What: know your audience, their expecations, their knowledge base and your relationship with them.

Why: you should tailor your story, your tools, and your tone to your target audience in order to achieve an effective communication.

How: by asking around (your manager, the organiser, some importan assistant, etc.) about any detail regarding your meeting. Who is coming? What is the expected outcome? Do they know me? Is it online?

Where: presentations and docuslides mainly.

Examples:

a) if you spend 3 slides (about 10 min of your talk) describing deep maths to a customer with no technical background, two things will happen: first, they may feel dumb because they do not understand what you are talking about, and second, they will drop their attention. You can’t afford any of these…

b) If you are giving an online talk, you probably want to increase your energy and prepare some additional retorical questions to increase engagement.