Information Overload
Imagine you’re at a Thanksgiving festival and a helicopter is circling above. Suddenly little slips of paper start to fall from the sky. On them are single words and small phrases. You race around furiously trying to grab as many slips of paper as you can to decipher the code.
What’s the message?
Sadly, you can’t keep up with all the fragments and you’re quickly overwhelmed. Exhausted, you give up trying to piece together the message and wander off to buy a smoked turkey leg and a cup of cider.
When you deliver a business presentation and overload your audience with information, they have the same experience as you at the Thanksgiving festival--they are left with little to hold onto and searching for the most important information to take away from your talk.
According to Psychologist and University of Texas Business Professor Arthur Markman, there are three primary reasons people fall into the trap of overloading their audiences with information:
The presenter believes that every single fact, statistic, and piece of background information is essential to the presentation;
Presenters are uncertain about their overall message and thus decide to include everything in the presentation and leave it for the audience to cypher through;
The presenter is nervous and believes that adding more information will build their confidence and credibility.
Whatever the reason for including excessive information, there’s a downside.
Specifically, the more points you have in a presentation the least likely it is that any of the points will be remembered.
We’ve long known that the first point you present is the one most likely to be remembered (a phenomenon called the primacy effect). But Professor Markman’s research reveals that when you have multiple points of information that follow, the ability for your audience to remember even the first topic diminishes with each passing point.
Presenters need to take a step back and rethink their presentations in order for their message(s) to be remembered. Here are three ways to make sure your important takeaway messages resonate:
LESS IS BEST: Instead of having 10 different agenda items, think of scaling that back to four or less. Research shows that people, at best, only remember two to four items in a presentation. If you need to have multiple meetings to present everything about your latest strategic plan, do it! The more you streamline your presentations by limiting your content areas, the more effective your presentations will be.
CONNECT THE DOTS: Information that is connected has a better chance of sticking. Professor Markman states that people remember information in chunks. He likens it to a bowl of peanuts where each peanut is a snippet of information. When all the peanuts are separate, it takes a lot more effort to collect each one from the bowl. On the other hand, if you connect the peanuts by pouring caramel over them, it doesn’t take nearly as much effort to get all the peanuts out of the bowl. Making connections between your content areas or main points is like pouring caramel over the peanuts. Your audience will retain more information if you connect the nuts.
GIVE THEM TIME TO THINK: When a speaker has a lot of information to disseminate, they have a tendency to plow through it with little time for audience reflection (a problem that is especially pervasive in virtual presentations). The tendency to blaze through information often occurs when presenters are worried they will either “bore” their audience or lose them to a more exciting distraction. Going faster, however, has the opposite effect. When the presenter starts to race through the content the audience further disengages, the speaker goes faster, and a vicious feedback loop ensues. You can break the cycle by including moments in a presentation when people have time to reflect and think. You can present questions, ask for input, silently scan the audience after a declarative statement, or simply pause between content areas. Giving your audience time to think will help them become active listeners and thus, help them retain more information.
In your next presentation don’t assail your audience with a barrage of information dropped from 500 feet. Resist the inclination to include every shred of information. Instead, compartmentalize your content into three or four main messages, find a way to connect them to one another, and give your audience time to think and reflect during your presentation. Taking these steps will ensure that your message resonates.