One more way
to set presentation goals
Alexei Kapterev
alexei@kapterev.com
m

Question
What is a good goal for a presentation
when you talk to well-educated and motivated
people?

What’s so special about this audience?
✤ They pay more attention to what you say
✤ And less attention to how you say it
(gestures, tone of voice, your Brioni suit etc)
✤ Pop psychology tricks are unlikely to work
with them

This doesn't look questionable
This looks like a total bull***t

To entertain
If informing is boring — let’s entertain! Let’s do standup comedy!
With PowerPoint! Now it’s a highly entertaining waste of time.
To motivate
Motivating, persuading to buy seems kinda fine. But is it really?
To inform
It’s where most people start, the goal is “to tell” or “to explain”.
The problem is that it’s BORING.
THREE GOALS ACCORDING TO CICERO

Problems with “the goal is to motivate”
✤ Ethically questionable: the’s no line between
“soft sell” and “hard sell”
✤ Takes a lot of emotional effort and may lead to
emotional burnout
✤ You don’t learn to do it on a two-day seminar

Question
Why do people *listen* to presentations?
Answer
They want to make a decision—and a good one.

✤ Should I read this book?
✤ Should I attend this seminar?
✤ Is the quarterly goal realistic?
✤ Should we buy this new equipment?
✤ Can we approve this loan?
For example…?

Key message
As presenters, we should help people make
better decision.

Question
How is it different from motivating or
informing?

To motivate
Here’s a particular thing or idea that I want you to buy and
all the data in my presentation aligned to support my conclusion
Helping to make a good decision
Here’s a decision-making process, here are my results but you
should re-examine everything and make your own choice
To inform
Here’s your information, you do what you want with it

Question
What’s a “good decision”?
Answer
Any decision is a *result* as well as a *process*.

Ultimately bad result (though probably good presentation!)

Relatively good process
Relatively bad process

Frequently asked question
What's more convincing, a story or a piece
of statistical evidence?
Answer
That’s a wrong question to ask. We should be
asking “what helps us make a better decision”?

The key question
How do we make good decisions?
A very vague answer
It depends on a) importance and b) resources
available

Not important, few resources
Coin flip
Intuition
Periphery cues
Very important
Mathematical models
Important, some resources
Naturalistic decision-making

✤ Commons space
✤ Problem
✤ Success Criteria
✤ Alternatives
✤ Simulations
✤ Choice
Sample decision-making model
There are dozens of them: GOPHER, DECIDE, и т.д.
THIS IS YOURPRESENTATIONSTRUCTURE!

✤ The question we should be asking ourselves as presenters:
what’s the best decision-making process here? This
should be the structure of our argument.
✤ We need to think about audiences’ long-term interests and
try to make decisions based on that
✤ The presentation title should be set in terms of decision-
making
✤ I think this approach makes a lot of sense for motivated
and educated audience
In conclusion

www.kapterev.com
alexei@kapterev.com
+7 495 764 1898
Presentations, etc.
m
Alexei Kapterev