I work with a coalition that runs on expertise. Their meetings are built around smart people sharing important information. They are researchers, agency leads, policy folks, and the default format is almost always the same: a presentation, followed by questions, and then…discussion.
It’s a reasonable format. It’s professional. And it almost never works as well as it could.
The purpose of these meetings is to support a group of people with different knowledge, different perspectives, and different organizational stakes to take in new information and do something with it. They need to connect it to what they already know, surface where they agree and where they don’t, where they need more, and move toward analysis. Maybe a shared position. Eventually, a recommendation.
That work requires cognitive headroom, or capacity left over after the briefing to actually think. Most presentations spend it before the discussion begins.
It’s not that the presentations are bad. It’s that they’re calibrated for the wrong goal. They’re designed to be comprehensive when they need to be generative. They need to give the group just enough to think together, not everything the presenter knows.
I’ve been sitting with this problem for a while now and I don’t have it fully solved. What I have is a hypothesis, a place to practice, and a growing pile of evidence.
Curse of Knowledge
Smart, well-prepared presenters fall into a trap called the Curse of Knowledge.
Chip and Dan Heath named it in Made to Stick: “Once we know something,” the Heaths write, “we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”
The more expert you become, the harder it is to remember what it felt like not to know what you know. You present to your own understanding, not your audience’s.
And there’s something else underneath it. There’s a subtle professional pressure that I notice constantly. It’s something like: if you’re not talking, are you really working? Silence to some feels like absence of effort (especially in virtual meetings). A full deck of narrated slides feels like proof of preparation and professionalism. So we fill the space (by reading slides to people), and we accidentally crowd out the room’s ability to think.
The brain can only do one thing at a time
Two pieces of research have changed how I think about presentation design, and I now bring them up regularly with presenters I work with.
The first is what researchers call the “split attention effect.” When people have to mentally integrate two sources of information at the same time like a speaker’s voice and slide text , cognitive load spikes. The brain isn’t multitasking, it’s *thrashing. Richard Mayer’s related “redundancy effect” makes this even more concrete: when you read text aloud that people can also see on the screen, comprehension goes down, not up. You’re forcing the brain to process the same information through two channels simultaneously, and they compete with each other. The fix is simple — either talk through a visual, or give people text to read and then be quiet while they do it. Not both at once.
*In computing, thrashing happens when a system runs out of memory and spends all its resources managing the overflow rather than doing actual work. The processor looks busy. Nothing gets done.
The second is about working memory. George Miller’s 1956 paper proposed we could hold about seven chunks of new information in short-term memory. He framed it as a rough estimate, not a precise limit. Nelson Cowan’s more recent research revised that down to somewhere between three and five chunks, and when people can’t use their inner rehearsal voice to keep things circulating, it drops closer to three. Either way, it’s nowhere near twenty. Most presentations I see are built around many more than 7.
You know that voice in your head that repeats a phone number over and over until you can write it down? It’s called the inner rehearsal voice, and we need it to process presentations. Here’s the part that gets me: the very act of listening to someone talk occupies the inner rehearsal voice that would otherwise help things stick. When someone is talking while you’re also reading their slides, that inner voice gets pulled in two directions at once and struggles to hold anything. People in a meeting can’t simultaneously follow what’s being said and mentally rehearse what they heard three slides ago. The cognitive deck is stacked against retention.
What I do instead
Here’s the thing about being the facilitator in this situation: I can’t pipe up during a presentation someone has prepared and stop them, and tell them to do it differently. That’s a professional bridge-burning exercise I’m not willing to do.
What I can do is work upstream and try to change a few things about how information enters the room.
When I’m the one presenting I use what I call a read-along deck. I share my slides and tell people which one I’m on: “I’m on slide four — navigate there and I’ll stay silent while you read. I’ll read your faces to see if you are done” Fast readers roll. People who need more time take it. Nobody is forced through the same cognitive bottleneck at the same pace. And because I’m not talking while people are reading, I’m not creating split attention — the two channels stay separate. This means it’s quiet. Silent, actually. In fact, naming silence like “lets keep silence while we all wrap our heads around this information” is the exact phrasing I use. And, silent time in meetings may be something we aren’t expecting.
When I’m working with other presenters, I go upstream before the meeting. If I have the relationship and the access, I’ll interview them: what do you most want the group to do with this information? Not what do you want them to know, what do you want them to do? That question alone can reshape what they choose to show.
I’ve been experimenting with infographics as an alternative to dense slide decks. I’ve been encouraging people to chunk presentations into 12-15 minute segments rather than 45-minute presentations. I love a fishbowl/interview that covers key topics in a conversational way. I send materials ahead when I can. And I’ve started planting specific questions I want people to listen for, or something I ask them to notice as the presentation unfolds. It gives the brain a job to go find something.
When someone cedes the plenary after presenting with “any questions?” and there’s that wide, unstructured silence. I’ll step in and redirect: “Let’s stick to our plan and get into small groups to process together.” Or I’ll ask the presenter directly: “Is there a specific question you’d like the group to wrestle with?” That move alone changes the entire texture of what follows.
