Takeaways

Before you give a presentation, write a document, or compose an email, you must first identify the most important points that you want your audience to understand and remember. These most-important points are called Takeaways.

Imagine you are presenting a report on the status of a project. There is a lot of information that you could include. You could list which items are complete, which are still in progress, how many people are assigned, the time allocation of each person, the budget burn-rate, or any number of other points of potential interest. While all this information is relevant in a thorough project status update, you must decide which points are the most critical for your audience to understand and remember.

For just about any project status update, there are only a few key points that are essential, and if you do not communicate them, you will not have clearly communicated the status of the project. For most projects, the key points that people care most about are: Are we on schedule, when will we be done, and are there any risks that could prevent delivering on time?

Once you understand what the key points are that you want your audience to understand and remember, you then build your presentation, document, or email around these points. If you are presenting to a single person or a group, you should make sure these points are stated simply, and repeated if necessary. When writing, each of your takeaways should be captured in a short list of bullet points, and referenced throughout the document or email.

To present the key points of a project that is going well, you might say the following: Are we on schedule? Yes. When will we be done? July 31^st. Are there any risks to delivering on time? No.

For a project that is going badly, you might say: Are we on schedule? No. When will we be done? Late summer to early fall. Are there any risks to delivering on time? Yes - staff turnover and changing customer requirements.

No matter what else is said for the remainder of the presentation, these takeaways are the most important points that your audience must understand and remember.

Even if you give a brilliant, thorough, in-depth, comprehensive, and compelling project status update, if your audience doesn't remember if the project is on schedule, when it will be done, or if there are risks to delivering on time, you have failed to clearly communicate the most important points about the project.

Communication can be thought of in terms of a ratio of signal to noise: The 'signal' is the key takeaways the audience will remember, the 'noise' is everything else. No matter what else happens, the signal of the key takeaways must never be drowned out by the noise - especially if that noise is nothing more than filler content whose only purpose is to increase the length of a presentation, document, or email.

As much as possible, information must be removed so that the audience is not distracted away from the key takeaways or left confused about what the key points actually were.

Of all the types of irrelevant noise that can be added to a presentation, the worst results from irrelevant tangents. A tangent is anything that redirects the flow of information away from the key points.

When presenting project status, a tangent would be: describing a recent team building exercise, calling out birthdays for the month, or showing appreciation for outstanding team members. All of these may be important internally to the project team but are irrelevant tangents when communicating project status to people external to the project.

Ultimately, critical takeaways such as: is the project on schedule, when will the project be done, and are there any risks to the project being delivered on time; are harder to remember when diluted by: who scored the highest on the monthly ping-pong tournament, who won the award for funniest socks, or which low-calorie snacks are now available in the break room.

The more information we jam into a presentation, the less important any other single piece of information will be.

For example, if your presentation, document, or email has three important points you want to make, but you include a bunch of other less important information, those three points will be difficult for your audience to identify. A more effective approach would be to not include the less-important information, and to instead focus on only the top-3 takeaways that you want your audience to understand and remember.

When focusing on takeaways, we all have a tendency to try to make points using hard data and statistics. The problem is that while hard numeric facts are extremely accurate, they can be very difficult to remember.

Consider how we might present a quarterly sales update. Conventional wisdom would say that numbers should be the key takeaways, with percentage growth across products being preferable to a general description.

However, which of these do you find easier to remember: Toy sales increased 5.68%, or we had a slight increase in toy sales; Clothing sales decreased 52.34%, or we are selling half of the clothes we sold last quarter; Electronics sales are 107.98% over projected targets, or we are selling twice the amount of electronics we expected?

Slightly, half, and twice are not accurate enough to plug into a spreadsheet to calculate profit and loss, but when we are prioritizing an audience comprehending and retaining the key takeaways, we must make it as easy as possible for people to understand and remember what we are saying. After a presentation, while people are discussing the presented information among themselves, they won't be saying, "Can you believe we are 107.98% over our sales projection," they will instead say, "Can you believe we are selling twice what we expected to sell?"

Communication is far less about precision and accuracy than it is about comprehension and retention. To be effective communicators, therefore, we should focus on takeaways that our audience will actually understand and remember, rather than present a bunch of data and hope that something sticks.