Talking At People

The presentation was excellent in that the information was accurate, current, and complete. When she was finished, the speaker asked whether there were any questions. The subsequent silence indicated either comprehension or its absence, with no reliable way to tell which.

I’ve watched some version of this scene play out more times than I can count. I never had a clear account of why it happens until I read Maggie Chumbley’s essay, “Cognitive Headroom.”1

Her argument is that most presentations are bad in a specific way: they spend the audience’s capacity to think before the thinking is supposed to begin. She calls that capacity “cognitive headroom.”

The presentations aren’t qualitatively bad. It’s just that they’re designed to be comprehensive rather than generative. That is, they convey everything the presenter knows rather than just enough for the audience to think together.

The more expert you become, the harder it is to remember what it felt like not to know what you know. —Maggie Chumbley

In her essay, Maggie pulls together a persuasive suite of cognitive science that explains why comprehensive presentations backfire. The curse of knowledge makes experts present their own understanding rather than build the audience’s. Split-attention and redundancy effects leave minds thrashing, inhibiting comprehension. Limits to working memory and the competition between the speaker’s voice and the audience member’s inner voice play their parts, too.

Her practical fixes are subtractive.2 These include a read-along deck where she lets people read in silence before elaboration, interviewing presenters regarding what they want the audience to do, and using breakout groups to engage in information retrieval and collaborative elaboration. It’s a playbook we would do well to adopt.

Maggie says a briefing should be generative rather than comprehensive. My read is that a presentation isn’t successful because it transfers information. It is successful because it improves the group’s shared capacity to orient.

John Boyd, the creator of the OODA loop (Observe → Orient → Decide → Act), insisted that orientation is the step that matters the most. He called it the Schwerpunkt, the center of gravity, of the whole loop.3 Everything else follows from how well a person or group makes sense of where they are. A briefing is an input to orientation. The deck is not the point; what the audience can now see together is.

[Presentations] need to give the group just enough to think together, not everything the presenter knows. —Maggie Chumbley

Maggie’s “just enough to think together” isn’t just a tip. It’s the presentation’s raison d’être. The comprehensive deck fails because it conflates information delivery with improving sense-making.

Orientation is where a group interprets new signals through its existing mental models, constructs meaning, and challenges (and sometimes replaces) those mental models. It’s where groups learn. It is the work.

One person remembers one thing. Someone else remembers another. A third person connects it to something from their own work. Together, they construct a more complete understanding than any of them arrived with individually. —Maggie Chumbley

That’s why Maggie’s breakout group suggestion is so interesting. It’s not simply an information-transfer episode that helps people encode what they hear. It’s the latent cognitive diversity of a group actualized. It’s orientation in action.

What appeals to me the most about Maggie’s method is that it emphasizes subtraction. Stop reading the slides aloud. Stop talking while people read. Stop asking “any questions?” Stop trying to be comprehensive. Her recommended interventions aren’t additive. Instead, they remove interference.

In my own work, I keep circling back to Gerd Gigerenzer’s notion of ecological rationality. That is, a cognitive tool is only as good as its fit with the environment in which it’s used.4 A dense, narrated, comprehensive deck is exquisitely fit for one environment, a solitary reader who needs a reference document, and is badly mismatched to a room of people who need to orient together in the next ninety minutes. Subtraction restores the fit. You take away the tool that doesn’t fit the environment and leave it with what it needs: space.

Boyd described orientation as “rapidly constructing, challenging, and destroying mental models.” All three activities require room to think. You can’t discard an incumbent mental model while your whole working memory is occupied trying to track a forty-slide narration. The cognitive headroom Maggie seeks to protect is that requisite space.

Maggie makes a compelling case for freeing cognitive headroom. That’s a critical first step. However, a group with plenty of cognitive headroom can spend it by rehashing what it already believes. Abandoning our mental models, even in the face of persuasive evidence, can be wickedly difficult. Space and quiet aren’t enough. They don’t automatically make us brave enough to step into a new way of thinking.

My takeaway? The full deck looks like preparation. The narrated slide looks like rigor. The packed agenda looks like substance. Each can crowd out the room to think. Talking at people is the conference-room version of a chronic failing: motion and noise are mistaken for effective orientation.