The breakout room as information transfer exercise
One thing I’ve started doing that I’m genuinely excited about: I use the first breakout as a place to process the information from the presentation (Impromptu Networking or 1-2-4-ALL works just fine)
“We’re going to use this first breakout as simply an information transfer exercise.” And then I explain, briefly and casually, why.
During a presentation it’s hard to capture and encode it all so we give your brain some space to work.
The first thing that happens in a well-designed breakout is retrieval practice. Retrieval is the act of recalling information shortly after receiving it. This is one of the most replicated findings in learning science. Being asked to recall something, even imperfectly, strengthens memory far more than re-listening to it ever could. Just saying out loud “here’s what I heard” does more cognitive work than another ten minutes of presentation.
Then something else can kick in. When people start explaining what they heard in their own words the groups start doing something really supportive: collaborative elaboration. One person remembers one thing. Someone else remembers another. A third person connects it to something from their own work. Together they construct a more complete understanding than any of them arrived with individually. They’re not just recalling the presentation, they’re already thinking with it.The brain isn’t just retrieving, it’s actively making meaning. Encoding deepens.
When people come back from that breakout, you can feel the difference. They're not faking comprehension. They're not retreating to what they already knew. They have footing.
The goal of that first breakout isn’t analysis. It’s footing. You’re trying to get everyone across the same threshold to a shared enough understanding of what they just heard that the next small group conversation can actually go somewhere.
When it works, the meeting has a shape. The first breakout builds the foundation: retrieval, collaborative elaboration, getting everyone to roughly the same place. The second breakout is where the real work happens: analysis, paradoxes, what this means for the decisions ahead. You can’t skip to the second without the first and many meeting designs try to.
This is also why I’ve stopped asking “any questions?” after a presentation. It’s not a room read. It only surfaces the people willing to admit confusion out loud. People will quietly fake comprehension, or steer toward what they already know. No many people admit they didn’t fully track a presentation in front of their peers.
“Do you feel like you have enough footing to start working with this?” is a different question. It normalizes not being fully there yet. It names what you’re actually trying to assess. And it tells you whether the room is actually ready to move forward , or if they need another pass at the info.
What a well-briefed room looks like
This is what I’m working toward, and when it happens it’s awesome.
People jump in. They’re already connecting what they heard to their own work. They remember specific things from the presentation and immediately see the implications. People have had enough cognitive headroom to actually think and now what they share is moving the inquiry forward. They start to surface paradoxes, notice patterns, ask questions that cut to the heart of what’s actually stuck in their system.
That’s the job of designing a meeting that uses an upfront briefing well. Creating the conditions where the group can do the best thinking they’ve done all week.
I’m still figuring out how to do this consistently. But I’m convinced of the underlying principle: the design of how information enters a room, and what we do immediately after can make or break a good meeting.
References
1. Curse of Knowledge Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Random House. The Heaths trace the Curse of Knowledge concept to a 1990 Stanford PhD study by Elizabeth Newton on “tappers and listeners.” The book’s introduction is available at heathbrothers.com.
2. Split Attention Effect & Redundancy Effect Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (1998). A split-attention effect in multimedia learning: Evidence for dual processing systems in working memory. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 312–320. This is the foundational paper. Available via ResearchGate: researchgate.net/publication/232595376
Mayer’s broader framework is laid out in: Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia Learning. Cambridge University Press.
3. Working Memory Capacity Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.
Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114. Available at: cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/44023F1147D4A1D44BDC0AD226838496
4. Phonological Loop / Inner Rehearsal Voice Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. (1974). Working memory. In G. Bower (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol. 8). Academic Press. This is the original working memory model paper that named the phonological loop.
5. Retrieval Practice / Testing Effect Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(3), 181–210. Available at: psychnet.wustl.edu/memory/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Roediger-Karpicke-2006_PPS.pdf
6. Collaborative Elaboration This draws on two traditions: Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of learning (Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society. Harvard University Press) and the collaborative memory research tradition. For a recent review: Rajaram, S., Greeley, A., & Pena, A. (2024). Collaborative memory: A selective review. Available at: rajarammemorylab.com
Thanks for this great post. As a former teacher in traditional learning institutions, I often feel obligated to download all that I know to those I “teach.” I’m working to break with this practice and trust the group to collectively create the knowledge, and ask the questions we may not be able to answer in the moment. Collective understanding and inquiry feels powerful.
I also appreciate the “science” that supports less is more, and allowing space to process those five to seven tasty bits of knowledge.
Yes, and I don’t ask, ‘do you have any questions’ but rather “what questions do you have”? The assumption that people have questions works to generate an understanding. “Do you have any” tends to shut people down”.
Another great source for generative decision making is @samslade . She wrote Going Horizontal which describes generative decision making.
I do appreciate what you are talking about with giving space to think. I’m going to incorporate these ideas into my generative meetings!