Jan Schultink is a presentation designer with a decade of experience as a CEO strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company. In his recent post “So What” in his blog Idea Transplant, he neatly and crisply addresses a solution for the disease we find in many presentations. We often see and hear about the “WHAT” – – Sales up. Sales down. Expenses flat. # clients up or down – – the standard “elevator analysis.” But far too often there is inadequate attention explaining the “So What.” Jan suggested that:
….you should ask yourself what “the real point of a chart full with analysis was and write that down as the title…A so what should be meaningful, and not simply stating a fact for example instead of “We are making a loss in France”, maybe it should read: “It is time to leave the French market”… Once you established what the so what of the chart is, you could then go on an cut down any facts, data, or analysis that was not essential to make the point. If you identified the key messages correctly you would be able to understand a document by just reading the headlines, the content of the slides just backs up what the title says.”
What Jan isn’t saying here is the easy part of the task is explaining and presenting the “What.” The really heavy lifting comes from defining the “So What.”
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