Give away the ending

22 May

Why burying your conclusion is costing you more than you think,

A smart and very capable person stands up in front of a room to give a presentation they’ve clearly put a lot of work into.

They start at their story where most do, at the very beginning. Laying out the context. Explaining the problem and the methodology that’s been applied. Going through the options considered in detail. Explaining the risks and the various considerations that need to be made.

Your mind is starting to wander off. Either because you are not really sure where they’re heading with all of this. Or, because you can see exactly where they’re heading and you’re frustrated that it’s taking them so long to get there.

The information itself is probably fine. The thinking is more than likely rock solid. But the way the story is unfolding is too hard to follow, too detailed, too long, too disconnected or some combination of all. Either way, it’s just not that compelling.

I’ve watched this happen in boardrooms, briefings, strategy sessions, and project meetings more times than I can count. And I’ve done it myself, more than I’d like to admit. There’s something seductive about building up to a conclusion. It feels like you’re bringing people on the journey with you, showing your working, before revealing the winning answer. The problem is the audience rarely experience it that way. What they experience is generally confusion followed by impatience, then a kind of resigned tolerance until you get to the point (if they’re still with you at the end).

Why we bury the ending

The instinct to build up to a conclusion makes a certain emotional logic. If I lead with my answer and I get push back, I’ve lost my opportunity before laying out my full argument.

To hedge against this, we are compelled to lay all the groundwork and give the full picture before making our point, often hoping the logic carries our audience to the same place we arrived.

There’s another thing going on too, which is a little uncomfortable: some of us have learned to associate complexity with credibility. If it looks hard, surely people will appreciate how hard we’ve worked. If we keep a little mystery in the method, maybe we’ll seem more rigorous. Giving the ending away can feel a bit like showing up to a magic show and announcing how the tricks work. Where’s the magic in that?

But that instinct can misfire. The people you’re communicating with are not waiting patiently for you to reveal brilliance. They are probably carrying about fourteen other things in their heads simultaneously. They are doing their own quick read of the room, skimming the paper while you’re talking, trying to work out what they’re going to be asked to do as a result of all this. They are busy humans who need to know where you’re going so they can decide how much attention to give it.

When you bury the ending, you make them do the work. They start drawing their own conclusions from the fragments you’re laying out, which may or may not resemble your intent. By the time you get to your actual point, they’re confused and/or frustrated.

Providing clear orientation for your audience is not condescension. When someone’s carrying a full cognitive load and you give them a map at the start of the conversation, you’re not dumbing things down, you’re making it easier for them to follow your thinking and engage with it well. The alternative, where they spend the first half of your meeting trying to work out what you need from them, wastes their attention and yours.

Clarity as a form of respect

When you do the work of getting to your point clearly and early, what you’re really communicating is that you’ve thought hard about what your audience needs from this interaction. You’ve done the synthesis so they don’t have to. You’ve made it possible for them to engage with your thinking rather than just trying to decode it.

In environments where complexity is the norm and cognitive load is high, the people who consistently orient others quickly are the people who earn influence. Because they’ve made clear and accessible communication the foundation of their engagement style.

Synthesising — turning chaos into coherence, making the mess make sense for others — is often misread as the tidy-up work (the “comms”) at the end of the real work. But the ability to take something genuinely complex and render it clearly, without losing the nuance that matters, is often the most important work, and one of the harder things to do well. It requires you to understand your material deeply enough to know what can be held back and to have the conviction to hold it back. And it requires you to care more about your audience understanding than about being seen as clever.

That’s actually the crux of it. Giving away the ending means prioritising usefulness over performance. And in my experience, that’s where the real influence lives.