This blog is about presentations & public speaking - how to make 'em, how not to make 'em and how other people are making 'em. Feel free to read, use and comment on what you find here. And good luck with your presentations...
Something special for marketing execs….. useful for the rest of us too!
Let me begin by suggesting you ask yourself this simple question – and be honest – have you ever found yourself altering the formatting of your document before you’ve finished writing it? No? Nothing even like that? Then you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t suffer from what I’m going to term Communication Impotence (or CI).
Marketing people are creative people. By definition you have to be. Everything has to look new if it’s to make an impact on the target audience. You have to be creative. On the other hand you have to be technical. It’s no good having the greatest ideas in the world if you can’t realise it, or present it to potential clients because of technophobia or incompetence. Ironically, the very breadth of skills make marketing people potentially prey to getting the work of the two sides of the brain confused and suffering an attack of CI.
Despite the breadth of demands on marketing people – and the commensurate breadth of abilities - we’re all also just human and even a Chief Exec’s brain works in just the same way as everyone else’s! Briefley, the right hand part of the brain is known to control creativity while the left hand part of the brain is known to be responsible for logic, problem-solving and so on. To do what needs to be done for clients, a marketeer needs to be what psychologists call a “whole brain thinker” meaning that you are able to utilise both sides of the brain and thereby be successful at tasks which are orientated around the full waterfront of human capabilities- both artistic and technical.
And there-in lies the problem of CI …
…and it’s potentially a big problem.
It’s a problem because in a recent survey by the B group – a thriving marketing company in the north of England – found that over 41% of its mailing-list admitted to having avoided communicating with people when they should have - and of using technology to avoid some personal interaction. Examples included things like using an Email when a phone call would have been more appropriate and making a phone call at a time when the recipient would be likely to not be at their phone.
In our experience, that’s not at all uncommon. People feel impotent as communicators and, like people suffering from traditional forms of impotence, they reach for props and crutches to help them survive: if not, how do you explain the amount of different forms of Viagra offered by spam emails every day! 
As marketing isn’t about simply telling people things (it’s about them hearing things!) this has got to be a damaging trend. If staff are avoiding talking to clients and potential clients, how much work are you missing out on? Perhaps more significantly, if campaigns are designed without understanding this new phenomenon (don’t forget your audience will be suffering from it at least as much as your staff) how many opportunities for novel approaches to the market are being missed?
At the heart of the problem is this: once you start to use the logic-orientated left hand side of your brain, you effectively turn off your ability to use the idea-generating, fun-loving, creative right side of your brain. That means that if you’re using inappropriate technology to do your communicating, you’re thinking in the wrong way to deal with people.
Prey pity the poor presenter who is so scared of the audience they hide behind more and more impersonal presentation skills (don’t confuse this with someone is technically competent at Powerpoint! ) and end up with the notorious “death by Powerpoint” presentations. And if they can’t communicate with an audience that they’re standing in front of, with all the feedback and interaction potential they get by doing that, what chance have they got of communicating (well!) with an audience that they can’t get close enough to smell?
So what’s to be done? Well the first thing is to just think about it. You might not decide it’s an issue you need to worry about. Great…. but you probably wouldn’t have read this far if that’s you!
The second step is to decide whether you want to put some policy or guidelines in place to help people think about things before they send that email etc. If you’ve got guidelines for staff about use of company phones you might like to put a simple sentence in there – or in your email guidelines: it might be a pleasant change for them compared to entreaties to think about whether the phone call is absolutely necessary! Perhaps this isn’t how you or your company work – it’s only a valid approach for companies of a certain size and style, but “email-free Tuesday” does have a number of appealing features….
You might like to encourage your staff in creative thinking and/or give them some training in positive communication skills. That, of course, is easier said than done. We’ve listed a few very simple tips below; we’re happy to chat about the details (by phone or email!)
Do some physical communication exercises on a mini-teambuilding day. If people have more confidence in their ability to communicate they’re less likely to bottle out of having a go. All it might need are a couple of the very simple things we all did in “drama” classes at school.
