Tell Them Only One Thing

"Audience members simply don't remember much of what we hear.  We're easily sidetracked, confused, and tricked."  With this premise, Nick Morgan, writing in Harvard Business Review urges presenters to "tell them one thing, and only one thing."

"You've go to keep it simple.  Many studies show that we only remember a small percentage of what we hear — somewhere between 10 and 30 percent.

"But when you get in front of an audience, the urge to tell 'em everything you know is hard to resist.  Far too many speakers perform a data dump on their audiences at the first opportunity.  Unfortunately, we can only hold four or five ideas in our heads at one time, so as soon as you give us a list of more than five items, we're going to start forgetting as much as we hear.  Against this dismal human truth there is only one defense:  focus your presentation on a single idea.  Be ruthless.  Write that one idea down in one declarative sentence and paste it up on your computer.  Then eliminate everything, no matter how beautiful a slide it is on, that doesn't support that idea."

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