Communication
What Is, What Could Be
Establish the status quo, contrast it with what could be, and make the gap as big as possible. End on the new bliss, never a summary slide.
At the beginning of any presentation, you need to establish what is.
Founder of Duarte Inc., author of Resonate and Slide:ology
Nancy Duarte is CEO of Duarte Incorporated, which has helped create over 250,000 presentations, including Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. Her models start from empathy: the audience is the hero, and the presenter comes alongside them to help them get unstuck. The structure she returns to moves between what is and what could be, then lands on the new bliss. She uses that contrast in meetings, on phone calls and to get her husband to do weekend chores.
Lenny's Podcast 00:47 17:00 18:09 19:19 27:08 30:40 31:03
Communication
Establish the status quo, contrast it with what could be, and make the gap as big as possible. End on the new bliss, never a summary slide.
At the beginning of any presentation, you need to establish what is.
Nancy Duarte
deliberately withholds resolution, alternating what is with what could be so the audience feels the gap before it gets an answer.
Barbara Minto
says lead with the answer, then support it, which is the house style at most consulting firms and in most executive readouts.
The Sparkline (Presentation Form)
The Sparkline is a visual mapping tool that diagrams a presentation's emotional arc as it oscillates between 'what is' (current reality) and 'what could be'…
The Audience Transformation Framework
Before building any content, define the transformation you want the audience to undergo. Identify who they are when they walk in and who you want them to be when they…
S.T.A.R. Moment (Something They'll Always Remember)
A S.T.A.R. moment is a planned, significant, sincere, and enlightening moment in a presentation that creates shared meaning between the speaker and audience. It…
The audience is the hero of your presentation, not the speaker. The speaker is the mentor who guides, equips, and helps the hero navigate their journey.
Framing any presentation or communication - the fundamental paradigm shift that changes how you build content
Your Big Idea must be expressible as a single sentence that combines your point of view plus what is at stake. Every element of your presentation must reinforce this one sentence.
Defining the core message before building any slides or content
End your presentation on a higher plane than where it began. The ending must paint a vivid picture of the 'new bliss' - the transformed world after your idea is adopted.
Closing a presentation with maximum impact, leveraging the recency effect
If your audience cannot summarize your presentation in one sentence after hearing it, your Big Idea was not clear enough.
Testing whether a presentation achieved its primary communication goal
If a slide takes longer than 3 seconds to understand, it has too much on it. Simplify until glance comprehension is achieved.
Evaluating individual slide design for visual clarity
If you remove a slide or story and the Big Idea still stands, the removed element was not essential. Keep only what is load-bearing.
Editing presentations for focus and eliminating filler content
The audience is always the hero; the speaker is always the mentor.
When presenters position themselves as heroes, they create ego-driven presentations that the audience resists. When they adopt the mentor role, they create empathy and…
Presentations exist to create transformation, not to transfer information.
If the goal were merely to transfer information, a document would suffice. The unique power of a live presentation is its ability to transform beliefs, emotions, and…
Contrast is the fundamental mechanism of audience engagement.
The human brain habituates to sameness and attends to change. By creating contrast at the content level (what is vs. what could be), the emotional level (analytical vs.…