"If you don't select and deliver what is relevant to your audience then they will tune out everything because eliminating 95% of the whole is very hard." Susan Trivers
What if 95% of everything you read or hear is junk? It is not relevant to serve your purpose or needs at a particular time. Wouldn't you love to easily identify the 5% that is perfectly relevant? You'd be able to devote much more time and energy to what is important.
Edward Tufte, known to many as the expert on displaying quantitative information on slides, explains this search for relevance in a video on WashingtonPost.com/leadership.
Tufte came to this understanding when he was in graduate school: "I realized that the published literature was junk... That is, there is only 5% you have to read. You just have to be able to identify it. That is, you have to have a sense of relevance, a sense of excellence."
Tufte's search for relevance meshes exactly with my starting point for any speech or presentation: what does the audience care about? Your call-to-action, your key points, your mix of high impact content and your attention-getting opening must all be meaningful to the audience, not just to you.
When Tufte explores a new topic, he wants to learn enough to be competent and to do it. He doesn't want to learn theory or to pass a test for a license. When you're creating your speech or presentation, remember that your audience is happy to let you be the expert. They want to learn only enough to DO something new going forward in a way that is relevant to them.
Read through my blog archives to learn more about putting the audience first, and creating speeches and presentations that inspire rather than inform. As Tufte says: "If you're not doing something different, you're not doing anything at all."
Share your thoughts about relevance through our comment link.
Recent Comments