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...
Critical Congruence
First things first – what is congruence? In short, it’s where things all line up in the same direction to support each other. (I’m not using the maths definitions here, obviously!) They don’t have to be the same, just all ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’, to coin a phrase.
Why is it important in your presentations? That’s easy. Without congruence you’ll have no credibility. Let me give you two examples.
The first example is from the daily safety briefings of a construction company I worked with. I’m sure you’ll applaud the idea of such briefings as much as I did. However, even though the project was nearing completion, the safety-briefing slides still said that the name of the project’s Health & Safety Manager was “TBC”. How, people thought, can the company really be serious about health and safety issues if the person responsible for this area is still “To Be Confirmed”?
The upshot was that no one took the briefings seriously.
The second example was at a presentation I went to this week: an accountant was trying to convince us that we wanted to let him be our accountant. Like all accountants he was “reliable, accurate, fast” etc…. and then he went on to talk about what made him special.
So far so good, except that as soon as you looked at his PowerPoint slides he wasn’t reliable, accurate etc…. (God knows he must have been fast though, because those slides can’t have taken more than 10 minutes to knock up!).
Accurate isn’t changing font every couple of slides. Accurate isn’t having your titles mis-aligned. Accurate isn’t having things mis-quoted on your slides and worse still having typos in them! Accurate isn’t having your text in a similar colour to your background. Accurate isn’t having a couple of your bullet points slipping off the right hand side of the screen… You get the picture, I’m sure.
I spoke to him at the end of the eveining. He didn’t feel he needed any presentation skills training, thanks all the same, but he was surprised that his conversion rate for the evening was, accurately, zero.
Anyone got any ideas why that might be, gentle reader? 
Facial feedback….
One handy way of practicing reading the more subtle responses of your audience is to play a game on the tube, train or the bus. Read a copy of the free Metro newspaper that’s around almost everywhere these days - to get yourself familiar with the stories in it - then watch as other people read it and see if you can figure out what stories they are reading from their faces. Don’t worry if you’re wrong – it’s only a game. The important thing isn’t to get it right, just to practice looking closely.
By the way, don’t forget to be subtle, too – I don’t want complaints of harrassment all over the place!
Contrast is king
We’ve all heard the phrase ‘content is king’ and I’d agree. Presentations shouldn’t be noticed - they’re there to get the content over, not to be an end in themselves. (That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be entertaining and so on, of course!)
However, one sure-fire way of getting your presentation itself noticed is to get it wrong. If your audience struggled to see the slides they were concentrating on the presentation itself, not the content, right? So why, oh why, oh why, do we still find people designing powerpoint slides like this?
The white text won’t show in light rooms and the yellow text on a green background won’t show for certain kinds of colour blindness. Heck, come to that it won’t show easily for people with ‘normal’ eyesite. Yellow and green are simply too alike for it to work once projected. To be blunt, this slide smacks of someone who thought “If I can read it, knowing what it says, at a distance of two feet, on my LCD superbright screen, I’m sure everyone will be able to read it”. Wrong.
So what will work on a green background like this? Eeerrrr…….
Well of the top of my head I can only think of black, but why have that mess in the background at all?
Oh, by the way, to add insult to injury, this was a presentationI downloaded from someone offering this as a template for people to use and emulate.
An extra day’s training sneaked in during July…..
We’ve had a bit of a waiting list that we’ve not quite cleared before the summer so we’re sneaking in an extra day’s presentation skills training course in Newcastle on Jul 23rd. Because we’re running it at such short notice there are a couple of extra places going (almost begging!).
To find out a bit more about the day, hit the website for reviews and pics, or email us at sme@curved-vision.co.uk
Why? Well why not?! If you don’t think a day from us has been worthwhile just say so and we’ll not charge you: simple - so what have you got to lose??!!
My top ten presentation tips
….as at half-past three on a rainy Monday at least… Actually this post is based upon an on-the-spot interview I did for my local newspaper. I’ve edited here for sense but Andrew Mernon’s original is here if you’re intersted.
- Tune your speeches into what the audience needs to know. The biggest mistake made by people giving presentations is to misunderstand the purpose of them. Presentations are not about what you know: they’re about telling the audience what they need to know, in the way they need to know it and not trying to impress the audience with your knowledge.As an example, I went to a meeting recently where a guy from a quango stood up and said ‘my quango is the first point of contact in the region for people who want to do x, y and z’. But in those 20 minutes he didn’t even tell us his phone number, email address or website. What he told us about instead was the internal re-organisation his company was going through - which the audience didn’t need to know.
