Presentation Tips

3 Elements of Presentation: Plan, Design, Presentation?

I believe it was just about when I started teaching ‘Presentations’ at a college. Having my experiences in operating a professional presentation company acknowledged, I’d received an offer from a college to teach a course in Presentation for a year – 30 weeks, and I’d planned to give lectures based on delivering examples of actual projects or experiences of my own. But 30 weeks time was way too long time to deliver only my real experiences. So I started reading and analysis presentation related books and added contents from the books to my lectures along with my experiences. The three books that I’d read back then fortunately had the very similar structure or story development methods. They all had defined the major elements of business presentations as plan, design and presentation, and chosen a way to describe details on contents of each and skills step by step.

During my very first class, I said that presentations can be divided into three major parts which are plan, design and presentation, and mentioned detailed plans to teach these 3 parts step by step. And I remember a student asking me a question :

“What is the most important element among those three?”
Even after that there were some people who’d asked the same question from time to time. For certain period of time, I had dismissed by saying “All three elements are important. You can’t implement effective presentation if even on element goes wrong.” Of course my answer wasn’t wrong, but I have to admit that it wasn’t a responsible and discerning answer expected to get from a presentation expert.

Defining the key elements of presentation as plan, design and presentation is still the most common way. Not only the three presentation related books, but in most of the presentation related books that are being published these days. However, defining the particular key element of presentation as plan, design and presentation only means stereotyping by the definition of presentation preparation process orders or characteristics.

If anyone asks me the same question again – “What is the most important element among those three?”, I will definitely give a different answer.

First, prior to distinguishing the importance level of these three elements, I am going to raise a question about the current method of dividing and defining presentations first by saying, “Strictly speaking, defining the key elements of presentation as plan, design and presentation may not be appropriate. “Because one is about topics that are going to be delivered, and the rest are about method of delivering the topics.”

Planning presentation is the process of creating topics. And designs and presentation is about how you deliver the topics. Distinguishing the three elements in the same level has issues.

Secondly, I would like to say that the most important element in business presentation is ‘planning(topics)’.
If the intrinsic topics of a business presentation cannot arouse audiences’ interests or doesn’t contain what the audiences want to hear, the presentation will most likely to be failed no matter how great and refined the message delivering method is.

Of course it’s important to have skills and know-hows to deliver topics i more refined way using effective language, speech, actions, gestures and etc. In addition, mobilizing visual communications, which is more advanced way, would be very useful method in persuading audiences. However, the other two elements, design and presentation, cannot be considered as the best essential of business presentations despite the importance of delivery methods.

I have a habit of comparing business presentations to plays. In real life, business presentation are very similar to plays. Planning presentations is similar to scenarios of plays, design is similar to stage, and the presenter has similar characteristics as the actors. Even in plays similar to presentations, you can’t touch the heart of audiences if you don’t have the strong enough scenarios no matter how fancy the stage is and how well famous actors are make their appearances. Planning presentation is not visualized as strategies or plans in real presentation situations.

Plans are hidden essence. That is the power that moves presenters, center of design, and oasis that touches and moves the heart of audiences.