Organize Knowledge with a Presentation...and Build Confidence, Too!

I've been mulling over this idea for some time, as I gave this piece of advice to a former colleague.  I have personal experience with this one, so I can say that it works.

The situation: You've just started a new job.  Great place, cool people, but it's like you're drinking from a firehose.  You can't get a grip on all the information being thrown at you.  Or maybe you can, but you're not confident enough in your knowledge.  It's keeping you from realizing your full potential, from making the best decision, or the fastest decision.  Maybe it's keeping you from standing up for what you think (or know) is right.


Why is this a problem?  If you, as an individual contributor are not making the best decisions you can, you're not contributing to the bottom line of the company most effectively.  Granted, not every company is only about the bottom line, but we'll set that case aside for now. You want to be an effective (and efficient) decision-maker.  You also need to be able to stand up for your ideas.  Your company hired you to innovate and contribute, and part of that is synthesizing information and coming up with creative ideas, not just standing by and getting railroaded.  The most important thing you can do is speak up - it will either contribute something valuable, or help you learn something, or possibly both.


What can you do?  According to Ferris State University (whose source is William Glasser) there are different rates of information retention for various activities:

Reading - 10%
Hearing - 20%
Seeing - 30%
Demonstration/see and hear - 50%
Discussion Groups - 70%
Practice by Doing/ Experience Personally - 80%
Teaching Others - 95%

The single most effective action you can take to organize your knowledge, build confidence in that knowledge, and retain the information is to teach others, or deliver a presentation.  "But that's so hard!  It's so much work!" you might say (or complain...).  Note that I didn't say "Easily organize knowledge..." in the title.  Sorry folks, it just doesn't work like that.  Hopefully, though, the next section will give you some tips for effective knowledge organization and presentation preparation.

When preparing for a presentation, ask yourself the standard questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how.

Who: determine your audience.  Perhaps it's a close friend/co-worker who won't judge you so you can make mistakes without feeling self-conscious.  Perhaps it's a small audience of your peers.  Perhaps it's a wider audience including several groups of varying knowledge levels.  In any case, make sure to target your presentation appropriately.

What: what are you going to be presenting, obviously.  Decide on your topic and talking points ahead of time, and DO YOUR HOMEWORK!

When: decide when you'll present.  Give yourself time for preparation, but not so much time that you procrastinate and wait until the last minute anyways.

Where: obviously choose a place that will hold your audience.

Why: hopefully the intro gave you some ideas as to why...

How: well, keep reading...

The 10-Step Guide for Knowledge Organization and Presentation Preparation

0. Take notes.

I list this as item 0 because it really isn't part of creating the presentation, but is critical for being able to effectively capture knowledge.  Bring a piece of paper (or pad or notebook) and a pen (or pencil, etc) to EVERY meeting you go to.  Make sure you capture important pieces of information.

1. Collect notes in one place.

Comb through your notes and collect them all in one place.  If you want, you can type them into a Word document or Notepad document and save some trouble later.  You can also just physically collect the notes into one stack.  At this point, you may also want to consider writing down thoughts in your head on your topic, and adding them to the stack.

2. Study!  Re-familiarize yourself with the material.

"But I left school!  Why do I need to study?"  Because, it's critical to continue to absorb the material and make sure that you know it cold.  It will help with the next steps.

3. Create a high-level outline.

Creating an outline is going to help you identify the major points you want to get across, as well as help you make sure you don't have any gaps in what you want to present.  This will form the basis of your presentation, and can be anywhere from a few bullet points with just a couple words each, to longer sentences or paragraphs describing important information.

4. **Revise your outline into a cohesive story. **

One of my biggest pet peeves, as well as one of the most important things I can stress.  A presentation, especially for purposes of organizing your own knowledge, as well as imparting that to your audience, needs to tell a STORY.  Re-visit your outline and arrange your major points logically/cohesively/chronologically or whatever works best.  Make sure that you would be interested in your own presentation.  Remember that awesome night at the bar with your buddy telling crazy stories?  Remember all the way back to kindergarten?  It's way easier to sit through someone telling you a story, than someone shoveling information down your throat.  This is why we're having this discussion, because most likely in this new job, all the information was force-fed to you - no one gave you a nice cohesive story or framework.

5. Flesh out details.

Obviously the next step with your freshly-minted-story-telling outline - flesh out the details, add supporting information and body, etc.  This is standard stuff.

6. Pull in alternative sources.

You probably want to do some searching around to make sure that you have good information.  Whether from public sources, Wikipedia, Google, etc., or from internal sources, i.e. older presentations or documents, you can use all the help you can get to add body to your presentation.  Maybe you'll even find an old presentation on the same topic that can help you solidify a tough concept.

7. Repeat and iterate on steps 3-6.

Rinse and repeat.  Keep editing until you have your story straight, and your slides mostly done.

8. Prepare your speech/notes/talking points.

Go through each slide for your presentation and in either the "notes" pane (i.e. Powerpoint), or else in a separate document, prepare either the full text of what you want to say, or bullet points of what you want to cover.  Whichever works better for you is fine.

9. Practice!!

Also an important bullet.  Make sure you run through the presentation as many times as you can, preferably out loud.

Last Steps

I went through this a while back at my old job, when I realized I wanted more exposure, as well as public speaking experience.  I volunteered to lead a "101" Series for new hires to the company, training them on the core of our business.  It involved a 90 minute presentation each week for 4 weeks, but was a huge success, and people learned a lot and had fun (perhaps throwing the audience candy for participation helped!).

Make this concept a habit.  By continually delivering presentations, you'll make sure you know what you're talking about, and will learn you have much more confidence than you realize.  You'll become an expert, and who knows, perhaps you can even start your own training series!

Best of luck to you!  Let me know if you have questions, or if you've experienced success with this method!

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