Are you ready to elevate your presentation skills?
Do you know the key steps to create a presentation that drives action?
What if a few simple questions could drastically improve your presentation outcomes?
In this episode, I guide you through the five essential questions that will help you create presentations that do more than just inform—they inspire action.
Whether you’re aiming to influence decision-makers, communicate complex study designs, or share ideas effectively, mastering these fundamentals will make all the difference in your communication strategy. Join me as we explore how to make every presentation count.
Key Points:
- Elevate presentation skills
- Ask critical questions
- Transform presentations
- Inspire action
- Influence decision-makers
- Communicate complex ideas
- Master fundamentals
- Effective communication strategy
By asking yourself these five essential questions before you even open PowerPoint, you can create presentations that not only inform but also inspire action. Whether you’re aiming to influence key decision-makers or simply communicate more effectively, this episode provides the tools you need.
Don’t miss out—listen now, and be sure to share this episode with your friends and colleagues who could also benefit from mastering these techniques. Together, we can all become more effective communicators.
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Transcript
5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Opening PowerPoint
Alexander: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of the Effective Statistician. Today I want to talk about presentation skills. And I think presentation skills are really, really important because not only for the presentations that you’re giving, but for all the communications that you do. This can be emails, this can be an impromptu One-minute talk at a meeting.
This can be something that you post on LinkedIn or even documents that you write. Yeah. Paper and abstract, all these things. Yeah. It is important that you learn about good presentation skills and with good presentation skills, you will be able to move the needle. We have lots of opportunities as statisticians to change the mind of decision-makers through presentations.
We do [00:01:00] presentations quite a lot. There can be kind of presentations about alternative study designs. There can be presentations about different ways to analyze the studies. There can be presentations about new technical things that are coming there. And also, of course, presentations about changes in the organization or new processes, new initiatives, all these kind of different things.
Now, let’s talk a little bit about how you can become a better presenter. And the first thing is, let PowerPoint present. Be closed. Yeah. So don’t, if you need to do a presentation, don’t directly start with PowerPoint. That is the wrong start. The best is, I think, you take just a blank piece of paper, it can be [00:02:00] electronic paper, and you think about These five questions that I will go through in this episode.
The first question is, what is the opportunity or the challenge here? And there’s always something for, from a content perspective, as well as from other, I would say, meta goals perspective. So, for example, you want to present about a new study design that you want to recommend to be implemented for your next study.
Then, of course, your goal here or your opportunity is to have an impact on this study, a positive one. However, there’s also a meta goal. What do you want in terms of the relationship [00:03:00] for you and the people you are presenting to? What kind of brand do you want to establish about yourself? What’s in it for you in this presentation?
This is a test. Also an important question that you need to ask yourself. So first, what is the opportunity, the challenge, whatsoever? And if you think like, yeah, I want to inform the audience about x, y, z, It is rarely just that. Very often you want to not just inform but you want to move the audience to something.
At least on the meta perspective there’s definitely something where you want to move the audience. So maybe you want to move the audience to have more [00:04:00] trust in you, have more understanding of your capabilities, have perceived you as part of the team, a great leader, a presenter, these kind of things. So always think about the opportunities for you and for the project or the initiative you’re talking about.
I see it again and again, even from pretty senior people. They think like, well, they’re just informed. Well, amateurs inform. Professionals move the audience. And that comes to the second question. The second question you need to ask yourself, and we still haven’t opened PowerPoint, is Who is the audience?
Who are the decision makers in the audience? If you’re presenting to a bigger group, who exactly in this bigger group matters most? And then you [00:05:00] create the presentation having this person or these persons in mind. Not for everybody, but for these people. And maybe, you know, you don’t want to convince the key decision maker, but you want to convince The right hand.
Because, you know, after the meeting, the decision maker will talk with their right hand and then the right hand will tell the decision maker what to do. Maybe it works like that. I’ve seen it again and again. It was said, I didn’t need to, you know, convince the head of XYZ. I needed to convince the right hand.
The statistician that was the most senior person in the room and where they had of xyz would always look for advice. Okay, so be clear about The decision makers, the audience. [00:06:00] And here you need to understand where do they stand on the topic. What do they know about it? What are potentially their challenges about it?
What are their constraints? What are their goals? What are their hopes? What are their fears? What are their pain points? This is what you need to know about. Yeah, so yeah, it of course is helpful to know kind of age, gender, ethnicity, all these kind of different things if you talk to a wider audience. But much more important is what is ongoing in their mind.
What are their beliefs? This is where you need to start. For example, if you want to convince someone from the regulatory team About. A new design? Are they open for innovative [00:07:00] things? Do they want to test things with the with the FDA or the email? Or are they very conservative and they want to see really proof that this has been done with other submissions and that regulators accept this kind of new new way of analyzing or designing a study?
So think about. What’s in it for them? If they act on your idea, if they follow your recommendation, and that is the next thing that you need to think about. Where do you want to move some to? So do you want to have some write a recommendation to your supervisors? Do you want to get a decision? Do you want to get specific recommendations from our leadership?
Do [00:08:00] you want to get approval for travel or approval for promotion or approval for getting money or funding or all these kind of different things? Yeah, there can be lots of lots of different things that you want the decision maker to do. And if you are not clear what you want the decision maker to act on your presentation, you will likely not achieve it.
And likely the decision makers themselves will not know what to do. So always Have that in mind. You always need to have the end in mind. One of the seven principles of highly effective people, that’s Stephen Coffey. wrote in this really really nice book about yeah called seven habits of highly effective people one is always have the end in mind so where do you want to move them was the fourth question and now the last question and this is [00:09:00] arguably the most difficult one is how do you move them so you know , what is the opportunity?
You know, who’s the audience? You know where they are now and where you wanna move them to, and now you need to understand what will actually move them. And there’s lots of, lots of research about this . There’s actually thousands of years of experience about it because by the way, presentations are not a new thing.
Also, PowerPoint is a pretty new thing kind of. Thinking from a historical perspective, presentations definitely have been around for So, we will learn, we can stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from, learn from others in terms of how we move people. And we’ll talk about this in the [00:10:00] episode next Friday.
So, if you want to become a, better presenter, then there’s one thing you absolutely need to do. You need to present more. And for this, there’s an awesome opportunity. Until mid September 2024, you can still submit an abstract for presentation or poster at the Effective Statistician Conference happening in the first half of November 2024.
This is an online conference, so no travel cost, no big budget things, all these kind of different things. You actually need, don’t need any money if you want If you are a presenter, because then you get the whole conference for free. And we have lots of very, very great keynote speakers like Sebastian Schneeweiss from Harvard and Tim Friede from the University [00:11:00] of Göttingen.
And we have lots of great workshops. And we also have various panel discussions that all will be very, very interesting. insightful and actionable for you. So submit an abstract to conference at the effective statistician. com. And there’s just a couple of things you need to think about for that. Check the details on the homepage of the effective statistician.
You’ll find the conference very easily there and then submit your abstract. And now I want to make it super easy for you. Have you presented a poster? or a presentation somewhere else and it is still relevant, then just reuse it. Yeah. By the way, it’s an online conference and your presentation, you can pre record it.So just 18 minutes, invest, and [00:12:00] you can do it at home. Super easy. You know, I think you can’t make it even more safe. You can present it at home. And that is an awesome opportunity for you Learn more about your presentation skills to invest in your presentation skills and become a better presenter. So submit your abstract now to conference@theeffectivestatistician.com.
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This group was set up to help each other to become more effective statisticians. We’ll run challenges in this group, e.g. around writing abstracts for conferences or other projects. I’ll also post into this group further content.
I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.
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