How do we make [the story] more compelling? How do we keep people engaged?
These are questions I get from time to time about research presentations and they reveal an assumption I keep running into: that data need to be translated into good stories, and that good stories look a certain way to keep an audience engaged. That’s likely true for presentations like TED talks, where the presenter has a time allotment and fills it with their presentation. You get one shot with your audience (or maybe a few if they rewatch the talk on YubTube) and so you want to stand out. This is more of a performance, or a monologue, and that makes it different from a research presentation where dialogue with the audience matters most followed by iterative engagement with the material over time. Research presentations aren’t one-offs, or at least they shouldn’t be. The research presentation is one of several touch points during which XFN stakeholders engage with findings, insights, and potentially the raw data that informed them.
You want people raising hands, asking questions, making comments, and translating what they hear into next steps for themselves or for their team. You want them identifying places where they want more details and making connections with their work. That’s where understanding and impact happen, and for researchers those are two key outcomes.
To achieve those outcomes, I believe it’s important to lean into complexity, to dig into details, to expose tensions, to challenge assumptions, to identify divergences from pre-existing beliefs, to make space for confusion, for wrestling with challenging material, and, ultimately, to tailor the presentation to the material rather than let the format determine how to tell the story or even what story to tell. Bottom-up presentation design, not top-down. It takes more time, but it’s time well spent.
Kurt Vonnegut mapped common story shapes — the rise and fall of fortune, the obstacle overcome, the gradual climb. This is the top down approach. These models work at the structural level, and they can help organize a presentation so it has a clear beginning, middle, and end, if that’s called for.
On the other hand, they don’t force anyone to fit, say, a “square” story into a “round” story shape. Maybe I start out telling a rise and fall of fortune story with my research data… “the customer saw an uptick in subscription renewals after design change a… but this was short-lived and, starting in Q2, they saw MoM increases in the number of subscribers cancelling… why did this happen?…”)… but that’s not enough to capture the customer struggle and so I break from the shape to accommodate the story I see in the data. It’s a “the rules apply until they don’t” situation.
I wrote in a previous post about the importance of proximity in the researcher-data relationship. One thing I didn’t say in that post is that it’s exactly this relationship that can guide researchers in assembling the right story for their data given, say, the goals of the project and the needs of their cross-functional partners. Closeness to data reveals the ways to package it for consumption by an audience, and that can/should include consumption through engagement. Note that success also turns on the importance of proximity in the researcher-partner relationship. Researchers need to be close to the data and close to their XFN partners to add value to a firm.
I’m willing to say that TED-talk-style research presentations are edge cases, and that the ones researchers ought to deliver are the ones that are more about conversation and engagement, where stakeholders have opportunities to call out items of interest, ask clarifying questions, identify implications for themselves or their team, and even identify additional questions that they’d like to answer through more research. A research presentation is actually a dialogue about the data, where the presentation itself creates a shared frame of reference for discussion topics. There’s less control, less structure, in the latter. Or rather, there’s less granular structure. Talk tracks become less important in a presentation designed to facilitate a dialogue.
Here’s the reality: complexity is the value proposition. The tensions, the contradictions, the nuance in the data, that’s what stakeholders need to understand if they’re going to make informed decisions. When you reduce complexity to fit a story, you’re not making insights more accessible. You’re making them less useful and less interesting.
Product leaders need to understand how customers think and behave. They need to understand the details, which can be messy and context-dependent and full of conflict. They need to see where the data are in tension, where different segments want different things, where they need to make trade-offs… That complexity is what drives real conversation and planning and, thus, the real impact of research.
The most engaging presentations I’ve given weren’t the ones with the smoothest arcs. They were the ones that surfaced tensions people hadn’t thought about, provoked questions and conversation, and motivated continued async engagement (comments in docs, Slack thread, emails, etc.).
So, lean into complexity. That’s where the real story lives.
jordan beck, phd 