Effective Scientific Presentations: The Winning Formula

Be honest here. How many presentation messages do you remember from the last ten you heard? One? Two? I guess no more.
It is a pervasive feeling among us scientists attending a conference. We forget about most of the presentations our colleagues worked so hard to prepare and deliver. And this is, of course, true the other way around. Most scientists attending our next presentation will not remember it. So, where is all our effort in preparing and delivering a presentation gone?
When designing a delivering a presentation, most scientists focus on its content. This is why we present our science, right? We what to share what we did and what we learned from it. And this is absolutely the way to go. We attend conferences to hear and learn what other scientists are doing to learn from it. But we still say that most of the presentations delivered during a meeting or a conference are boring and non leaving a long-lasting impression on us.
Here is the truth. We spend a lot of time designing our presentations, focusing on their content. But, despite presenters’ efforts, most presentations get forgotten as soon as they are delivered. Therefore there is something wrong in the process, and we need to fix it.
The wrong bit is focusing on presentation content. It sounds absurd at first: we present and listen to presentations to deliver and learn about their content, but focusing exclusively on content is not effective. Most presentations are not effective in delivering a clear message that lasts in people’s minds because there is usually too much content, and the structure of a presentation is boring.
The solutions are simple to state but hard to put into practice. On the one hand, presenters should reduce the content to the minimum, identifying all the content bits representing noise and distracting the audience. On the other hand, presenters should structure the content of their presentations in the form of a story. A story is very easily remembered.
To find out more about designing and delivering an Effective Scientific Presentation, I crafted a short book that guides you along with a ten-step Winning Formula. It is now available on Amazon!