the factory. This will appeal to Factory Management, while aiming to appease the Quality department. In all likelihood, Quality will want to run through the details of this analysis extensively – prepare supporting material for this purpose. Describing this in detail will make it clear that you’ve conducted a thorough analysis, and should dispel any doubts as to the quality of your assessment.

Conclusion

To summarise, understanding your audience is an essential aspect of preparing for high-level presentations on complex topics. By understanding stakeholders’ interests and influence levels, it’s possible to craft tailored messages that resonate with your audience, and ultimately affect decisions after the fact. Additionally the strategic use of tone adds another layer of depth, shaping stakeholders’ perceptions and engagement to the material. When these techniques are integrated seamlessly in an address, presentations become highly effective tools to capture the attention of the audience, ultimately leading to more successful and impactful outcomes.


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