Pragmatic design of meetings and presentations

Abstract Designing and running good meetings and presentations is a mystery to many software engineers, including many very experienced ones. Many workshops, training courses, and books address the mechanics (overheads, speaking style, and so on), but these provide comparatively little information beyond the most basic reminders, such as “no personal insults” or “make an agenda and stick to it”. These basics do not address such difficult problems as presenting to an audience made up of people from several departments at several levels of management, handling skeptical or oppositional people, what to say to the manager whose authority is being undermined, talking to top management in language they can understand about things they care about (rather than what the programmer thinks they ought to care about), and so on. This article presents an organized and comprehensive approach to designing meetings and presentations. It discusses techniques for addressing the differing attitudes, degrees of knowledge, and concerns of the audience, and presents a step-by-step procedure for designing a presentation that considers the audience's knowledge, attitudes, and perspectives.