tellingpeople ~ the presentation skills blog

I’ve spent some time in hospital recently, for an urgent (for a pretty trivial) operation. One of the things I spent time doing while sitting on the Ward, other than getting bored and counting down the minutes to visiting time, was listening to the way people talked to each other.

One of the interesting things I noticed was the way students were spoken to: I found out that I could tell what year the student was, simply be taking notice of how much things were explained to them. Students newly on the Ward were given all the necessary explanations – experienced students were given only partial explanations or instructions. It was natural and sensible, obviously.

What was interesting though, was that no one realised it was happening – knowledge and experience were assumed by the speaker… and therein lies the problem for presenters. All too often we assume that the audience is ‘trained’ to the level we want them to be at. If they are, great, but check first! There’s nothing more dampening for an audience’s enthusiasm than not understanding you – not because they can’t understand if you explain it, but because you forget to explain it in the first place.

Remember, the more of an expert you are in your field (so the more right you have to be making the presentation) the greater the risk of you making assumptions about what other people know. Something might be obvious to you, because you’ve studied X, Y or Z for months or years, but your audience hasn’t. (If they had, chances are they’d be making the presentation instead of you!).

It’s not disrespectful or patronising to explain your terms and your jargon – it’s actually a simple courtesy… and one which will pay you back fully in terms of how your audience thinks of you and your message!

I’ve lost count of the number of times when I’ve read fora online – about public speaking – when the advice has been the mantra “practice, practice, pracatice”. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t practice! Of course you should.

I’m continually bugged by people saying “I have an presentation to make next week: help!” who look slightly surprised when I say “How much time do you have to practice between now and then?”. They seem to think there’s a silver bullet which will solve their problems. Practice helps for sure!

I’d like to differentiate between what I’m going to call ’strategic practice’ and ‘tactical practice’. Tactical practice is what you do when you go over and over and over something, again and again and again. A pianist doing their scales would be a classic example or a tennis player receiving balls from a serving machine….

There’s certainly something to be gained from this: mind you, less than you think – I’ve talked a bit more about differentiating practice and rehearsing.

Strategic practice is when you have a go at something, as before over and over, but this time with a gap between so that you can get feedback. In the context of public speaking, this would be something like giving a presentation at Toastmasters, thinking about what you did right and wrong over a couple of weeks and having another go. Obviously there’s a lot to be gained here, too.

There are times, however, when you can over do it – particularly the tactical stuff.

I follow guykawasaki on Twitter and a recent Tweet of his pointed me at this article about why we sometimes get things wrong, no matter how well practiced we are. I particularly ‘like’ number nine in the list as a presenter… the harder you try, the more likely it is go wrong.

Apart from all that, there’s also the obvious one – if you’re too practiced, you sound like you’re too practiced… and that’s boring to listen to. Obviously you shouldn’t be making it up as you go along either, but don’t let it go stale, either!

I posting something on Twitter recently which seems to have started a bit of a flurry. I said: “As they say in SEO: Content is King. All presentations need do is get your content over. Less than that wastes content, more wastes effort.”

Obviously, given Twitter’s character limit of 140 there’s always an element of cutting to the bone, so I thought I’d take a moment to unpack the idea I was getting at in those 140 key-strokes….

Content is king – for me this is axiomatic for presentations. If you’ve got nothing to say, say nothing. Too many presentations waste my time (and the speaker’s) by being about nothing – or perhaps more accurately about nothing important. Note to all… I don’t consider the speaker’s ego to be anything important.

Once you’ve established your content, it’s all about getting it to your audience.

Obviously, it’s great to make a presentation that takes people’s breath away, with each slide, each moment, a work of art – or genius even – but in the real world that’s not always going to happen. To get your information over to your audience you need to put in enough effort, structure and design etc to help both penetration and retention. (Penetration is defined as getting the info into your audience’s heads and Retention is defined as making sure it stays there.) If you don’t do that, then you’re wasting their time and yours. If you do 45 minutes preparation for a five minute presentation but it needed 60 minutes for what you say to stick in your audiences’ head, you’ve effectively wasted the 45 minutes work you did.

If it needs 60 minutes work, do 60 minutes work.

So what about doing 75 minutes work then? Surely that extra quarter of an hour will make it stick more? Well if it does, fine and good – do it… but there comes a point where you can’t justify that extra time. It might make it stick a fraction of one percent more if you put an extra 15 minutes work in, but what else could you do in that time?

I don’t know about you, but in 15 minutes I could write an article that gets more information to more people. I could have a cup of tea and a biscuit. I could play with my kids. I could read a couple of articles by other people. I could proof-read the workbooks for a course…. you get the idea. While ever you’re spending time on your presentation, there’s an “opportunity cost” to be paid – the cost of not doing something else.

