\u201cThe single most important thing you can do to dramatically improve your presentations is to have a story to tell before you work on your PowerPoint file.\u201d <\/p>\n
Cliff Atkinson, Beyond Bullet Points <\/p>\n
This slideshare focuses on four steps you can take to build your story and tell it in a way that encourages your audience to connect their thinking with yours and so increase your chances of delivering an influential presentation. <\/p>\n
The four steps are:
\n1 Consider the situation \u2013 who are your audience? What do they know? What are they expecting? What is the context of your presentation, what else does it connect with?
\n2 Establish the substance of your message. Can you distil it down to the one (or two) main ideas you want to leave people working with?
\n3 Put your message into a three act story so you have an engaging structure – a beginning that sets the scene; a middle that highlights a dramatic conflict and an ending that resolves the conflict.
\n4 When you have worked through the first three steps you can sort your slides \u2013 the bit of the presentation iceberg that shows above the surface. <\/p>\n