tellingpeople

Every now and then I talk about graphs in presentations so I’m going to spend some time talking about Ducks and Golden Ducks. No, not terms for cricket batsmen who fail to score but types of graph. Put simply, a duck is a graph or graphic which doesn’t contain any information. A Golden Duck is the same but worse – so much worse, in fact, that it manages to draw attention to itself and what it’s doing. It shouts at you that it’s a waste of space on the page, screen or whatever.

An example might help illustrate the point. If I told you 69% of our clients are female you’re perfectly capable of realizing that this means that approximately a third are male (assuming people are either male or female and not either/both!). It doesn’t take a pie-chart to illustrate the point – that would be a duck.

To make it a Golden Duck you can do fancy things to it such as turn it 3D, or explode the pie – what’s the point of a pie chart with one slice half pulled out when there are only two slices?

Of course, I’m not anti-graphics in your presentation – far from it. I am, however, anti-graphic-for-the-sake-of-it!

Take a moment to look at your graphics – do they add something, or are they simply there to fill up the screen? Honestly? If it can be cut, cut, because anything that’s present-but-not-necessary gets in the way of your audience understanding what’s present-and-necessary.

I’m writing this on my way back from a day’s training at Imperial College, in London. I spent some time working with PhD students looking with them at how they could make better oral conference papers – presentations of their work, in other words.

As an (ex-) academic myself it’s always gratifying to see people so enthusiastic and keen to not only move science on but to tell people about it. It did show up, starkly in some cases however, that experts have a particular problem when it comes to being a presenter – they know too much.

Eh? How can that be? Every presentation skills trainer in the world (and any wannabe!) will tell you in their hints-and-tips “Know your material inside out”. True, as far as it goes. The problem for experts lies in deciding which material is to be included in the presentation. That kind of choice is really hard for people who’ve spent months and months working on something (or even years): after all, if it’s worth spending time like that on, it’s worth telling people about!

The problem is that if you tell people too much they take nothing in – they don’t just reach saturation and stop taking in things that are too much for them… they ‘give up’ and write off pretty much everything. So what to do as an expert? Well, there’s a great quote I like from a Disney Imagineer: “perspective is worth 80 IQ points”… which is pretty much the tip! Get some perspective: before you actually design and/or write your presentation, take a looooong hard look at what you need to say. Pretend you’re explaining it to a very smart child, someone with plenty of intellegence and a natural curiosity but who doesn’t know your field at all. If a smart 12 year old can understand it, you’re probably in the right ball-park!

Okay, so don’t take me too literally here, but you get the idea, I’m sure!

As a (strong) Introvert (in the sense that I get my emotional energy from inside my head), I’ve often been asked about the fact that I “do presentations for a living”. With a confused (or challenging) air I’m told: you can’t be an introvert, look at what you do for a job.

That mis-understands the nature of being an introvert (in the Jungian sense); I may get my energy from thoughts inside my head, but that doesn’t stop me from going public with them, when I’m good and ready. That’s the big difference between me and the extraverts around me – they tend to go public in order to get ready.

It’s something I blogged about a long time ago (here and here) and it seems I’m not the only one who finds this interesting. With the exception that my understanding is that introverts comprise much more than a mere 10% of the population, I pretty much endorse everything said in this article:

http://www.career-intelligence.com/management/Introvert.asp

Mind you, there’s an upside to being an introvert presenter, too…. while it’s true that I’m less able to respond (instinctively) to my audience, perhaps, it’s also true that I’m less easily ‘thrown’ by my audience, perhaps…..

I did a short interview recently for someone who ran a Toastmasters in Portugal and one of his questions got me to thinking about why people are afraid of public speaking: it’s not as if it’s a question that’s not been banded around and asked millions of times already. “If I can figure out why I’m afraid” goes the logic, “I can do something about that particular issue.” That idea in itself is a massive clue – as is the fact that no-one’s been able to definitively (for me) say why people are so afraid of making presentations.

My contribution to the debate is this:-

We’re afraid precisely because we can’t define what it is that’s going on for us. Let me explain a little more. According to some psychology I’ve read, many of our basic emotions stem from our relationship to our ‘goals’. Blocked goals lead to anger; impossible goals lead to sadness; uncertain goals lead to anxiety.

It seems to make sense to me: I certainly get angry when someone, or something, blocks my goal. Okay, not always ‘angry’ specifically but something on the ‘anger scale’. A trivial goal or a tiny blockage makes my just ‘annoyed’ where as blocking a bigger goal or blocking a goal more effectively leaves me feeling ‘cross’ or even ‘angry’. Ultimately, if you were completely block a critical goal (something like protecting my family, say) you’d push me to the top end of the ‘anger scale’ – something like rage or fury.

If I can’t see a way to achieve a goal I certainly feel sad – the more important the goal, the further along the ’sad scale’ I am – from disappointed, through sadness itself, to being distraught.

And here’s where it gets interesting for presenters… because uncertain goals lead to anxiety – or rather lead to something on the ‘fear scale’. In my experience as someone who trains people to make presentations and help them with their public speaking, the most common issue I’ve had to contend with had been this: people don’t actually know what their presentation is supposed to achieve. And if you don’t know what it’s supposed to achieve, how will you know when you’ve achieved it?

If you’re playing a game of football you know you’ve got to score more than the opposition in a fixed period of time. You know what the rules are and you’ll know when you’ve won. If you’re playing chess you’ll know when you’ve lost etc. Each time the situation is clear. Okay, you might be anxious about losing but that’s because you don’t know what the consequences of losing will be – you do know what will happen if you win.

So it is with presentations! Or rather, it’s the other way around. Presenters know all too well the consequences of making a bad presentation – people laugh at them, they don’t make the sale, whatever; but if you ask them “How will you know if your presentation has been a success?” they’ll be at a bit of a loss. They might fall back on “I’ll make the sale” or something like that but that might have happened despite their presentation, not because of it. Besides, it’s not ‘immediate’; and it’s the immediate that affects our basic emotions.

If you’re making a presentation “because the boss said so” how do you know you’ve done it successfully? If you’re making a presentation “to tell them about change X” how do you know when you’ve told them enough? When you’ve outlined the changed? When they understand the change? When they let you leave the room alive? When they can remember five facts? Six? Seven? Just one?

If you don’t know what success ’smells’ like you’ll not know when you’ve achieved it. All you’ll be left with, as a presenter, is a vague sense of anxiety as you struggle to achieve… well, what exactly?

If you don’t know what success looks like but you can imagine all too well what failure looks like, no wonder you’re anxious – and no wonder it’s so damned difficult to do anything about it!