Clue logo by SantaMinion 

Do you like to read mystery novels? Watch mystery movies? The fun is in guessing whodunnit while the author throws red herrings at you. You don’t want your audience guessing “whodunnit” in a business presentation because then they aren’t listening to you.

While a mystery novel starts with the murder, it purposefully buries the lead on who committed the crime. Now imagine what your brain does as you read a mystery novel. With every clue, your brain guesses who the killer is. Mystery authors know this and use it to their advantage. They give you clues that point to multiple suspects. They kill off prime suspects and introduce new suspects. They introduce red herrings, plot points designed to point to an innocent character. The red herring idiom comes from the practice of fugitives using fish to throw off the scent as bloodhounds tracked them.

Now imagine you designed your presentation like a mystery novel. There are two problems to this approach. First, your audience is spending mental energy trying to guess where you are going. That means they aren’t listening to you. Second, because you haven’t given them your solution to the problem, your audience will come up with their solution. And if they come up with a different answer, now you must defend yours.

I’ve met a few people who like to read the last chapter of the book first. While this spoils the fun of reading a mystery, it speaks to the human desire to want to know the answer upfront. Spilling the beans is the opposite of burying the lead, and it’s how you should approach most of your presentations.

How to Spill the Beans

There are multiple ways to spill the beans in a presentation:

  • Presentation Titles that give the scope and purpose of the meeting
  • Knowing your Key Points and hitting them early
  • Executive Summaries that distill the key points
  • Slide Titles that give the main point of the slide
  • Storylines that lead with the answer

I discussed Slide Titles in Death to the Category Header. Let’s discuss Storylines here.

Storylines

Let’s start at the very beginning

A very good place to start

– “Do-Re-Me,” by Rodgers and Hammerstein

That may be a good place to start your singing lesson, but it’s not a great place to start your presentation storyline. As humans, we naturally fall back on linear storytelling. So here’s a typical business storyline that I call “The History Lesson”:

  1. We found a problem
  2. We talked to stakeholders
  3. We gathered data
  4. We analyzed the data
  5. We came up with a brilliant solution

The problem with this approach is that we don’t get to the solution until the end of the story, so your audience is spending mental energy guessing where you were going. Your presentation is not a mystery novel! A better way is to lead with the answer, then give the supporting information necessary to accept that as the correct answer. Here’s an example storyline:

  1. We must make a change in our product/process/policies (recommendation/solution)
  2. This change addresses a problem
  3. We understand the root causes of the problem
  4. Here are the details of the recommendation/solution
  5. The answer creates value

In some cases, you might lead with the problem to ensure you have agreement on the problem before giving your solution. Then, depending on the stage of your project, you might include other elements. For example, if this is your final recommendation, you might include these elements:

  1. We have tested and pre-sold the answer
  2. We have a clear implementation plan
  3. We understand the risks and have a mitigation plan
  4. We need your support in these areas to be successful

There are two exceptions to the rule of leading with the recommendation:

  1. When your recommendation is counter-intuitive or controversial
  2. When your purpose is to review your problem-solving approach

In the first case, leading with your recommendation risks having your audience stop listening because they are spending mental energy organizing their argument to tell you how wrong you are. To prevent that, lead with the critical piece of data that led to your recommendation. It also helps to acknowledge that you know your recommendation is counter-intuitive or controversial, so your audience will keep listening. In the second case, your audience’s job is to review the sausage-making, so you want to share the methodology steps: stakeholder inputs, data sources, key assumptions, and calculations.

The Game of Clue would be less fun if you were handed a card at the beginning that said, “Miss Scarlet in the Conservatory with the lead pipe.” But your presentation audience will thank you if you don’t make them guess. By choosing a storyline that puts important things first, you ensure your audience isn’t wasting mental energy guessing where your story is headed.