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Over the last few months, I’ve written about presenting data honestly on slides as well as fitting your narrative to the data you have rather than vice versa. Integrity is the point here. Every time we erode our own integrity as presenters, we create an impression of dishonesty (or at least incompetence), and we damage our own potential to positively connect with the members of our audiences. We hurt ourselves when our audience discovers that we – intentionally or otherwise – have been presenting factually inaccurate material.

For example, a presenter I saw a few years ago (of whom I’ve written before) was speaking on the advances of technology, and he was using the iPod as an example. Not only did he get the year the iPod was introduced incorrect, but he also had prices and capacities mismatched. This was a professional presenter who was hired as a consultant, but I had a hard time taking his other facts and statistics seriously  – some of which I later discovered were also incorrect – after seeing mistakes that could have been remedied with a simple Wikipedia search.

This issue hit a little closer to home when I was watching some colleagues give a talk about institutional racism earlier this year, and they were using print advertisements to prove their point. One ad they included in their talk was this one:

Yikes.

There is one problem: the image is a fake – and not the only one in the presentation. Proctor & Gamble never marketed the now-vanished Dash detergent this way. Yes, the image illustrates racism, but it does not illustrate any form of institutional racism. Rather, it illustrates racism as used in parody – a completely different topic and debate.

Close colleagues may be pretty understanding of comparable slip-ups, but imagine you are pitching an idea, presenting to a larger audience, or representing your organization at a trade show or national conference. Such mistakes are not only embarrassing but they undermine the very message or product you are trying to pitch. Fact-checking has become easier thanks to the Internet. We shouldn’t let our presentation quality suffer because we get fooled by a fake image or we don’t know how much an iPod costs.

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