Dan and Chip Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, have a new article up on Fast Company.com.  It is about making presentations and how they can be more engaging to the listener.

I think these two paragraphs sum up the article quite well.  They read….

….Great presentations are mysteries, not encyclopedia entries. An online video called “The Girl Effect” starts by recounting a list of global problems: AIDS. Hunger. Poverty. War. Then it asks, “What if there was an unexpected solution to this mess? Would you even know it if you saw it? The solution isn’t the Internet. It’s not science. It’s not government.” Curious? See, it works. (Go to girleffect.org for the answer.)

Curiosity must come before content. Imagine if the TV show Lost had begun with an announcement: “They’re all dead people, and the island is Purgatory. Over the next four seasons, we’ll unpack how they got there. At the end, we’ll take questions.” We’ve all had the experience of being in the audience as a presenter clicks to a slide with eight bullet points. As he starts discussing the first one, we read all eight. Now we’re bored. He’s lost us. But what if there had been eight questions instead? We’d want to stay tuned for the answers.  (Source and the rest of the helpful story.)

So not only do stories stick, but so do questions.  So I ask you….what are you going to do tomorrow morning?