Olivia

There’s also a point to be made here about about classical story structure. Shakespeare (building on the Greek tradition of ‘chorus’ etc.) Uses the prologue in his plays to do a number of things.

1- quieten the crowd and get them hooked from the start
2- tells them what he wants them to do to get the most out of the play
3- tempt them with tasty morsels from the story…

if they ‘do with patient ears attend’ the ’2-hours traffic of our stage’. But he doesn’t give the plot away, just the core theme.

In Romeo and Juliet, he promises the (hungry, diseased, drunk, depressed and oppressed) people who would have been in his audience in the 1500′s, rich Italians (how exotic), hatred, sex (always a winner) , murder, suicide (a crime against God) and a happy ending (of sorts) in the first 45 seconds. Then he tells the audience to be patient, and promises them that all will be clear by the end.

It’s pure salesmanship. And half-way between giving the conclusion at the beginning, and leaving it ’til the end.

And at the very bitter end he nails them with the epilogue. He tells them that they must go away and talk about what they’ve seen, and tells them that they’ve never heard such a story before!

It’s brilliant, but you can only do it in real life if you’re confident that you have a strong story. But when you do, and you do it, it’s amazing the effect it has on even the most cynical, senior and jaded crowd.

Jim

My caveat would be to only do this when you have good reason (not just an unfounded assumption) to predict that an audience will resist to the point of shutting off.

In other situations, starting with your conclusion will surface some disagreements but this won’t be fatal to your case. Rather surfacing the disagreements allows you to be address them in a straightforward manner. In sales, this is the idea that it’s good for the customer to raise objections, so that you can address them.
Olivia

In my workshops with business managers I teach them to lead with the conclusion and then unpack the data that supports that conclusion. This is based on personal experience as well as writers like Barbara Minto, John Medina and others. Here’s a further explanation of this principle: http://www.speakingppt.com/1-answer-first/

The exception is when you expect the audience to disagree with your conclusion. In that case, putting it first may cause debate before you even have a chance to develop the rest of your argument. An example: I produced a report for a company that believed software piracy was their biggest challenge with one customer segment. But this was based on misinterpeting some key data. In meetings when I tried to correct people, there was a strong emotional resistance to hearing my counter-argument. So in my presentation I started with “Piracy: what does the data say?”. People were more willing to assess the data when it didn’t challenge their preconceived notions.