Reruns from the Dusty Archives No.3: It's not rocket science.
Why do so many presenters 'lose' their audience? Part of the roof collapses – the audience may forgive you. All the technology in the room fails – the audience will forgive you. You have a full-blown asthma attack in the middle of your presentation – the audience will forgive you. But there are two things no audience will forgive you for – being boring and running over time.
Why do so many presenters 'lose' their audience? Part of the roof collapses – the audience may forgive you. All the technology in the room fails – the audience will forgive you. You have a full-blown asthma attack in the middle of your presentation – the audience will forgive you. But there are two things no audience will forgive you for – being boring and running over time.
There is no such thing as a boring topic, there is no such thing as a boring statistic, there is no such thing as a boring target. There are just such things as boring presenters. There are also such things as wristwatches, so make sure yours is in your line of sight as you talk.
I had an interesting experience on this a while back. I was invited to make a presentation on the subject of presentation skills to an audience of middle and upper-ranking doctors. The speaker before me was talking about medical litigation and what the latest thinking was on how to avoid it. Great subject - certainly of tremendous interest to this particular audience. But the speaker blew it.
She blew it by having very, very texty slides - word-for-word paragraphs of text in small font sizes filling the screen, which she then proceeded to read to us. Her presence was entirely unnecessary. She could have simply provided us with a copy of her presentation and we could have read it at our leisure.
- She blew it by constantly having to skip past slides, complaining that there wasn't enough time to cover this or that. (She mentioned, about six times, that she would normally deliver this talk over the course of half a day. I reckon that she had done no editing of the presentation at all for that day, leaving her with 80-90 text-heavy slides for a 60 minute talk.) There's a very handy little trick that this presenter obviously didn't know - You take your original presentation and "Save As" a new filename and then DELETE all the stuff you're not going to have time to cover! [Like I said, not exactly rocket science]
- She blew it with the slides themselves. She had no visuals of any kind apart from her company logo. No charts, no audio, no distraction or variation whatsoever. In short, nothing to appeal to the right side of the brain. It wasn't even death by bullet point. She wielded her lengthy paragraphs like blunt instruments and beat us to death with those.
- Finally, she blew it by looking at her watch every now and then, laughing nervously, shrugging her shoulders helplessly, and saying, "I'm going way over my time here, aren't I?"
Coffee break started an interminable 17 minutes late. The tea was stewed and the coffee was lukewarm. The audience were, appropriately enough, seriously annoyed - these were hungover doctors badly in need of caffeinated stimulants. I sat in the conference room, frantically cutting my presentation down so that we wouldn't run over into lunch break as well.
This poor woman utterly lost her audience. Hers was the one subject of the day that any doctor should have been interested in, but they were now going to remember her presentation for all the wrong reasons.
You are not providing captions for your slides. You are the presentation. You. If there is a power cut, are you going to slink away with your tail between your legs or can you keep going? Think about the kudos … “Wow! Even after her computer burst into flames, she just calmly extinguished it and kept on going. I’ve never seen such aplomb! And that presentation! She really knew her stuff …” [I have, cruelly or otherwise, simulated power or technology failures when coaching clients in presentation technique, just to see what they will do. Most cave in.]
Sometimes, you have to turn off your lovingly-created and massively-rehearsed presentation because the lunch was too rich or the room is too warm and your audience is nodding off. Presenting is c-o-m-m-u-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n - it's all about engagement, about connecting (or re-connecting) with the human beings in the room. As first speaker of the morning, talking to a bunch of hungover docs, my advice to this presenter would have been to put up a slide with half a dozen key discussion points and then just talk to the audience. Ask questions, elicit concerns and address those. I would have notified the staff at the hotel to bring coffee in early and to make sure that there was plenty of water in the room. A large percentage of that audience were only there out of politeness and this presenter completely lost sight of this.
Respect your audience. Respect the next presenter. Respect Old Father Time, but above all do not eat into the coffee break. All of this requires the humility to work and practice. As the haranguer-in-chief, Tom Peters says, "Does anyone here feel that they suffer from too much talent?"
This poor woman utterly lost her audience. Hers was the one subject of the day that any doctor should have been interested in, but they were now going to remember her presentation for all the wrong reasons.
You are not providing captions for your slides. You are the presentation. You. If there is a power cut, are you going to slink away with your tail between your legs or can you keep going? Think about the kudos … “Wow! Even after her computer burst into flames, she just calmly extinguished it and kept on going. I’ve never seen such aplomb! And that presentation! She really knew her stuff …” [I have, cruelly or otherwise, simulated power or technology failures when coaching clients in presentation technique, just to see what they will do. Most cave in.]
Sometimes, you have to turn off your lovingly-created and massively-rehearsed presentation because the lunch was too rich or the room is too warm and your audience is nodding off. Presenting is c-o-m-m-u-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n - it's all about engagement, about connecting (or re-connecting) with the human beings in the room. As first speaker of the morning, talking to a bunch of hungover docs, my advice to this presenter would have been to put up a slide with half a dozen key discussion points and then just talk to the audience. Ask questions, elicit concerns and address those. I would have notified the staff at the hotel to bring coffee in early and to make sure that there was plenty of water in the room. A large percentage of that audience were only there out of politeness and this presenter completely lost sight of this.
There is a very powerful little button on your computer. If you push the ‘W’ key while you are displaying a screenshow in PowerPoint, the screen will go white [The 'B' key makes it go black]. Walk around. Talk to people, rather than at them. Invite questions. Start a discussion. Sit on the side of a table and listen to what the participants are saying. Use the flipchart. Get everyone to stand up and interact in some way [Maybe not if they're hungover!]. Then, when you have made your point, collected your data, or woken everybody up; hit the ‘W’ key again and you can segue back into your flow.
Respect your audience. Respect the next presenter. Respect Old Father Time, but above all do not eat into the coffee break. All of this requires the humility to work and practice. As the haranguer-in-chief, Tom Peters says, "Does anyone here feel that they suffer from too much talent?"
2 comments:
What's funny about this, Rowan, is that I recently had a group in a workshop insist that doctors and scientists require bullet-pointed PowerPoint.
I was at the point in my workshop where I introduce them to image-based Ppt. They were horrified at the prospect of using "that" kind of presentation to speak to their brutal-doctor-audiences.
Of course, NO audience requires bad PowerPoint, but it was mighty hard to convince them that yes, doctors' brains work the same as everyone else's.
As one of the AV techs usually responsible for making sure the presentation actually makes it to the screen, I am constantly amazed at some presenters lack of respect for the time table.
There is a schedule for a reason. I did one show back in the olden days of 35mm slide shows. The Doctor had three hours. He also only had three slides. He still managed to go over by 30 minutes. When he finished there were three people left on the room. Myself, an attendee sleeping, and the Doctor.
One adverse result to Presenters going over time is that the AV crew doesn't always have a chance to go on a bio break of their own. We're stuck in place. We still have to deal with the next Presenter who is, understandably, anxious because of the time crunch they are now under.
My advice is this, Keep it short, Keep it sweet, and Keep it simple and the attendees (and crew) will love you.
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