Imagine your best friend calling you up one summer evening and launching into a long speech that begins something like this:

“The temperature outside right now is 70° C., or 21°F. The weather people estimate that the maximum variation during the next 12 hours will be around 7%. The UV Index is 4 Moderate. The wind is blowing from the west at 1.5 m.p.h. Dew Point is 55°F, or 13°C. Visibility is 4.3 miles…”

Only after this lengthy meteorological and statistical excursus does she arrive at the punch line: “Want to join me for a stroll in the park?”

Sounds a lot like putting the cart before the horse doesn’t it? (Not to mention longwindedness of the “cart” itself.)

Yet top business people are using this back-to-front style of communication far too often, according to Roly Grimshaw, a London-based consultant. This is especially the case when they are presenting a proposal to colleagues or superiors in the boardroom, reporting on their company’s progress to shareholders or other interested parties, and other similar occasions.

And one can only wonder how often it happens when a salesperson is making an important pitch to a highly desirable potential client.

By way of proving his point, Grimshaw describes an event that he happened to attend: the annual results presentation of a major international company. The chief financial officer had started off by saying: “I’m going to go through the numbers and then hand [them] over to the chief executive.” He was true to his word. Painfully so.

The CFO spent the next half-hour taking the audience through two or three dozen slides, each dense with numbers. Then he handed the presentation over to the chief executive, who painstakingly ploughed through a review of the previous year, division by division, slide by slide. By conventional standards, the performers performed very well. They had plenty to say, their diction was clear, and they delivered in a nice professional and methodical style with no “ums” or “ers”.

But when question time finally arrived, it became clear that the audience hadn’t listened to either speaker! Not one of the questions related to anything in their presentations. Apparently, not a soul in the target audience had “got it”!

Why not?

Both presenters had given the audience a wealth of evidence. But evidence of what? What were they trying to prove, exactly?

After each section of the presentation was over, members of the audience sighed and asked each other “So what?” When some of them sat down afterwards to compare what they had gleaned from the talks, they couldn’t even agree on what they key points had been.

All this, of course, underscores the need for a strong opening statement that will capture the audience’s attention and set the tone for the “meat” of the presentation that is about to follow. Grimshaw gives the illustration of an imaginary division head who is introducing a presentation to his marketing and sales team:

“Thank you for coming here this afternoon. I’m afraid the news isn’t particularly good – our performance this quarter was weaker than expected. The numbers I’m going to put before you say one thing loud and clear: We need to redouble our efforts to identify and serve our clients’ needs.”

We often talk of the “magic of numbers”. Many of us – and not only accountants and statisticians – love to juggle figures around. We enjoy playing with facts and sharing all kinds of data.

But nothing exists in a vacuum. The smallest snippet of information is useless without a clear context.

The horse really does come before the cart.