One of the biggest challenges in any business presentation is making your message compelling enough that the audience are driven to listen to your arguments and proposed solutions.
That challenge can feel almost insurmountable if you are selling the solution to a less than everyday risk that the audience may consider remote. This is true even if the impact of that event actually happening could be potentially devastating to the individual or their business.
A good example of this problem can be found in this (non-business) related headline from the Sky News website in February this year:
Now this is unarguably a very strong headline that genuinely compels the Sky News audience to open that item and discover just how imminent the possible destruction of the earth and all the life on it might be.
The answer was (happily) reassuringly remote, as this passage set out early in the article;
“Latest calculations have shown a 3.1% chance of the space rock making impact in just under eight years”
A comparison with National Lottery winning odds was attempted yet made little sense in the context given and, if anything, confused the reader.
The net result is that this very important story – including a genuine if rather small risk to humanity and the planet itself – probably failed to hold the attention of the reader.
So how could Sky have delivered the detail of this important story more compellingly?
Having already mixed probability and odds in the item, the website failed to maximise the analogy to aid understanding.
Whereas a good writer or presenter would perhaps change the context of the facts to fit something more tangible and “real” to their intended audience.
Now a 3% risk of this asteroid hitting earth sounds - and is - rather remote. Yet surely this risk remains well within the parameters of one that we need to take seriously and which requires some forward planning and precautions?
So how to make the audience sit up and listen?
In the case of the asteroid story, we could perhaps use sports betting as our useful comparator. Whilst betting odds should not be considered an accurate measure of probability, they nevertheless provide a more familiar way of visualising more remote possibilities.
In the case of this asteroid hitting earth the presenter could encourage the audience to think of the 3% chance of impact as something akin to a sporting bet of, say, 33 to 1. Such a bet would usually be considered a guaranteed loser. Yet a quick look at the history books will provide plenty of examples of such wild outside bets becoming winning reality.
Indeed, in the last decade alone we have seen three great examples:
Or, if you must make comparisons with the national lottery, you could point out that there were no less than 383 new millionaires created by the lottery in 2024 alone. Each one overcame odds of something like 7.5 million to 1 to win their prize.
It should be noted that despite the above barrage of ancillary statistics nothing has actually changed from the original asteroid headline and probability of impact. It remains the case that there is just a 3% chance of the asteroid hitting the earth.
Yet by using more familiar examples the presenter has completely moved the context and probability in the minds of the audience. That same risk now feels both potentially possible and far more real than at the start of the presentation. Accordingly, the audience will now be more engaged with whatever solutions or mitigations can be advanced in your presentation.
Such simple analogies may or may not be entirely mathematically accurate (see this link for a more thorough view of chance vs probability vs odds), but nevertheless serve a very useful purpose in focusing the attention of the audience and advancing your opportunities for a business conversation.
In simple terms they have shortened the presentation odds in your favour.