Obviously, the most common risk with presentations is actually under-preparation but don’t be fooled into thinking that you need to do so so so so so so muuuchchhhhh preparation. Sometimes all you need to do is ‘enough’. Once you’ve spent time getting your presentation to the standard it needs to be, there’s an issue of something called “diminishing marginal returns”: the first five 20 minutes work you do achieves X amount of output but the second 20 minutes achieves a total of slightly less than two times X and so on….

How much is ‘enough’? That’s up to you and your professional judgement of the material, you, your audience and what else you could be doing in the meantime.

Simon

ps: Yes, yes, I know, I’m over-stating the case but what the heck!

…..so says a student friend of mine who’s having to give presentations for the first time. To be fair to him, he didn’t say this spontaneously, but in response to a question about what was the worst thing about speaking in public. Like almost everyone I’ve ever spoken to, his concern was lay with what his audience would think of him: in other words, what was uppermost in his mind was “being judged” as a presenter.

And yet, as a trainer of people who find they have to make presentations, I can’t say how many times I’ve said over and over, it’s “less about the presentation than you think”. To quote colleagues who work in the field of search engine optimisation: “Content Is King”. In other words, if you don’t have something useful to the audience to say, no amount of well delivered tosh is going to make your presentation useful.

As an aside, that doesn’t mean, of course, that having little (or no) content is automatically going to stop your audience thinking what you’re saying is useful. You can always fool some of the people some of the time…. For proof of this, just do a google search on “Clap Traps” to see how you can string together random nonsense and have your audience on it’s feet if you deliver it well enough. (Or watch anything by Tony Robins! )

For me, though, presentations and public speaking are about giving something of value to your audience. The presentation itself is simple ‘a means to an end’. The ‘end’ is the imparting of Something. That Something could be information, a skill, an opinion or whatever but there has to be Something. Otherwise we’re in the realm of what Shakespeare would call ‘Sound and fury, signifying naught’.

Dozens of times I’ve helped people out on public fora when they’ve turned up, joined the forum and immediately asked a question like “I’ve got to make a presentation on X in three days: help!”. When I ask them what they want to say in their presentation they’re flummoxed – it simply never occurred to them to do the research first and to have something to say before they started worrying about how to say it.

It’s a concept I’ve termed Communication Impotence sometimes (see my ebook “…like a brick wrapped in velvet…”).

Remember – it’s not always about how well you say it, it’s about what you say: all the presentation has to be (quality wise) is good enough to get your content over, after all. Content is king – presentation quality is more like the Jack; sometimes wild!

Hopefully what follow is pretty obvious: when you’re getting your presentation together, sort out what you want to say first.

There’s another advantage to the point I’m making here too, in that it can often help with nerves – no one turns up to hear you speak, they simply turn up to hear what you’ve got to say…. you’re not the focus of what’s in people’s attention. Your audience should be concentrating on what you’re saying, not you. You’re the messenger, not the message (usually).

Let me say something right from the start: I don’t believe people can learn public speaking or how to make presentations if they’re unduly anxious. That’s why our courses always have a relaxed, supportive and informal atmosphere. I like the whole ‘Consructives’ thing at Toastmasters. Got that? Good.

Thing is, having established an atmosphere like that, it’s perfectly acceptable to say “No, that wasn’t good enough”. Obviously, you only say that if you genuinely

• believe it;
• know what you’re talking about;

and preferably

• have a suggestion about how to improve things

but that doesn’t mean it’s not sometimes the right thing to say!

I have been struck recently by how bland some feedback is when it comes to presentations and so on. If I’ve made a pig’s ear of something it’s important I realise it’s a pig’s ear – otherwise how am I going to know it needs working on? It’s all very well and good saying X was good, Y was great etc. but what if Z stinks?

And while I’m ranting, why tell people their presentations was ‘good’ if it was, frankly, only ‘adequate’? To me, once we’ve established that I value your feedback and you’re not being spiteful, I absolutely need to know you’re going to tell me stuff I need to hear, not what I want to hear.

Here’s an even worse thought – could it be that the mediocrity of most public speaking means that people genuinely think that presentations are ‘great’ when the best that can objectively say of them is ‘they didn’t stink too badly’? As I’ve said before, to be relatively good all you need to be is not rubbish!

A while ago I wrote about a technique for the 30 second presentation you have to make when you’re networking in response to the dreaded question “…and What Do You Do?”

I recently came accross a similar philosophy today, using the image of a Baseball Diamond: the idea of the “Audio Logo” has a lot of resonances. Nice one, Mr Middleton!