tellingpeople ~ the presentation skills blog

One of the recurring responses I get from people who work with me about making better presentations is that they don’t have the necessary time to design their presentations in anything other than the quick-and-dirty approach of a hastily thrown together set of bullet-points. My response is often to look at the trade-off between the time it takes to design and rehearse a good presentation (compared to throwing something together) against the benefits/costs of successful presentations and failed ones.

A successful presentation which takes ten hours to prepare is ten hours invested. Two hours preparation for a failed presentation is two hours wasted….

By way of example, I sat through two hours of bullet-point information presented to me by a firm of accountants this week and, while I’m sure what they were saying was right and potentially useful, they wasted their time, because after slide number three of bullet-points that were droned on about, I lost the will to listen.

By slide 13 I’d lost the will to live.

By slide 42 I’d lost the will to let them live!

The result was that the three presenters wasted the two hours they spent talking (a total of six hours); plus, let’s say another three hours preparation time (running total nine hours); plus the two hours of everyone in the audiences (two hours times 35 attendees = 70 more wasted hours… a running total of 79 hours). That doesn’t include the time of the people who organised the event, or travel time for everyone. Including those figures we might easily be expected to get to over 100 wasted hours.

100 hours – think about it for a moment… 100 hours is a little over four full days, or 11 working days (over two working weeks!). It’s long enough to walk from London to Paris ad back again a couple of times (assuming a steady pace of four miles per hour and that you could walk on water to get over the English Channel! ).

A hundred hours..!… all wasted because no one was listening… because no one can listen to that level of bullet-point hell.

Setting aside the hours wasted, let’s think about the money. Most of the people at the meeting I’m thinking of were reasonable senior managers or self-employed. Even if we only charge time out at £30/hour for these people, that meeting cost £30,000 in lost productivity. That’s not counting the additional real cost of the folders, paper, petrol, room hire and so on!

Can I be absolutely sure the meeting was such a failure? Well no, I can’t be 100% sure because someone might have emailed the presenters after the event, but in the rather embarrassing rush for the door at the end, the presenters were conspicuous by the lack of people wanting to talk to them – from their perspective the meeting was certainly a failure as they got no clients out of it. From the audience’s perspective the meeting was a failure because we didn’t learn anything.

Listen to me folks – no one (NO ONE!) can listen to two hours of bullet point orientated slides. The time you spend getting your presentation sorted out is not ‘wasted’ – it is ‘invested’. The time you don’t spend on getting an effective presentation together is the time we all waste!

Last month was a big month for people giving presentations. Steve Jobs launches the iPad, for example and ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair gives evidence about the war with Iraq. To be honest, Mr Jobs had the easier time of it, for two reasons. Firstly, his audience wanted him to do well (whereas Mr Blair was being interrogated (albeit politely) – but more importantly perhaps, Steve Jobs had time to prepare and practise.

I’m sure Tony Blair practised too – after all one of the most common points made by commentators was that there weren’t any questions that he’d not already been asked, so it’s not as if he went in ‘cold’ – but Steve Jobs had the luxury of setting his own agenda and of rolling it out in front of his audience in his chosen order. Never underestimate how much of an advantage that gives you: it means you can rehearse your presentation coherently, for a start!

Of course, if you don’t rehearse, you’re not taking advantage of that opportunity and you’re deliberately putting yourself in a worse position than Tony Blair – the first time you open your mouth is the first time you hear what you’re saying. (At least Tony had chance to practise in other interviews!). Why would you do that to yourself?

So how much practise time do you need? Well that’s rather like the old question about the length of a piece of string. The answer is “enough but not too much”. Even worse than not knowing what you’re going to say next and being terrified (which the audience may very well not notice) is knowing too well what you’re going to say next and being bored (which the audience will certainly notice and not forgive you for). The trick is to rehearse until you know exactly what you’re going to say, but not necessarily how: in other words, you should always be able to predict your next paragraph, or even sentence but certainly not your next word.

Sorry to all who’ve tried to read this blog over the last few days. Some joker thought it would be funny to attack our ISP and consequently they shut down all the websites they host for three days. Hope you feel big, fellas.

