What has happened or needs to happen?
Most people have heard of a rhetorical question--it's when a speaker asks a question for the purpose of setting up a logical argument, not because he expects an answer. A related concept is the rhetorical situation. The rhetorical situation does not refer to the situation you're in: which might be that you have to put together a presentation for your board of directors tomorrow morning and your boss only gave you 12 hours notice. That's your professional situation. The rhetorical situation is a very simple question: why are you speaking? What has happened or needs to happen?
For example, let's say you work in a manufacturing facility that produces microchips. You are responsible for all the safety systems. Yesterday, one of your systems incorrectly detected a hazardous gas leak, which forced the plant to evacuate for two hours. Manufacturing stopped, tools went idle, and it took several hours after clearing the alarm to get all the systems working properly again. Millions of dollars were lost because of a failure in your department. Now you have to explain to the plant manager and the rest of upper management why the system failed and what you are going to do to prevent it from happening again.
In this scenario, what has happened is the false alarm and the massive productivity loss. What needs to happen as a result of the meeting is:
Those three elements sum up the rhetorical situation for this one case. Any time you are called on to give any form of presentation, you can ask yourself a similar what has happened/what needs to happen question.
Understanding the rhetorical situation will help you focus your presentation on the essentials. When your presentation is well-focused, the result will be a far more effective meeting with less wasted time. If you come to a presentation without an understanding of the rhetorical situation, you run the risk of missing the whole point and leaving the central issue unaddressed.
Returning to our microchip plant scenario, it would be fairly easy for a stressed-out department manager to show up to the meeting without considering the basic questions of what happened/what needs to happen. He could waste this time blaming other people and saying, "It's not my fault." Although we are friendly meeting attendees, we certainly understand that millions of dollars of loss demand more productive answers. In this scenario, our department manager might come across to his supervisors as out of control or panicky--he would certainly not be able to convey the image of calm confidence that is essential to resolving the problem, calming everyone down, and, of course, keeping his job.