If you prefer video content over text, I explain this material with fun, musical examples in my YouTube video.
Conventional advice for presentation: the conclusion should summarize everything you said.
No. The conclusion needs to go one step further to truly inspire action.
In this article, I break down the ingredients for a memorable conclusion:
What Not To Do
Malcolm Gladwell is a famous author, well-known for explaining why crime fell in New York in the 1990s.
In his TED talk Malcolm goes on to analyze his old argument and explain its shortcomings:
- It was a theory, but he presented it as truth
- That “truth” led to controversial policies like stop and frisk
To conclude the talk, Malcolm could have said a sentence like this:
“The great desire of any writer is to write a book for the ages, that will forever explain the way things are. But that’s not possible. Writers need to be held to a higher standard”
A nice recap of everything that came before, yes. But it’s missing a final spark that makes the audience go: “That was a fantastic talk”.
What To Do
Check out how Malcolm Gladwell actually concludes his TED talk:
Malcolm’s ending proceeds through these beats:
“The great desire of any writer is to write a book for the ages, that will forever explain the way things are. But that’s not possible. Writers need to be held to a higher standard. I made a mistake. And I’m sorry”
This ending is much more powerful because of dopamine, a critical chemical in the brain’s reward system.1
- Dopamine increases if you get more than you expected.
- Dopamine remains the same if your expectations are met.
- Dopamine decreases if you get less than expected.
In other words, if your conclusion just rehashes old material, you exactly meet your audience’s expectations, resulting in no new dopamine.
But, if you give them something slightly more as Malcolm did, you stimulate a final boost of dopamine that leaves them feeling satisfied.
Summary
Of course, the conclusion shouldn’t introduce anything completely new. All the meat of your presentation should have come before in the body.
What the conclusion should do is review what came before AND push it one step further: shed things in a new light, give a call to action, or reveal the small piece that brings everything together.
That leaves the audience with an understanding of what the presentation was about AND its broader implications.
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Sources
1 Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, “Dopamine reward prediction error coding”
