Want to make fabulous presentations that are clearer and more compelling for non-technical audiences?

Here’s 1 unexpected skill that can help…

It’s quite a challenge to present an idea to an audience in a way that helps them understand it and buy in.

When you present technical topics to audiences with mixed levels of technical expertise, that challenge becomes even greater.

So much can be lost in translation, particularly when our audience’s brains are busy places and when they aren’t as familiar with the material as we are. Those barriers can make it tough to keep them engaged, land key messages, and move their hearts and minds.

My Aspire colleagues and I think about this challenge often. Every day in the training room we need to help our participants quickly learn complex concepts from psychology, leadership, strategic thinking and more. In a training setting it’s essential that we help people internalise those ideas fast enough to practice them in the room and see how they apply to their own work situations.

Happy to report that we’re already quite effective at this based on what we hear from our participants during and after our sessions together. 🙂

Even so, we had the good fortune recently as a team to add another powerful communication tool to our toolkit. It opened up a whole new channel for clearly and creatively getting ideas across to our participants.

The skill?

Visual facilitation

In a nutshell it involves graphically representing information primarily using symbols and metaphor. And it doesn’t require being a gifted artist.

Within the space of a 1.5-hour workshop we learned a few key lines, clever techniques, and borrowed from existing templates to help shape our ideas. From there we surprised ourselves with how well we could express ideas in clear, colourful and refreshing imagery.

Fabulous Presentations

We’ve noticed the difference in the training room already. It’s enhancing the quality of communication by depicting concepts visually instead of relying on verbal information transfer alone.

As an important bonus, it adds a unique kind of delight to the presentation and brightens the atmosphere for everyone in the room.

We’re loving seeing people’s faces light up when we reveal bright, crisp, colourful designs within the space of a few minutes. Here’s an example of the ideas we are using:

If you need to articulate complex technical ideas to non-technical audiences, remember that a visual can be worth a thousand words.

Curious to check it out and grab a few quick ideas for your next fabulous technical presentation?

Have a look at the books Bikablo and Uzmo

And reach out to our good friend Stephen Cornes for a great team building experience learning Visual Facilitation. Can’t recommend him highly enough!