Business Models Inc.

Are your presentations boring and predictable?

October 30, 2011 | Erik van der Pluijm

A big presentation…

After weeks of hard work, you and your team have finally finished designing an exciting new Business Model for your organization. Now the time has come to present it to others and gain support to start realising your vision, making it into reality. How are you going to achieve this? How are you going to make sure the members of the management team congratulate you after the presentation with big smiles on their faces?

What excites your audience?

Convincing other people works best by telling a story. When I help to turn a Business Model idea into a story, I always try to go beyond the ideas and facts, beyond the Business Model Canvas. The important question for me is to understand what it is in the model that will win the audience over. What will excite them about it? Once I have an idea about that, it is time to build the story.

And when you build the story, remember that the order in which the elements of your story are presented is both very important and flexible. It may seem straightforward to tell it in a strict chronological order, or to focus on the most important facts first, but will that excite your audience? Are they content to sit through facts or events that they cannot place in a big picture yet? Let’s look at how other stories keep people interested.

The Usual Suspects?

One of my favorite movies is “The Usual Suspects“. I like it so much because, amongst other things, it uses a special structure to organize the events in the story. The storyline starts right before the chronological end of the action, and then proceeds to show what has happened before as a flashback, and finally concludes the action with a really surprising ending! It is not chronological. Another, more extreme example of this can be seen in “Memento“. Great cinematic trailers also use special structures, presenting elements of the story in a special way. They reveal just enough to make the audience curious and excited to see the entire movie.

Now, back to your story…

When presenting your Business Model ideas you can borrow some of these ideas. What would happen if you would change the order in which you tell your story? Or if you tease the audience a little first, showing just enough to excite them?

For example, in a presentation about a new business model, you could start by presenting the ideal world first. Make your audience think “That sounds great! How do we get there from here? Tell me more!” before presenting the rest of your plan.

Or, when presenting an important project that finally starts to show positive results, start by reliving a point in the project where nobody believed that it would ever be a success. Then show how well it is doing now. Make people really feel how hard it was to get this project up and running!

Instead of a predictable, boring presentation you give the audience something unexpected and exciting. Now that should make any management team smile!