Most of us believe that we focus on what’s most important. In fact, the reverse is usually true: any information or issue we are made to focus on becomes the most important.

Observe how news seems to come in waves. A particular event (possibly a tragic one) hits the news and then similar events seem to happen across the country. Often, those events were happening and going to happen anyway - but nobody paid them any attention. Opinion polls consistently show that issues in the news assume a higher level of importance: ‘something must be done about…’

So what’s going on? As Robert Cialdini explains in his book Pre-Suasion: ‘we can be brought to the mistaken belief that something is important merely because we have been led by some irrelevant factor to give it our narrowed attention.’ 

Before 2015 most people had no strong views on the EU, it was a fact of life. Once the issue came to dominate the news agenda it grew in importance to the point where people started to define themselves according to their views on EU membership, some even became a bit obsessive.

In a very unscientific way, I’ve recently observed how the degree of strict adherence to social distancing seems to be related to the percentage of news coverage dominated by coronavirus.

For a mundane example, think about what happens if you are having a conversation with somebody and your mobile phone rings. Try as you might to ignore it, it has a grip on your attention. ‘Who is it? Could it be important? Sorry, what was that you were saying?’

Focusing Attention in Presentations
As a presenter, one of your chief tasks is to be persuasive. In the context of the tendering process this means convincing your client that yours is the most advantageous solution.

It’s likely that your proposed approach will have strengths and weaknesses compared to your competitors. While you must always address all of your client’s requirements, you have more influence over the relative importance of those requirements in your client’s mind than you probably realise.

I recommend that you actively research your client’s hierarchy of needs and match your proposal’s strengths against these. Try to positively influence the relative importance of your strengths in their hierarchy and, similarly, aim to persuade them that the relative strengths of your competition shouldn’t rank so highly in their hierarchy of needs. Let’s look briefly at how you might do that.

What Comes First?
A key consideration is the order in which you present information. The thing we hear first is normally assumed to be the most important. Subsequent information tends to get filtered through the ‘reality’ of the first information we receive and accept. Once accepted, this idea can exert the same magnetic force of attention attraction as the ringing mobile.

When planning your presentation it’s impossible to overstate the importance of how, and in what order, you intend to present information and arguments. Think about how you need to frame and manage the flow of information so that it is focused on your strengths and so that people remember those strengths and perceive them as important for a successful outcome.

Other methods of focusing attention include:

• Self-relevance - make sure the information you want the audience to focus on is framed in a way that addresses them directly. 
• Posing a question that you don’t answer until later in the presentation: ‘X, is a vital outcome for you in this project, how can we make sure that happens? We’ll come to that in a bit…’
• Use metaphors and mental images - these help your audience ‘experience’ your presentation in a more active way and become more receptive to the information you want them to focus on.
• Aim to ‘know’ the audience you are addressing (very often this information can be gleaned from publicly available data or previous experience of dealing with them). Use this knowledge to your advantage. Align the language you use and the tone of your presentation to match their particular communication style. This technique will make them more receptive to your messages. This is something we do a lot of when preparing teams for behavioural assessments.

There’s plenty more I could include on this topic, but that would be a book rather than an article. For now, I’d just like to encourage you to think a little harder about how you can use presentations as an opportunity to shape and positively influence the discussion and the decision making process. 

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I am indebted to a close contact of mine Ian Brownlee for bringing to my attention the results of an International study on Presentations 2000 to 2012 (updated in Dec 2017).

The study aimed to identify why audiences lose interest and stop paying attention during presentations. I’m sure this is something any presenter would want to understand.

I hardly need to explain why this is a bad outcome. In short, you’ve wasted your best opportunity to get your message across and wasted everyone’s time into the bargain.

I don’t believe that anybody deliberately sets out to deliver a bad presentation. The vast majority of presenters seem to genuinely believe they are presenting well. They might not be totally confident in their own ability but they believe they have done all they could to deliver their messages successfully - even when they haven’t.

Can You Rely On Audience Feedback?
Understanding current performance levels is the first step towards improvement. Unfortunately, audience feedback isn't much help. It's very difficult for an audience to objectively critique a presentation and it’s even more difficult for the presenter to receive this critique objectively.

 A better place to start might be to understand the most common behaviours that will make your audience switch off. Bear in mind too, that remote presentations make the task of keeping your audience engaged that much harder.

 In no particular order here are 5 of the most common issues that arise:

• Clear lack of preparation by the presenter.
• The presentation lacks a clear structure.
• Messages are unclear and lack relevant examples.
• The purpose of the presentation and its stages are not explained clearly.
• The presenter doesn’t engage the audience – often using overly technical language, reading the text on the slides and is monotone in delivery.

 All of these flaws can be fixed. It’s within the power of every presenter to become more engaging and persuasive and to consistently achieve the goals of each presentation.
 
Grasp the Limitations of Working Memory
Without going too deeply into the science behind it, maintaining audience engagement is all to do with our working memory. This is how much information our brains can evaluate and retain. Miller's original research suggested this to be 7+/- 2 pieces of information. More recent studies by Cowan & Shu and others suggest that the memory can process up to 14 connected or related visual elements – lending further weight to the oft quoted cliché that “a picture paints a thousand words.”

Shu, et al, also state that Working Memory is able to easily process 3 chunks of incoming information at one time. E,g., The good, the bad and the ugly. The Father, the son and the holy ghost, etc.. Listen to any politician and note how often points come in groups of three!
 