Play. This is a hugely underestimated way of improving communication skills – once people buy into the activity they concentrate less on the way they’re doing it; if the games are well designed they will “map back” to their jobs pretty easily and well.
Explore the environment people are working in. Colours and design are hugely influential in influencing people’s urges to communicate (or not!).
Practice “active listening” techniques with an eye to getting better able to read what people are interested in and how the communicate: this leads to more confidence in actually communicating with them.
Set a good example – try an audit for a few days of each phone call, email or letter you send and review what you’ve got at the end of the week. It doesn’t need to be sophisticated or time consuming, just honest.
Okay, so these are all simplistic but that doesn’t mean they’re not effective! If all else fails, call in the cavalry and get some professional help!
Like a Brick Wrapped in Velvet – designing a presentation at conferences
IntroductionDid you know that the vast majority of men in the UK think they are “above average” as a driver? Obviously, about half of them must be wrong, by definition. Making a presentation often strikes me as being a bit like that. We all think we can do it – and many of us think we can do it well. Some of us are right: some of us aren’t. I’m not too sure that there’s much correlation between those that can and those that think they can, either!
My approach to doing a presentation is summed up in the title: by analogy, a presentation should be “like a brick wrapped in velvet”. Unpacking that, the content of your presentation should be like a brick and the presentation itself should be like wrapping it in velvet. Bricks are simple, easy to pick up, usable on their own but more usable with other bricks. They’re easy to grasp and everything about them is immediately obvious.
They’ve got a reasonable amount of ’stopping power’ too.
On the downside, they’re likely to scrape your skin if you’re not used to handling them and they’re just that little bit too uncomfortable for most people, so wrapping them in velvet makes them more user-friendly for your audience. Velvet is smooth, subtle and covers over the rough edges – that means that more people are more likely to pick the brick up.
To be blunt for a moment, no matter how good your brick might be, if the velvet isn’t up to it, no one will pick it up. (To be fair I should add that if all you’ve got is velvet with no brick inside it people will spot that as soon as they try and pick it up, too: you need both, obviously!)
This article isn’t about the brick: it can’t be. You know your subject matter; you’re the experts. I’m not.
But how important is the velvet, then? Well, Richard Burton managed to make reading the telephone directory sound interesting, but on the other hand, Bill Gates manages to make the future of technology sound slightly less interesting than my O-level lessons in Archeology! Believe me, that takes some doing.
Applying the analogy
So how does this rather twee-sounding analogy help in practice? Let’s start at the beginning by looking at how long you’re going to speak for and use that as an example.
Actually, I want to be slightly more off-beat than that. It’s not about length measured in minutes: only bureaucrats measure time that way. Real people like you, me and your audience measure time by how long it feels to them; if they’re engaged and interested you can talk for longer than if your audience is bored.
The velvet brick approach is that you consider the two elements of the presentation separately. First you think of what you want to say – your brick – and then you think about how you’re going to say it – your velvet.
Using the approach, clearly you should present for as long as it takes to tell people about your subject: no more, no less. If you can do it in five minutes, do so. If you need 20 either negotiate a 20 minutes slot or talk about something else. You can no more “fit a quart into a pint pot” (as we say in the UK) than you can give your audience all they need to know about particle physics in 15 minutes.
On the other hand only a presentation genius could make a presentation about how quickly paint dries interesting to the general public for more than a few minutes. (There are such people but they’re depressingly few and far between, believe me!)
Look at the other option – that you can explain things in five minutes but you’ve got 20. Listen to Pascal: “I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short one.” No one ever made themselves unpopular by finishing early. When you’ve finished saying what you’ve got to say, shut up. If 30% of your presentation is waffle your audience will assume that 30% of your claims about your product are waffle…..
… worse in fact, because once they get past their ‘boredom threshold’ they’ll simply switch off and take nothing you say on board.
