Put Away the Fire Hose

We’ve all been fire-hosed. Maybe by an instructor, a sales rep, a colleague, or an ad. The presenter gives so much information and detail that you can’t focus, and you tune out. Think about the last time you were in a room with a speaker who had so much material prepared that it was almost comical to think he could get through it all. Salespeople call this “show up and throw up.”  Word vomit. Whatever you like to call it, it is at best an inefficient use of precious little time, and at worst, an effective way to alienate your audience.

Everyone has been fire-hosed, and everyone hates it. Ironically, when it’s our turn to present, most of us get out our hoses. Some of us use small garden hoses, and some use FDNY issued equipment. But almost all of us do it. Why? Because we want to:

• Look smart
• Seem prepared
• Address everyone’s needs
• Cover the bases
• Answer all possible questions

What happens? We come across as exactly the opposite. We look unprepared as if we’ve not researched our audience. We are deemed insecure because we rely not on our knowledge, but rather on a prepared set of data points. We disregard our audience and focus on delivering the presentation, rather than hitting on what’s important to them. Fire-hosing has never endeared a speaker to a room full of people, and it never will. We all know the feeling in the pit of our stomachs when we hear these words: “I apologize in advance, but I only have an hour to get through the 68 slides I have prepared.”

When you bombard your audience with details, the outcome generally falls into one of three categories:

Irritation. An audience that endures extraneous details that are not relevant to their particular needs and interests gets annoyed and deems your presentation irrelevant at best, a huge waste of time at worst.

Dilution and distraction. The more you say, the less your audience remembers. The big, important points that you need to impart get lost in the fray of endless bulleted slides.

Overwhelming rejection. The human brain is not particularly efficient at taking in and processing new information. Your audience’s ability to understand is significantly lower than your ability to transmit that which you already know.

Learning new things and comprehension requires a tremendous amount of mental energy. The brain always tries to maximize efficiency, so if you overwhelm your audience with information, what do you think the brain is going to do with it? Is it going to spend time equally evaluating and weighing each point? No! The brain begins filtering all of this information, and only holds onto what it determines is important. The problem with this is obvious—what the brain thinks is important often does not jibe with the message you want to get across.

How do you avoid brain drain and information overload? By investing the time into building your presentation in such a way that it is truly tailored to your audience. This is actually far more difficult than creating 100 slides of word vomit. First, you must realize that each word has unique power and that your audience cannot tolerate too many. To that end, focus on CRITICAL CONTENT ONLY. If it isn’t mission critical, leave it out. You must also try to avoid repetition. Not only is it annoying to your audience, but it also burns through limited audience capacity. Lastly, be as brief as possible. As Shakespeare put it, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” The more information you include, the more pruning the audience will do.

Keep it simple.