Are you writing a fear or greed presentation?
March 17, 2011 Leave a Comment
As a PM, a large amount of my time is taken up by reading & writing powerpoint decks. Yay me!
What I have noticed though is that most of them are seemingly written with the following underlying intents in mind (consciously recognized or not):
- Show what a great job you are doing
- Show how smart you are
- Cover your ***
They typically do not tend to affect any change or motivate me to take any action. I hardly ever go: “He is so smart, I just must follow the recommendations in his deck!”
I have found that when you do you want to affect change, something else needs to be added to the mix. I think one of my old bosses put it quite well, he said: “Ask yourself one key question when creating a deck. Are you writing a Fear or Greed presentation?”
Fear is painting the audience a picture of all the bad things that are going to happen if they don’t follow the recommendations in your deck: market share will decline, good employees will leave or they will look foolish to their bosses.
Greed is based on the opposite: follow my instructions and you will get a “atta boy” from your boss, the respect of your peers, more sales, etc
It is the classic pain / pleasure principle. People want to move away from pain (fear) or work towards pleasure (greed). Pain (fear) is maybe unsurprisingly the biggest motivator…