So, moving on, let’s look at how this philosophy works for the actual style of your presentation. Are we talking about something complex or something simple? If it’s complex, does that complexity stem from the concept you’re trying to get over or from the application of that concept, the details etc. That gives us three options, and none of them require PowerPoint (or “Presenter” or “Impress” or any of the other presentation packages out there) – at least not automatically. The velvet brick approach is to look at the content and then decide what format of presentation to use.
If you’re like many people you’ll tend to sub-consciously put the idea of the presentation together with the idea of a PowerPoint-type presentation (an example of a phenomenon we call ‘Communication Impotence’, but that’s for another article!). Resist the urge! Don’t even go near a computer to write your presentation until you know exactly what you’re going to say and even then only if you’ve consciously decided that a computer presentation is the way to go.
If you need to, give your presentation the Fuse Test. If all the fuses in the building blew, could you still explain your concept? Anyone saying “yes” should consider long and hard whether they should be using a computer-based presentation in the first place. (Anyone saying “No” should just spend 10 seconds checking that they’re the right person for the job! ) Computer-based presentations are actually a lot harder to write well than people think and if your velvet is alienating you drastically cut your chances of your audience actually picking up your brick which is, presumably, what you were hoping for when you agreed to speak!
A third example
You know how long you’re going to speak for and you know whether you’re going to use some kind of multi-media option. What next? Well, anything you like to do with your presentation, really. Should you, for example, use handouts?
According to the ‘brick wrapped in velvet’ approach you just look at the content and then decide the best way to deliver it. If you need your audience to have access to really complicated mathematical formulae for example, you should really think about handouts: don’t compromise by saying “I’ll manage without the formula”. That way you give your audience only half the story.
Of course, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t think long and hard about whether the formulae really are part of your brick in the first place! Often they’re not. A face to face presentation (1-2-many in the jargon) is best used for swaying hearts and minds, not for imparting the minutiae and details. If your brick is comprised entirely of details the approach should be something other than a mass presentation. (There’s some fascinating research on this coming out of the US at the moment, looking at how much recall people have of facts that they read and those that they are told, but that’s outside the scope of this particular article.)
Please, avoid the habit many presenters (particularly the ones who are important and/or lucky enough to be invited, rather than those of us trying to create opportunities for ourselves) slip into of sub-consciously saying to themselves “I’ve got a presentation slot, what shall I talk about?” That’s putting the velvet in place and trying to fill it with brick. You might pull it off – don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen it done superbly – but it’s a much more difficult way of doing things.
The most simple way of avoiding this risk is to have a set of bricks ready in advance. I’ve got a number of things I can cheerfully talk about (bricks) which are just waiting for the right opportunity to arrive (the velvet). I won’t risk spoiling them by forcing them into a place they might not want to go: you’ll not do them justice and you’ll not do yourself justice.
This article, for example, can be delivered comfortably as it is: I don’t need the meet you all to outline my ideas: I had the idea for such an article for a long time, sitting on a shelf in my head……
…. waiting for the right time…..
Summary
It’s not rocket science here. I’ve not said anything new – and probably nothing that you’ve not heard before, but if you like the analogy of the brick wrapped in velvet it might just stick in your head the next time you’ve got to stand up at a conference.
Simply the best!
During our public presentation skills training course last week we were using some ‘famous presentations’ as texts for an exercise and someone was lucky enough to be working on Martin Luthor King’s fantastic “I have a dream”. Interestingly these famous words didn’t make an appearnce until well into the speech as you cans ee for yourself if you’ve got twenty mintues to spare by looking at the full thing here….. thanks to videogoogle!
It’s a fantastic piece of oratory, building but without being crudely obvious. The design and structure of the piece is almost flawless and if you find yourself making big presentations you can’t do better than study this.
Notice how King allows his voice to do the work - no PowerPoint showing images of people being beaten or (worse!) lists of bullit points about where people have come from and what they have suffered. Can you imagine the awful slide which would accompany this these days in corporate presentations? The slide would be titled “Dreams I have” and there would be the inevitable list of these….. God save me from this kind of presentation!
