Hello, welcome to part one of the course, which is about setting the goals. Now, goals are important. What's the big deal with goals? Well, goal is the core of what we do. We have to set proper goals before we even begin to construct the, you know, the scenario or the script of our presentation. Form follows function, this is what they say in architecture. Before you design the building, you ask, "What is the intended use of this building?" And the same applies to presentations as well. There are, I don't know, at least two very different presentation structures and we have to decide which path are we going to follow early. Secondly, and this is the biggest thing, in my experience, most of the big-time problems with presentations could be solved by setting proper goals. I have people coming to me as a consultant with all kinds of strange goals, and my job is to make it right. My job is to help them understand what can we accomplish with this communicative act? We have to come and we have to talk for, I don't know, an hour and a half or 30 minutes. What goals can we reasonably accomplish in this 30-minute frame? Now, what are those problems with presentations that I'm talking about? The surface problem, of course, is it's boring. Right? This is what we dread as the audience as well as the speaker. This is what we're mostly afraid of, right? People falling to sleep while we talking, or this. This is a very recent picture from the conference, and this is mostly what happens. People are minding their own business, they don't pay attention to the speaker on the stage. Maybe they pay like 50 percent of their attention to the speaker on the stage. The rest goes to their Excel spreadsheets, to email, Facebook, etc. etc. So, let me give you an insight into why this really happens, because, at least as I'm concerned, this is only a surface problem, there is a much deeper core problem. And it was to me, it wasn't covered by those guys, by Stephen Kosslyn and his team. This is academicians, people from Harvard, Stanford, and University of Chicago who went around and collected, like, more than 200 interviews. They gave people a whole list of possible problems with presentations, and they asked them, "Well, what are the most irritating and the most common problems that you see in your life?" And behold, the top five problems with presentations. I will start with number five because this is the way it's more dramatic. So, problem number five: not enough information was provided to support the main point. This is usually a problem of most sales presentations that I see. The person is selling something, but he does not provide enough information to support his conclusions. Is this a problem? Well, yes. The bigger problem in my experience of course is that there is no main point whatsoever. But, well, this wasn't what the research has found. Now, we all know why that happens. There's a recent, I don't know, fad or fashion about slides with no information whatsoever. People are just, you know, talking about emotions, about, you know, storytelling, right? Too much marketing, not enough data. This is the problem with presentations at the moment. This is the reason I cannot watch Ted anymore. It's not informative enough. Right? Too many fluff, too many, too many stories. Now, problem number four: went through the presentation too slowly. This is a very common problem. We've all been there, right? Boring. And this, I would argue, that this is the precisely opposite problem to the problem number five. Too little information, too much information. People go through their presentation too slowly, they have too much to say. Problem number three – it's actually the same problem. People read from notes or from slides themselves because they have a lot of information on their slides. This is a very typical situation. I've been to seminars, to dozens of seminars like this. The guy in front is actually the speaker and he doesn't, I would say, he doesn't mind the audience. Right? He just looks at his slides and just, you know, reads them aloud and people gradually fall asleep. Problem number two: too much information on the slides to absorb before the next slide was presented. And this is precisely the same problem; people read slides because there's too much material on the slides. Everybody watches at the slide, and you have to do the same thing. All the audience's attention is there, OK, I will look at the slides as well. And problem number one is, well, if you allow me, this picture – this is the problem. The main point was obscured by too much of irrelevant detail. Do you see the pattern? Problem number five: not enough. Problem number four and number three, number two and number one: too much. This is the problem we're currently facing: presentations are boring, confusing, and unconvincing waste of time simply because we do not know where to stop. We either stop too early or we stop too far. We stop when the audience is already dead asleep. And what we need to do, we need to understand where to stop. Where do we stop? And I would argue that the only way for us to do that is to understand what is the goal that we're trying to achieve and to stop precisely where the goal is achieved. Because if we don't set the goal, we just keep informing. If we set the goal, oops, we're done, there's nothing else to do, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your attention. So, understand what is it that you're trying to achieve, what information the audience needs to make this or that decision and filter the information accordingly. This is the main thing that I want you to understand about the goals.