One of the things we’ve been doing while the site was down is working on a community opera, with a mixed (but mainly amateur) cast… more fun than any job has a right to be. One of the things we taught them in this project was a few basic improvisation tools – the main one being accept, return and build: as we worked on it, it struck me how useful it was as a tool for improvised sections of presentations such as the question and answer session or when you realise you need to go ‘off script’ to deal with some particular need of your audience. It works like this…

Accept: this is the basic and most simple of stages. If someone gives you the gift of a question or point of information, simply accept it (If you don’t agree with it, accept it provisionally by saying something like “assuming for a minute that…”). Work with it.

Suppose someone asks you a question such as “What do I do if…”. There’s no point in replying, no matter how rightly, “Well that won’t happen so don’t worry about it”. The obviously are worried about it. Accept that and deal with it directly. By all means reassure them (and the rest of the audience, that the alien invasion during a presentation (or whatever!) isn’t likely, but don’t just fob the questioner off by suggesting it won’t happen at all so they don’t need to worry!

Build: give the questioner an answer – but don’t stop there. Generalise the issue so that it’s relevant to a lot more people in the audience. If the question is about an alien invasion deal with that first and then go on to say something about zombie invasions or attacks by giant ants…

Generalising to a wider context makes the rest of the audience feel more included. I’m constantly amazed at how much people take what’s being said as very specific and don’t really try to (or see how to) make it apply to their circumstances: help them.

Return: give the ‘onus of control’ back to the questioner, or to the rest of the audience. This continues the flow of the presentation. The most simple way of doing that is to say something like “Does that answer your question?” or perhaps more generally “Does anyone else find that they have a similar problem?” The idea is to use what you are talking about now to move the conversation on. If you don’t move a little way forward you’ll risk going around in circles, giving the audience a limited experience of your skills and not helping them with enough content. On the other hand, just starting something else is too much of a non sequitur and you’ll confuse people. The trick therefore is to use where you are as the starting point to talk about something else. By moving from the specific to the general you very much encourage this to happen.

Before anyone says anything – yes, I know, I’ve taken liberties with the tool, but I’m sure you’ll forgive me.

Okay, we’ve all seen lists like this before but we all ignore them. Why? Because we don’t want to believe that the things on them are sensible, in terms of our time; perhaps we don’t think we need to do what is being suggested – or perhaps we think we already do. Maybe we just don’t think we need to do it badly enough to put the effort it.

Think about it for a moment.. then recall the number of times you’ve read a self-help book and not done the exercises. For me, that’s a higher number than I’d want to admit. I’m sure it is for you, too. If I’d done all the exercises in fitness books that I’d ever read, I’d be the fittest man on the face of the planet. As it is, I’m not the fittest man on my street – and my street only has five houses on it!

So – to put it bluntly – there’s limited point in lists of

and

when it comes to making presentations and doing public speaking.

Quite apart from the fact that most of the advice in these lists is superficial (yes, I know I shouldn’t say Errrm a lot when I make presentations, please don’t tell me not to… tell me how not to!) the fact is that the advice, even when it’s good advice, all too often doesn’t get taken.

Why not?

To be honest, I don’t know; but I suspect it’s something to do with the fact that the motivation to change just isn’t there. People don’t change their behaviour unless the pain of not changing (or the benefit of making the change) is not great enough to justify the move and also great enough to overcome the pain of the actual process of changing. Given that I ask a lot of my clients sometimes, that’s a lot of pain they need to be in.

So what to do about it?

It seems to me that the answer’s fairly obvious. Instead of just listing the changes that need to be made by potential presenters, we need to think about why those changes need to be made.

What say you?

Most lists say I need to learn to breathe properly – sure, but how? Any what motivation would I need to spend time flat on my back doing the necessary diaphragm exercises?

Most lists say I need to make sure I know what my audience is like – absolutely, but how? And what motivation do I need to overcome my shyness about meeting them first?

Most lists say I need to make sure I don’t try and say to much – agreed, but how? And what motivation do I need to learn the techniques for designing presentations correctly?

What say you?!