I’ve been in a lot of meetings where a presentation falls flat. Why? Usually because there’s not enough context for the reader. When that happens, either people politely listen, get confused and slow down the presentation asking lots of questions, or start hijacking your meeting. How do you ensure you are providing the right context in your presentation to keep everyone aligned?

1. Write an executive summary page for your presentation. At the very least, it will force you to articulate what the key points are. If this is the first time you are presenting on this topic, context is even more important. Don’t assume that everyone knows why you’re there.
2. Create familiarity by showing the same slides/language where possible. Don’t create every presentation from scratch, especially if it’s the same topic. Familiar pages which are updated with what’s new keeps the context for the audience. Yes, you might feel bored. But trust me, don’t reinvent when what you have works. I once had someone working for me who would always want to use a new word to describe contingency. Why?
3. Treat the page as precious real estate. In other words, don’t waste space with words which add nothing, sentences which are vague. Every bullet has to be saying something important in order to earn the right to stay on the page.
4. Make sure the story flows from page to page to page. Often, I use the bottom of a page to place the leadline for the next page. It acts as a cue to remind me of what’s coming so I know how to lead in. Something like “now that we’ve reviewed the quality metrics, let’s look at how these programs impacted our financials for the year” is what I might say…the tagline below might be “While 45 of 50 service level metrics have improved significantly, we have also managed to keep our expenses flat to plan”.
5. Change the actual perspective as the writer: I liked to tape my deck pages on a wall and look at the story. Sometimes a slide made more sense sooner than later, sometime a slide could be killed altogether, sometimes you saw where a piece of data needed to be introduced in a different place. There’s something about putting the whole story so that it can be seen in one take that helps crystallize what you’re trying to say. And yes, you can do that on screen, but there’s something about having it right in front of you, life-size, which really brings it home.