tellingpeople

I’m a long-time fan of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I’m please it’s returning. Old-timers like me remember the big, fundamental gag that ran through a lot of the earlier stuff about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. They finally settled on the meaningless answer ’42’ purely because they couldn’t actually define the question properly.

A couple of friends of mine have asked what I thought of their presentations this week and been rather taken about when I asked them what the presentation was for. “It’s about X” I was told: or “I’m talking about Y”.

Sadly, that’s not good enough – your presentation can’t be about something, it must be for something. The question that a presenter needs to be able to answer is “What is your presentation for?” If you can’t answer that question, you run the risk of simply telling your audience lots of “stuff” – and that’s a bit of a blunderbuss approach… you might hit something, but it’s hardly efficient!

Don’t go and make a presentation “about my company” or “about my project”: make it “to encourage people to buy from my company” or “to make people interested in joining the project”. You’ll be much more effective, and efficient, that way.

I’m reading :59 seconds at the moment, by Prof Richard Wiseman. Despite the name, it’s not an action-thriller, with the rugged hero fighting to save the world in less than a minute… James Bond style. Instead, it’s about the things you can do which make life better (for yourself) in short, sharp bursts. Amongst other things it debunks some of the common self-help myths by pointing out that they’re actually not based upon any scientific research. (See here for ranting about an example of where research is mis-used but a quick Google search on “7% myth communication” will give you a couple of days reading!).

As a performer and then a trainer, I know that mistakes happen and that (usually) they’re not as obvious to the audience as they are to the performer who makes them. Okay, as a theatre technician I’ve made some boobs such as playing the wrong music for a dance, and there was no way anyone could have not known about that one, but you know what I mean…

Wiseman’s book provides some convenient supporting evidence for that experience.

In a short section about they “Spotlight effect” he describes an experiment performed on students at Cornell University by Thomas Gilovich. He established that the students at Cornell, in general, wouldn’t be seen dead wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt and then made a late-comer to meeting wear one. Cruel and un-natural punishment indeed!

After a couple of minutes the late-comer was taken back out of the room and asked to guess how many of the other students had noticed the Manilow T-shirt. Their guess was that about half of the people around them spotted their humiliation! However, when the other people in the meeting were asked to confirm this, it turned out that only about 20% of them noticed anything.

In other words, you feel worse than it looks to other people!S

We’ve just had a very nice new bathroom installed – and so for the first time in several years I’ve been able to enjoy the luxury of taking a bath (don’t worry, I’d been using the shower; I hadn’t started to smell!), That’s great for me, because I find time relaxing in a bath conducive to sorting out the overview and ideas for big presentations.

That lead me to wondering how other people design their presentations and to something we’ve been finding a lot recently – clients who design their presentations at the computer. Our advice is always the same – don’t.

As soon as you start using a computer, no matter how expertly you use it, two things inevitably happen. Firstly, you limit yourself to the ways the computer ‘thinks’ (by which, of course, I’m referring to the way the program you are using was written). Some presentations (and other questions of communicating with people) aren’t easily captured or recorded in a computer program and that limits your imagination.

Secondly, no matter how good you are at using a computer, part of your brain needs to be used in working the program, not in creating your presentation, and that limits your productivity.

Today’s tip? It couldn’t be more simple. Trust yourself to step away from your computer when you need to think about how to tell people things. And if your boss wants to know why you’re staring out of the window, tell him Simon Said…