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’ve posted (and perhaps even ranted!) about the 7% myth in the past. Now, at last, the man who did the original (mis-)quoted research speaks out. He did an interview for BBC Radio 4 recently. I don’t know how long the recording will stay live, so get it while you can. You can listen to it here.

In short – your presentation isn’t 93% the way you say things with only 7% what you say.

For many years I’ve been fighting the good fight about the myth that only 7% of the meaning of communication is in the words themselves; I ranted about it years ago, for example.

Just recently however, Olivia Mitchell waded in with a superb piece of writing. I commend it to you. It’s here.

In fact I pretty much commend the whole of her blog, for that matter!

I’ve spent a long time being self-indulgent recently, so I thought it might be useful to run through how one of my favorite slides evolved by way of redressing the balance ; it’s still not fixed in stone and may well change as/when/if I get the urge….

First things first – figure out what you want to say. In this instance I wanted the slide to capture the very basic things you need to make a decent presentation. I worked this out in the way I tend to do a lot… by using a simple spidergram to get all my ideas down onto the page in any old way. It’s more important tot get everything down than it is to get it right in the first instance – you can always impose formality later but trying to be too formal too soon inhibits the creative/cathartic process. I used a white-board in my office to do it but a large sheet of paper would do nicely – just remember to start somewhere near the centre of the page and don’t use too big a pen. (Otherwise there’s no point in using a bigger sheet of paper! )

I’d go so far as to say you shouldn’t ever turst a mind-map that looks too neat! That means someone, somewhere, has cleaned it up!

This one, on Olivia Mitchell’s excellent “Speaking About Presenting” website looks ‘real’. I can’t show you mine because I didn’t think to photograph the whiteboard when I’d finished….

Okay, so once I’d got everything down I walked away. In fact I went off for a cup of tea (hey, I’m British, don’t you know! It’s what we do!) to forget about it for a while. When I came back it was with fresh eyes. The next step is easy – just change the colour of your pen and link things together that ‘go together’. The idea is to find three (or four at a push) of the big ideas/concepts that lie behind everything in front of you.

In an ideal world, you’d spot three concepts and you’d be able to categorise every word before you to one of those three ideas. For example, on our public training days I run through this exercise with people, using the subject of ‘Making a perfect cup of tea’. Often groups come up with the concepts of

• consumables – milk, tea, electricity etc.
• tools – kettle, teapot, mug etc.
• process – the things you do such as boiling the water, pouring the tea, letting it brew

There are other ways of categorising things of course – don’t let that list stop you doing your own. So, back to my slide: it turns out that I came up with a classification of only three items:

• you need all the necessary skills of presenting – the kind of things I train people in
• kit – things like your slides if you use them, projector, props, microphone if you need to use one
• something to say – and the urge to say it…. the right attitude, you could say.

When you put that onto a slide, using PowerPoint’s (shocking bad) defaults, you get something a bit like this, perhaps, after a little thought…

…. hideous isn’t it!

And instantly forgetable.

To make it a little more “audience-friendly” I did some basic housekeeping: replace the title with a ‘headline’ if you can – something that captures the whole idea in just one catchy phrase and tidy up the bullet-points a little. The result is the kind of thing thats both still ugly as hell but also (sadly) what I see most of when I’m watching presentations…
… and that’s where most people leave it.

Now for those of you who are new to designing slides, take a deep breath and do two things. Firstly, replace your headline with an image that captures the whole concept in the same way the headline does. Secondly, cut your bullet-points down to single words.

Image-wise, I went for something that was just as scary as making presentations: something that required the same three attributes – which by now I’d abbreviated to simply, skills, equipment, attitude. I looked around my hard-drive and found a picture of my daughter doing her first sky-dive. From two miles up you’ve got to have the right combination of skills, equipment and attitude, I’m sure you’ll agree. If any one of them is wrong, things are not going to end well, not well at all. After much fussing around to get the image contrast right I ended up with this slide:

Much more attractive and much more memorable… in idea at least. Sadly the image doesn’t cut the mustard, so despite me being wedded to it because it’s person to me, and the time I’d spent trying to get the colours and brightness right (and so on!), the graphic had to go!

To be honest, that looks better on my screen than I expected, because when it’s projected it doesn’t look good at all – the contrast in the imagage isn’t up to the mark. I tried it out in front of a “tame” audience and didn’t get a good response – people were spending time figuring out what the image was, and what it was supposed to show: clearly it was mind-boggling-ly obvious but only mind-boggling-ly obvous to me. Maybe it’s because I’d been there when my daughter jumped out of the airplane!

A bit later, poking around google-images (and, I confess, a chat with my wife who made the suggestion of what to look for!) I came up with the idea of a space-walk. This is my current version of the slide: now doubt it will evolve more in the weeks ahead….. what do you think?

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!