So in practical terms, to improve your presentations you must avoid overloading the working memory:
 

• Deliver fewer key messages and focus on the ones that really need to be retained. Avoid lengthy explanations of the details. Equally, keep any support materials simple and as visual as possible. Audiences can read so you will insult them if you read text out loud.
• Emphasise the benefits to the audience: ‘what you get… what this means to you is… the difference this makes is...’ Give them ‘real life’ examples that they can relate to so they understand how the benefits will positively affect them. 
• Be prepared to repeat key points to keep them in the working memory.
• Make it clear from the outset what the purpose of the presentation is and what actions need to be made as a result of it (actions by the audience).
• At the start and throughout the presentation regularly provide ‘signposts’ with time updates. The audience is then primed to see and hear what’s coming.
• Prepare thoroughly. And yes, practise delivering the presentation either to yourself or to a ‘friendly audience.’ Think about the passion, pace and tonality of your voice as well as your stance, position and visual engagement with the audience. If you’ve rehearsed it less than 6-7 times to achieve this I’d be astounded. Expert presenters tell us how much they practice before any session and it’s rarely less than this.

 
Doing all of this is easier said than done. It’s beneficial to have an objective external opinion to coach you on how effectively you are implementing these points and to provide encouragement and coaching on subtle ways of improving.
 
If your presentation is of critical importance to you and your business, you really want to do all you can to keep your audience alert and engaged, and ready to absorb the points you need to communicate.
 
The Bid Coach consultants are experts in effective communication. We help individuals and businesses large and small to improve the effectiveness of their presentations so they become sought-after experts and win more business.

Telling presenters that they shouldn’t use bullet points is, well, pointless. I think most people (except excessively lazy presenters) have got the message that bullets are engagement killers. But sometimes they are unavoidable.

So rather than issue an edict that says ‘thou shalt not use bullet points in your slides,’ I thought it might be more helpful to look at what bullet points do to the communication process. This might help you to use bullets more carefully and wisely.
I’m indebted to my friend Ian Brownlee for the psychological insights here. It certainly confirms what I’ve observed through experience over many years.

What’s the Point of the Bullet Point?
Most people believe that presentations are for sharing facts, figures and evidence to convince the audience of the strength of their argument. These are important considerations, but only up to a point. 

The problem is that people don’t make decisions based just on the facts. Neuroscientific evidence shows that if the rational and emotional parts of the brain become disconnected, even simple decisions become impossible to make. Recent research indicates that more than 90% or our decisions are based on emotions which then need to be justified by data. 

So when you are presenting, don't show them the data. Show them what it represents – the ‘what they get.’ Paint a picture of a brighter future.

Emotional Engagement
ALL decisions (even ‘hard-nosed’ business ones) are a mix of the rational and the emotional. Bullet points are not strong on emotional engagement. So, if that’s pretty much all your presentation has, you have a problem.

In the world of procurement a slightly better mark can be awarded to one potential bidder simply because “it felt better” to the assessors or “they seemed to understand us more.” Multiply this effect across a range of questions and even a marginal improvement in score can make a significant difference to the overall marks and result.  

Use words like ”Imagine the positive impact..!” Or “Consider how this will increase…!” This style of language initiates internal emotions - which is what you want.

Control the Narrative
Our role as presenters is to lead the audience through the ‘story’ we want to tell them. We need to  focus on one piece of that ‘story’ at a time, until we choose to move on to the next stage. The best way to achieve this is to make sure we get our audience emotionally engaged in our narrative. There are techniques you can use to do this, which we’ll cover below.

Be aware too, of what happens if you ask anyone to read and listen simultaneously.  They start reading and stop listening. Project a screen full of text or bullet points and you’d might as well stop talking altogether.

How to Use Bullets and Stay Connected
So, if you get to a point in your presentation where you can’t tell the story with pictures and the spoken word, if bullets look like the only option, what should you do?

• Make sure you aren’t taking the easy way out. Is there really no more imaginative way to make the point?
• Pare the words down to the absolute minimum. Give yourself as much talking to do as possible.
• Limit yourself to five (ideally fewer) points per slide.
• Try to put words with emotional value into your bullet points (words that relate to trust, security, discovery, optimism, happiness, tranquility etc).
• Use relevant icons with each point to give a visual memory cue.
• Plan the ‘reveal.’ Never flash up all of your text in one go - people will just start to read and stop listening. Add context, meaning, anticipation and colour to each point with your spoken narrative. Give people enough time to absorb each point.
• Make the most important point stand out, either with larger text or an image.
• Fade the points you have dealt with to draw attention to the next point you want to make. Perhaps ask a leading question before you show each new point.

How Much Can We Remember?
Here’s the other thing to remember about bulleted lists: people are most likely to retain what they hear first (when their concentration is highest) and last (the most recent thing they hear). It’s a case of front-loading vs end loading in a double bind context.

In the double bind context the first point somebody hears is absorbed and ‘accepted as a given.’ The follow up point or option is then treated as more important and retained longer in the working memory. The working memory applies a “last in, first out” concept. This is especially true if the point is emotion-based and provides more benefits for the receiver.

So the presenter who lists bullets in descending order of importance may be helping their audience remember points that are less important at the expense of key information.

The order in which you present bullet points has more significance than many appreciate. You have considerable influence over what information your audience absorbs and retains - use it wisely!

The point of your presentation is to make an impact, induce positive feelings and be remembered for the right reasons. How you avoid or use bullet points can go a long way to achieving this.

Want to go deeper? Here are links to articles by Ian Brownlee related to this topic:

The Psychology and Use of Bullet Points in Presentations. 

Goodbye, Bullet points. Hello, Transmediation (and Effective & Memorable Communication) 

International Presentations:  Top-Down or Bottom-Up?   How to structure your message.
Published in the ASTD journal.

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