Your evidence is weakening your case
Readtime: 3.5 minutes
A few weeks ago a client told me about a presentation he’d given. Fifty-five minutes on something quite complex to a senior audience, with a great deal of data in it.
I’ve no doubt that the analysis was excellent.
The problem was what happened afterwards. The people in the room didn’t know what he wanted them to take from it. And when I asked him, he couldn’t explain it briefly to me.
The main messages were in there. Just buried underneath everything else.
What I used to take into the room
For 11 years I presented to boards and audit committees as the partner or director signing the accounts.
The papers I took in were long. I’d have said at the time that they were thorough, which was true. What I’d say now is that a lot of the length was for me.
If something went wrong later, I wanted to be able to point at page 31 and show that it had been considered. If someone asked a hard question, I wanted the answer already in the pack. And I didn’t just leave it in the pack. I presented a lot of it, page by page.
The thickness was a kind of insurance, and the premium was paid by the people who had to read it and then listen to me go through it.
Somewhere in the middle of those 11 years, I started saying less. I’d open with what I thought, and why, and then stop. The pack was still there, but I’d stopped walking people through it. I don’t think my opinion was taken any less seriously. If anything the opposite.
I now know what it’s like to be on the receiving end, as I’m a non-executive director on a board, and I also help senior leaders present to boards.
What too much evidence says
That’s the bit that I’d got backwards for most of those 11 years was that I’d assumed more evidence made a stronger case. But in a senior room, I think it often does the opposite.
There’s research on this that I find slightly painful to read. Kimberlee Weaver and her colleagues at Michigan asked people to design a persuasive pitch from a list of ten reasons, and 83% of them wanted to use all ten.
Then they tested it. One group of readers was shown just the strongest reason on its own. Another group was shown the full list of ten. The group that saw just one reason came away more convinced than the group that saw all of them.
Her explanation is that the person presenting adds the reasons up, but the person listening averages them. So every reason you add that’s weaker than your best one pulls the whole case down.
I think most senior audiences do a version of that averaging without knowing it. They aren’t checking your working. They’re trying to work out what you think and how sure you are.
The things that persuade a board tend to be short. Here’s what I recommend, here’s the one thing that would change my mind, here’s the risk I’m least sure about. The 20 pages behind it earn you the right to be brief in your presentation.
Why it gets harder as you go up
The instinct to explain your working is trained into most of us early, and rightly. When you’re junior, the working is the point. People need to see that you’ve done it.
The awkward part is that the habit is still there years later, when the audience has changed. You’re now presenting to people who assume you’ve done the working and want to know what you make of it. But you’re still trying to prove you did it all.
I think that’s why so many senior presentations feel like a defence rather than a recommendation. The person presenting is protecting themselves, maybe against a question that was never going to be asked. Or the detail is there for their own comfort.
So a test for the next thing you present. If the people in that room had to say, in one or two sentences, what your conclusion and main associated risk was, what would they say?
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. I run a programme for leaders on presenting to boards and senior audiences, which I’ve delivered for companies like HSBC. If that sounds like it might be helpful for you or your team, reply with “boards” and I’ll send you an outline.
P.P.S. I’ve just had a confirmed release date for my book, Outsized Leadership: How to Make a Bigger Impact with Less Effort. It’s out on 29 June 2027. If you’d like behind the scenes updates, launch bonuses and invitations to the launch events, you can join the Inner Circle here.