The future isn't a place that we're going to go, it's a place that you get to create.

All "bad" presentations struggle to keep the audience interested. The audience squirms wishing they could escape. The audience has given the presenter an hour of their life, so they want that hour to be useful. It's disrespectful of a presenter to not show up rehearsed and prepared with information and insights that will improve the lives of the audience in some way. Presenting will do only one of two things for you: it will either diminish your credibility or yield results. Most bad presentations hurt the presenter's credibility.

Spending energy to understand the audience and carefully crafting a message that resonates with them means making a commitment of time and discipline to the process.

Personal stories are the emotional glue that connects your audience to your message.

The audience does not need to tune themselves to you - you need to tune your message to fit them. Skilled presenting requires you to understand their hearts and minds and create a message to resonate with what's already there. Your audience will be significantly moved if you send a message that is tuned to their needs and desires. They might even quiver with enthusiasm and act in concert to create beautiful results.

Ideas need to stand out to be noticed. There is so much noisy information out there that if your message is bland, it won't be heard or acted upon. To avoid obscurity, you need to clash with your environment. Incorporating contrast into your presentation will help it stand out. You create contrast by using the presentation form. For example, you can state the problem, then the solution. State an opposing perspective, then your perspective. State the past, then your picture of the future. Adding the cadence of contrast will pull your idea out of obscurity.

My hope is that design thinking becomes an innovative discipline and not just the trend of the decade. As a nation and globally, we have some of the biggest problems to solve we have ever faced. We need innovative ways to solve our problems and communicating the solutions will be paramount. Original thinking, complex problem solving, and collaboration are all important skills for our future.