Hello Reader,
Broadway director Michael Blakemore once said: "When the curtain goes up, the audience is in trouble." He was talking about theater, but it's the line I think of every time I watch a presentation go sideways.
The cast has been in rehearsal for months — every nuance of the show is in their bones. The audience walked in five minutes ago with none of that, and the show has maybe thirty seconds to start bringing them in. Theater has always known this. Most presenters don't think of themselves as being in the same situation — they figure their audience shares their context, that everyone was in the prior meetings and knows the subject. But nobody in that room has been living inside the material the way the presenter has. The audience is always walking in with less than the presenter thinks.
The reason this keeps happening even to smart, well-prepared people is a genuine blind spot: the more you know something, the harder it is to recover what it felt like not to know it. Researchers call it the curse of knowledge. You skip context because it doesn't occur to you there is anything to skip. And even for the experts in the room, a little context isn't overhead. It's signal: it tells them what you're choosing to focus on and where you stand.
And if your presentation is recorded? A live audience gives you feedback — you can read the room and add context if people look lost. A recording has none of that. Someone could watch it six months from now with a completely different level of familiarity, and you'll never know who they are. The fix isn't a long preamble. It's two or three deliberate sentences at the top: what this is about, why it matters, and what someone needs to know to follow the rest.