Tips for presenting data

- You know, you had all these conferences, you've really been able to figure out, like, I should put this person on stage about this topic, and this person, no, I'm not going to put on there. What does it take to impress Ben Lorca enough to be able to say, "Yes, I'm going to put this person "on stage to communicate this complex idea to the masses?" - What I'm looking for is, you know, the ability to explain a problem as described in the abstract, right? So there's clear takeaways, right, and then, it's not about impressing you with what they know. It's making you feel empowered to take their ideas and run with it, 'cause that's what, most people who go to conferences, at some level, want to be able to go back to their manager or to their team and say, "Hey, this is all the cool things I learned," and you know, "we should be trying this," right? So I'm looking for people who can kind of spur that kind of inspirational reaction from the attendees, right? - Yeah, it's real interesting, 'cause most of the time, it's such a good measure for people, because the company, your manager, somebody has put up a bunch of money to send you to this thing, and if you don't come back with a bunch of takeaways that are actionable, you're probably not going to get to go again. - Yeah, yeah, and then, I guess the one thing that, one of my pet peeves is when I go into a session at a conference, and let's say it's a 30-minute session, and the speaker spends 20 minutes talking about the problem, the background, and then, maybe five, 10 minutes, this is what we did. Well, you know, that's not helpful to the attendees, right? 'Cause basically, if you're in healthcare, and you spend 20 minutes telling me all of the different, you know, electronic medical records systems and things like that, all in minutiae, but then, the actual heart of the problem was just the ETL or the data processing or the data wrangling, it's like, 10 minutes long, and that's the secret sauce, I want the opposite ratio, right? So less on the background, more on the details of how you solved the problem, because that's what the attendee will take back. Right? So not every attendee is in your industry. - My personal pet peeve is when people say, "As you can see in this data," and I'm like, "What do you mean? "I can't see anything." - Here's the kind of a secret to our listeners, right, so when you create a talk, the first thing you do is the last slide, or the last three slides. Here are the three takeaways and then you go back and create your talk. 'Cause basically, what you want to be able to do is tell people maybe three things that they really need to know at the end of this talk, and then, you know, you structure your talk accordingly, and then at the end, you summarize it, that these are the three things. I think people underestimate how powerful this simple formula is, because basically, at the end of the talk, people will (snaps fingers) you know, realize, (snaps fingers) "Oh yeah! "That's exactly what we need," or "That's a great point." - Yeah, you want them to almost pull out their phone and take a picture- - Yeah, exactly. - Of that slide, so they can share it. - And now, the details of how you do that is a combination of some stories and data, right? 'Cause people, as you know, DJ, people remember stories more than they remember standard deviations or percentage differences, right. So pepper it with some stories and data along the way, if you can, and then, root it in a real-world example, ideally, 'cause people really relate.