You're part of a high‐performing team that has some great data‐driven results to share. After months of effort, the team's work on a major project is finished and you're ready to present the results to the senior leaders in your organization. You and the entire team are energized and excited about the upcoming presentation and spend substantial time pulling together the necessary facts and figures. Those facts and figures are impressive and leave you no doubt that what your team has found will yield massive benefits for the organization once the executives act on the findings. As you step to the front of the room, turn on your laptop, and start your data‐driven presentation for the audience, you're feeling confident and proud.

The first information presented is a list of the key milestones of the project. To make sure that you accurately summarize the milestones, you turn to read the dates and descriptions from the screen. As you discuss the project's methodology, you provide the technical details behind each phase so that the executives understand the extent of the work your team did. You don't want the presentation to appear too long, so you keep your slide count to a minimum by putting as many points as possible on each slide. As the presentation progresses, questions indicate that audience members aren't understanding the technical details, so you go over all the details again, frustrated that they don't understand such simple concepts.

In preparing the presentation, you reused many of the technical slides that were used to explain the results to the extended project team because the slides had been proven effective with that audience. You notice a few spelling and grammar errors early in the presentation but figure that nobody else will notice before you fix them. All numbers in the presentation are shown to three decimal places to reinforce the rigorous precision the team practiced, yet an audience member identifies some numbers that are not correct. You promise to update the figures before distributing the presentation.

At the end of the presentation, you summarize the facts the project team uncovered and the data that supports those facts. The executives ask questions to better understand the business and practical context of the results and how to make use of the information properly, so you promise to add more information on those topics before distributing the presentation. After asking the audience what they find most compelling about the findings, you are stunned at the lack of excitement exhibited by the executives. To help move things forward, you state that your primary recommendation is for the executives to reconvene to discuss what actions they might take based on the findings. You conclude by saying that you and the project team look forward to hearing what potential actions the executives identify and which they decide to pursue first.

After the team's months of hard work, no actions are taken, and the project is shelved. You receive feedback that the executives found the presentation hard to understand, unfocused, and boring. They certainly didn't see the potential you and your team saw. Worse, as far as the stakeholders are concerned, you and your team are now associated with an embarrassing failure of a project. Bye‐bye end‐of‐year bonus! You are baffled by this and soon leave the company to find a job at an organization with executives who will be more enlightened and appreciative of your hard work.

Unfortunately, the same pattern repeats at the new company, and every company after that, because the problem wasn't with the executives in the audience … it was with you.

There were many errors in the presentation delivery described in the preceding paragraphs. I hope you noticed many of them. If not, don't worry because this book is here to educate you on what went wrong and what to do differently. Delivering an effective data‐driven presentation to a(n) (often nontechnical) live audience isn't the same as discussing technical details with peers. Entirely different ways of organizing and presenting information are necessary to help an audience that doesn't have your expertise to do the following:

• Understand what you've found.
• Grasp the implications.
• Take action.

Delivering a live presentation is also very different from compiling a written document. You must be purposeful and diligent if you want to develop a presentation that conveys a compelling story while simultaneously avoiding myriad traps that undercut your credibility and limit your impact.

If your goal is to create and deliver effective data‐driven presentations, this book will explain how to do that!