What happens when you lose the audience, and how to ensure it never happens to you 

 

We live in an era of great distraction. There is more information more readily available and constantly competing for our attention, a feeling of less time to take it all in, and as a result, we are more easily distracted than ever – by David Fish

 

This creates a significant challenge when it comes to sharing and presenting to others; the danger of losing your audience’s attention. And if what you have to share is important information that you don’t want them to miss or misinterpret – this can be disastrous.  

 

Here are the three reasons you never want this to happen to you. 

 

No longer listening

The first challenge arises when the audience becomes lost in your content.  

 

As a pilot I am acutely aware of the need to plan a flight and be very precise with navigation. Getting lost is a recipe for disaster. The same is true of presentations, and to me it can be very obvious when either the presenter or the audience is lost. More often than not, within a few of minutes of this realisation, a few more slides in, the impending disaster becomes clear to all. 

 

Once the audience is lost, there is only one thing on their mind: finding their way back to where they need to be. They begin tracing their steps back to the last place that made sense to them. They scan the slides frantically to see if they can pick up something you are saying and connect it to something they can see.  

 

The issue is that all of the time this is happening, they have stopped actually listening to anything new that you are saying. They can miss key pieces of information, and even whole sections of presentations can fail to connect when the audience is no longer with you and connected to your content.  

 

Worse still, they give up trying and just tune out.  

 

Filling in the gaps

A dead cert way to lose your audience and leave them utterly confused is to start right in the thick of the detail. Building up excruciatingly slowly towards making a point and then trying to bring it all back together with a clever plot-twisting conclusion that’s worthy of a movie script is not the way to go. The presenter themselves can become a little lost with key points often fumbled or omitted altogether. 

 

Our brain is wired to create and store information in the form of a story. This has huge benefits for attracting and holding attention, as we will explore shortly. But it also has one major drawback, when there is a gap, either incomplete information or something that was simply omitted, the brain will fill in what is missing in order to store a complete story, and it does this by calling on past experiences and expectations to fill in these gaps.  

 

When those past experiences and expectations don’t align with what you are sharing, when the information is new or seeks to challenge an existing idea now, there is a real risk of misunderstanding simply by not holding the audience’s attention in order for you to control the flow of information and ensure there is no misunderstanding.  

 

Your secret code – jargon

Every organisation, even teams within companies, form their own internal language. You may have created fancy names for your tools, services or products and adopted a shorthand of TLAs (three-letter acronyms) that rattle off the tongue with ease and often at great speed. It is like your own secret internal code.  

 

However, when this internal code creeps into your content, you risk confusing your audience and losing them in the first five minutes and for them never to connect to a single word you say after that. You know this secret code, but to them you might as well be presenting in a foreign language because they have no idea what is happening.  

 

So, what does it take to gain and retain your audience’s attention?

 

Make it about them, the audience  

Narratives that cause us to pay attention and the ones that are relevant to us and involve us emotionally, these are the stories that move us to action. This is what a good movie documentary does.  

 

You want to take the audience on a journey you tightly control with a narrative addressing one very important topic: how does it help shift the current reality of your audience and take them to a better place? In short, what problem are you here to solve for them? You want to take the time to understand what having this problem means to them, what the impact is, and what could be at stake if it isn’t solved.  

 

Connect emotionally  

This fundamental understanding is core not just to how your content can be crafted around a compelling story but to how to increase the audience’s emotional engagement with you from the outset. But this understanding does more than provide a nice way into your story. It is critical to how you establish the value in your ideas for your audience and how you curate the content to make this clear to them to gain and hold their attention. 

 

Dale Carnegie makes his view on this very clear in his classic book on interpersonal persuasion, How to Win Friends and Influence People: 

 

‘You are interested in what you want…the rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want. So, the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.’ 

 

Structure for attention and understanding  

When you need to do more than just inspire and entertain an audience.  When you need them to connect with your content, stay engaged, understand and be able to recall your key points easily, days and weeks later, the most effective way to do this is through storytelling.  

 

The human brain is wired to store and recall information in this way. Psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt describes the human mind as a ‘story processor, not a logic processor’.  

 

When it comes to business communication there are three critical stages to effective stories that gain attention and increase understanding.  

 

Establish why the audience should care  

 

Start by establishing the problem you are solving for them, what you know about this topic and empathise with how bad things could get if this problem isn’t resolved effectively. Make no mistake; this is much more than a setup. This is about creating a real feeling of being in it together to draw your audience in and give them a reason to connect right away and stay attentive to what is coming up.  

 

Navigate through your story 

 

The next stage is to navigate through your story, moving from problem to resolution, using organised and logical sections, each starting with the most important points and high-level concepts before diving into the detail. This helps your audience stay completely connected to both you and your content throughout.  

 

Create a resolution 

 

The final stage is the resolution. It’s hard to believe the amount of communication that still abruptly finishes with a ‘thank you’ or ‘next steps’ slide. Your audience and your story need a confident and conclusive resolution: We started here, we have seen this, and now what this means is that we have arrived at a much better place. 

 

Control the flow of the information  

Now, armed with a story structure that takes your audience on a journey that is relevant and demonstrates meaningful change for them, you want to make it as easy as possible to follow along at every stage of the story.  

 

Controlling the information flow is key. Start with the most important points in each section and on each slide – and make sure they clearly look like the most important – and then unpack what sits underneath in the most logical and obvious way possible. Layer the content using signposts at all times to keep the audience with you. 

 

Concept before detail  

It is far better to establish the concept and then clearly navigate through the detail supporting it. Dr John Medina has studied how the mind reacts to and organises information, his work suggests outlining the general idea before diving into details can deliver up to a 40% improvement in understanding.  

  

The slide headings alone should tell the story. They help you present and enable the audience to follow along. Don’t waste them on pointless content like “our approach” or “about us”. This is precious real estate and should only carry the highlights of your story.  

 

Data that doesn’t stick  

Today, there is an ever-increasing pool of data points to draw from. But little thought is given to getting those statistics to stick.   

 

Headings lead with vague phrases such as ‘Latest Data’ – rather than signposting the most impactful statistic. And without highlighting the data point or context, the audience is left searching to try and find meaning in a sea of numbers. When they return in a few days’ time, will it be clear why 1 in 3 matters, rather than questioning what is happening with the other 2 out of 3? 

 

When Chip & Dan Heath conducted research with Stanford University students for their book, Made to Stick, they found that stories were 12 times more memorable than statistics alone.  

 

Leading with why this matters, and giving meaning to the numbers, is therefore critical. This should be part of the spoken narrative and the slide’s main point, supported by connected shortcuts such as clearly highlighting relevant elements of any charts that support the point being made.  

 

The goal is to have slides that are easy to understand and impossible to misinterpret. 

 

As you introduce and unpack each new concept or idea, keep asking yourself; for someone seeing this for the first time am I: 

• making this as easy as possible for them to follow along, ensuring each point connects to the next 
• making it clear what they need to take away as the main point. 
• making it impossible to misinterpret the point, particularly when it comes to any data or statistics you are sharing. 

 

Shifting your attention to gaining theirs  

 

The issue is not how well you present; it is how you structure your narrative and your content to capture and then hold attention, to increase understanding and aid recall.  

 

Start with why this matters to them (the audience, the people giving up their time to see your content). Make it easy for them to stay connected and follow along as you unpack your content. Enable them to take what you present and become an advocate for your ideas. This is what it takes to ensure that your content consistently gets the attention it deserves. 

David Fish is a business strategist, record-breaking pilot, and author of What it Takes to Create Winning Presentations