Four Presentation Lessons from Andrew Cuomo’s Daily Briefings
You have heard it, you have said it and you feel it every day—we are living in turbulent times , indoors, socially distant, and cut off from the world. Yet we as humans are resilient, and one of the ways to build resilience is learning new lessons and finding inspiration.
As a design strategist and a researcher one inspiration for me has been NY State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings. I no longer live in the tri-state area, but like thousands of others still tune in to watch his briefings every now and then. A lot has been written about his leadership during this pandemic, which is worth analyzing, but that’s for another time. What has been fascinating for me is his presentation skills — how he communicates data, highlights key points and builds a narrative. His daily briefings are nothing short of a master class in presenting data and research in a way that is both meaningful and resonates with a broad audience comprising of people from all walks of life.
Presenting research that is both honest yet engaging and builds a wider narrative than the smaller studies is a challenge most researchers and strategists struggle with. Additionally, making the data and narrative meaningful to a multidisciplinary team with varied perspectives, goals and subject matter expertise is another challenge. That is why I find Cuomo’s briefings inspiring, it has answers to many of these challenges.
Here are some key presentation lessons we can learn from Cuomo’s daily briefings.
1. Visualizing Information
Graphs, charts, images of first responders, his famous image of New Yorkers crowding outdoors are some of the ways Cuomo synthesizes and emphasizes his key points visually. Just imagine if he were to present a bullet point list of sentences. How much time would we be spending trying to read that vs listening to him and processing information?
May it be quantitative or qualitative data, synthesized articulation is key to ensuring your audience gets the narrative without getting lost in the weeds. We have all heard the adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ Think about the emergence of visual memes — one image can tell you so much.
Visualization is the most effective way to convey complex and even multiple ideas without oversimplifying. One of the reasons behind visualized information’s effectiveness is; 1) it forces synthesis and distilling down key ideas and information, 2) it communicates the relationships between multiple ideas in a coherent way, and 3) No matter what discipline and function your audience comes from, everyone understands visual representation.
In short visualization enables synthesis without oversimplification and helps overcome the barriers between functions that speak various technical languages. And don’t mistake visualization as a way to only present numerical data. Just as charts and graphs work for numerical data, similarly models, mind maps and blueprints, etc., are an effective way to synthesize qualitative data. Qualitative data is all about showing connections and relationships, visualizing these in the forms of models helps your audience understand better.
2. Verbal Visual Fluidity
One of the first things I have noticed about his briefings is synchronization of his visual and verbal presentation. It is truly impressive. He doesn’t come across as an orator or a lecturer, he comes across as a storyteller that uses visuals to aid his narrative. Neither does Cuomo uses his power point slides as a crutch, you won’t find him ‘uming’ through the slides or reading what’s on the slide word to word. By doing that he paints a picture of reality that would be incomplete if he were to rely only on verbal or visual communication alone.
Most design strategists and researchers struggle with keeping their verbal and visual presentation in sync, mostly because they are trying to do two things at once; 1) in depth report that can be distributed and read without a narration and 2) a presentation that briefs their audience with key data points and takeaways.
So, what the key takeaway? Create two different documents — one for presentation and the other for in depth reading that audience can engage in their own time. Some organizations like Amazon are famous for avoiding PPT, in that scenario, a word document or a poster can relay the same information effectively. The idea is to leave a visual footprint in your audiences’ brain while narrating the depth. The key is to see presentations as storytelling that requires synchronized visual and verbal delivery.
3. Using qualitative to enrich the quantitative
If you have seen Governor Cuomo’s briefings you know he always starts his presentation with graphs, charts, numbers and percentages, but doesn’t end there. He engages his audience by adding verbal narrative, giving deeper context, telling stories, adding images of real people — putting a face to and giving meaning to numbers.
He often using quotes from reports, his visits, meeting and conversations with other people — what we in qualitative research call field work.
Not only does that contextualized layering helps in evoking emotion, it helps in creating resonance. As we look at his visual presentation the flow moves from static numbers that don’t evoke any emotions, to stories that humanize the numerical data.
As much as numbers are considered the ultimate truth, we as humans understand and make sense of the world through stories. The key takeaway is using quantitative data as anchor point to build a narrative that creates contextualized understanding, humanizes statistics and builds resonance among the audience.
4. Metrics as drivers for decision making
As the pandemic crisis unfolded, Cuomo and his team came up with strategies to understand the situation and evaluate it. For example, having a reporting structure in place with all hospitals in order to count number of Covid patients, hospitalization and deaths. Additionally, laying out metrics that evaluated which county / areas were harder hot or recovering faster than the others, and which areas could be re-opened, removing the NY State Pause.
Having a metric to evaluate where each county stands has been important for governor to continue with his NY State Pause orders. It provided transparency to the decision and might be one of the reasons for why a majority of New Yorkers agree with his directives.
Having metrics in place gives a clear indication of what’s lacking where. It helps communicate why certain decisions need to be made and why those decisions, however unpopular or difficult, are crucial. We can apply the same metric based approach for making tough decisions in terms of design and development of products, services and systems. For product-service experience these metrics can be anything from SUS (system usability scale) to PSC (product satisfaction scale) or CES (customer effort scale). Having metrics in place provides transparency and affords scaffolding for crucial and difficult decisions. Your stakeholders are more likely to cooperate even on unpopular recommendations if they are fully aware of the reasoning behind them.
Lastly, beyond the presentation itself, the demeanor of the presenter has an immense effect on the audience and on the effectiveness of the message. During his briefings Cuomo displays clam, he is neither hurried nor dramatic, and takes his time to narrate the point, inspiring confidence. The key is to find your own calm and confident presentation style, one that compliments and boosts the clarity of the message.