The authority of King’s voice is so evident it’s startling, even allowing for the relatively crude recording systems of the time!
Laying down the law!
This tip is in response to two people asking me the same question inside a week - it doesn’t often happen like that but when it does, I figure the universe is trying to tell me something…..
The question in question was how to deal with/cope with questions and so on and how to handle an ‘unruly’ audience.
Fake it. It’s that simple. I’m married to a teacher who tells me that the whole school discipline thing is a game: teachers pretend they have authority and pupils act as though they have. In real life, if pupils decided not to do as they were told there is precious little that can be done. It’s called “Assumed Authority”. If you act as though you’ve got it, people will (generally) behave as though you have.
One way to assume it is to lay down the law by establishing clear ground rules at the start of a presentation. For example, tell your audience how long you’re going to speak for and tell them when you’re going to take questions (at the end? in private?). A brief, closed question to get people to ’sign up’ to that will then mean that if anyone steps outside those ‘rules’ you can pretty much assume most people will be on your side when you refer back to them. By that I mean just saying to the audience “…..is that okay with everyone?” and then move on.
Authority - fake it till it’s real!
Voices are utterly unique
I’ve been saying this for years as part of our voice training and here’s some legally-based support using voice work to identify criminals in the same way as fingerprints are….
http://expertpages.com/news/voice_forensic_tool.htm
Interesting stuff! Basically what it means is that your voice can uniquely identify you, and that re-inforces the point about you being the presentation, not your PowerPoint! That’s good news for people who have the courage of their convictions but not so good if you’re the kind of nervy presenter who hides behind the PowerPoint - it might be natural, but it’s not a good idea!
More thoughts from a train…
Two five hour train journeys within a couple of days gave me plenty of time for reflection. Despite my 20 years training as a scientist, I gave in and did a quick ’straw poll’ about what most people were doing while I walked to and fro the Buffet.
Most were sleeping – or at least approximating it. Some were reading and perhaps taking things in. Some were working on their laptops. Of the laptopers, the most common activity I saw was people going through PowerPoint presentations which was presumably the focus of their journey. I watched several of them scroll through them, mouthing the odd thing without realising it as they zipped through their slides at high speed, changing the slides as they went sometimes.
I restrained my urge to say “Stop it!”, but only just….
Why this instinct? Because I knew from looking at these people that they didn’t have the experience necessary to account for the difference in speed between how they ran through the presentation now – almost at the speed of thought – and the speed they’d run through their presentation ‘for real’ – at the speed they could talk.
Forget that at your peril. I’ve seen far, far too many presentations which were ‘crammed’ at the end as the author realised he or she was running out of time and rushed through what was – presumably, I never understood what they were getting at because they rushed too much – the most important part of their presentation.
On both our public voice and presentation skills courses and our commercial presentation skills training we strongly urge people to practice out loud, not in their heads. Here’s why.
- Scanning things in your head means you can go through the presentation at anything from two to ten times faster than you will in real life; there’s no sensible way to be sure of how long the presentation will really take when you deliver it;
- Not saying things out loud doesn’t give you the actual practice of what you’re going to be doing on the day – after all, you’d not train for a marathon by talking about how fast you were going to run but not actually doing any running, nor would you learn to play the trumpet purely from imagining yourself on the concert platform;
- Not actually pronouncing the words doesn’t allow you to find (by falling over!) the difficult combinations of words and sounds which you’ll get wrong on the day unless you re-design or at least practice – it’s surprisingly easy to write tongue-twisters accidentally!;
- Doing things in your head doesn’t allow you to use all the proper breathing exercises and so on which are essentially to controlling your nerves – you can’t just do these things on the spur of the moment, you need to have rehearsed them (lots).
And of course, the final reason for practising out loud….? Well, if you do it on the train, no one’s going to sit next to you!