- Write your speech before turning to PowerPoint. The second biggest trap speech makers fall into is to assume they have to use PowerPoint. I’m not saying PowerPoint is evil but it’s a tool that’s very easily misused. The reason for this animosity towards the programme is simply because people tend to design their PowerPoint slides first and then write a speech around them, which hinders the creativity process.For heaven’s sake don’t turn your computer on until the very last thing. Do the creative stuff first and then the PowerPoint.
- Be careful not to overuse props to liven up your speech. I believe props are a two-edged sword. If you are confident in them then great - but most people use them as a crutch. They hide behind the tool rather than remembering that the audience is there to hear and see them – the visual aid is not the reason for the presentation.
- Avoid bombarding the audience with facts and figures. An audience can only handle three big ideas (five tops) during a 20 minute speech. If you give the audience fact after fact they start to drown after about 30 seconds and they lose the big picture.Presentations are best used to talk about principles or patters…. so take the facts, analyse them yourself - then use the presentation to talk about the results of your analysis.
- Keep slides as brief as possible. People can read 10 times faster than they can listen (particularly to someone reading from the slides!). It is for this reason I suggests keeping your slides simple - otherwise people will be able to read the gist of the speech ahead of you and will be left waiting for you to catch up. You just want a couple of key phrases on each slide.
- Beware the use of colour alone. Since around 10% of the business community are colour blind, it’s a dangerous game to baffle the audience with an array of colourful graphs. Red and green are a particular problem. The safest method is to use black on white as different projectors have different settings which can distort the way you represent your graphs. By all means use colour - but check for contrast in greyscale!
- Practice out loud. As a culture we are very inhibited so we go through presentations in our head. Don’t do this because first of all you won’t know how long the presentation lasts and secondly there may be words or phrases that just sound naff when you say them out loud. For example, you may have four S’s in a row.
- Imagining the audience naked does not work. While it may be a common technique to calm the nerves before a speech it belittles the audience when you should be taking them seriously as the speech is for their benefit. I recommend reminding yourself the audience wants you to succeed. They don’t want you to fail because that would mean they’ve wasted their time.
- Focus on your breathing to calm the nerves. When we get scared we start to breathe in our chest and that stimulates our fight-or-flight reflex. The more shallow your breathing the more adrenaline you produce, the more you breathe up in your chest and then you start to sound short of breath. Remember to breathe low and down and out using your diaphragm, that will control the nerves to a huge extent.
- Get the audience warmed up. In most presentations the speaker will throw a question or two into the audience in a vain attempt to get them involved. All too often, however, they are met with an awkward silence and a sea of blank faces. The best way to conquer this is to gradually warm the audience up. The trick to getting the audience involved is to start early with a closed question, something the audience doesn’t have to commit to.Ask for a show of hands in the first few minutes, then move on to verbal ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers and by the end they will be happy to answer open-ended questions. At the question and answer session at the end of the presentation, it is often a good idea to have a question of your own prepared in your arsenal. Since the words “any questions?” often result in an eerily silent conference room complete with tumbleweed, it is advisable to be prepared. ‘Someone at my last meeting asked me if…’ or ‘People often ask me…’ are commonly used lines to cover up a lack of questions from the audience.
Presentations vs Public Speaking: one and the same?
For me, a Public Speaking engagement is a particular type of presentation. The main thing that differentiates public speaking from a (business) presentation, is that it’s given
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to a (general) public - rather to business associates etc. (who may even be an invited audience);
- to relatively undifferentiated audience - the range of a priori knowledge will vary within any given audience… but will often be quite low;
- with more time (that is a greater duration) than a ‘business presentation’ (often) - or at least more flexibility of timing;
- without much in the way of visual-aids - or at least using them in a different way;
- in a relatively formal, one-way process with few chances for questions;
- with a less focussed subject matter (typically).
Anyone want to pick me up on these?
Let’s unpack an example. I was at a speech recently by the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP (now Prime Minister) in which he was talking, specifically, about the issues of debt in the developing world. It was introduced to the audience as a speech and it was the typical political speech - no visual aids, addressing a number of (related) issues, not at all interactive and not driving to any decision. It was simply about him telling us (the audience) about what he believes, what he’d done and what he wanted to do in the future.
For me that was an example of public speaking.
On the other hand, watching him talking about the same issues to a smaller, more select audience was clearly a presentation. What was the difference?
Well, the presentation was designed to “define, discuss and decide” (so it was more interactive); the Chancellor (as he was at the time) used a number of visual aids to provide backup information; and there was a clear time-limit on the whole thing. What’s more, while the level of technical information and detail in what he said was much higher than at the public meeting (I don’t believe this is an indicator of the difference between public speaking and presenting per se) it was at least possible for Gordon Brown to speak in this way because his audience was less diverse (and more informed prior to the event).
It’s important that - when you stand up (or sit down!) to speak - it’s pretty important to know whether you’re doing a presentation or doing some public speaking……..
