PRESENTING IS SIMPLE (It's just not easy)

I don't care how you make the sausages

2011-12-22T17:16:00.001Z

I was reviewing a presentation for a client recently. He's a boutique consultant, with some very good ideas and the service that he and his partners have come up with centres on identifying savings and efficiencies for small-to-medium sized businesses, improving cash-flow in the short term and enabling those businesses to expand in the medium to long term. They have developed a strong methodology and have gained an invitation to present their ideas at ministerial level here in Ireland. So far so good.

Then I looked at the presentation.

30% of the landscape was logos and bands of color.

Every slide was awash with full-sentence bullet points.

All the info was presented up front on each slide - the busiest of which had 43 elements on it.

And finally, the core of their presentation was a lengthy discussion of their methodology, the elements it was designed to address, and the three pillars on which it was built (represented by a triangle, four circles, and a continuous improvement arrow diagram)

"I don't care how you make the sausages," I said.

"Pardon?"

"You're jumping straight into a long-winded description of your processes and the thinking behind them. I don't care how you make the sausages."

My recommendation to him was to produce one slide. A case study of Company X.

"We applied our methodology in Company X. They made savings of Y% over 6 months and grew by Z% over the next 12 months, hiring 5 new staff to accommodate all the extra business." [Irish ministers right now are very interested in projects that result in jobs growth]

"If the minister seems interested in this, then you produce one more slide. Case studies of Companies A, B and C."

Company A Savings X% Growth Y% New Jobs: N
Company B Savings X% Growth Y% New Jobs: N
Company C Savings X% Growth Y% New Jobs: N

"Then you can tell him you accomplish all this with a simple sausage and ask if he wants to know how you make your sausages!"

Image: Canstockphoto.com

Look at a recent presentation of yours. Chances are, there will be a flowchart or a process diagram in there. Like as not, it will have four apices with a continuous arrow feeding into each of the points. Or it may have three or five or even six apices.

Utterly generic.

I don't care if it's in 3D, I don't care if it was hand-rendered under a full moon by elvish princesses and cost you $5,000; if it's a process improvement diagram, it is UTTERLY GENERIC.

Not to you - you've sweated over every detail of it, you've questioned the utility and impact of every word in every part of every questionnaire you have designed. But to me - and hundreds of PowerPoint viewers like me - ya-awn!

That means, two slides into your presentation, my eyes are glazing over. That means I am unconsciously thinking of you as nothing special or writing you off as yet another snake oil salesperson. That means you have not piqued my interest or held my attention from the get-go.

So don't tell me how you make your sausages. Instead, determine if I like sausages. Determine if I need or want sausages. Tell me how your sausages have improved other people's lives. Give me benefits, give me happy endings and smiling faces. Then, once I've expressed real interest in your sausages, I may start asking questions as to their constituents and manufacture.

There's an old quote, frequently misattributed to Otto von Bismarck, about the two thing you should never see being made - laws and sausages. I don't know who the true coiner of the phrase was, but it was a good one.

I don't care how you make your sausages.

The Wright Brothers - Powerpoint

2011-07-22T13:12:00.001+01:00

Nice little page on Microsoft.com imagining how some events in history might have been talked about, planned, and presented if MS Office existed in days of yore. A bit of a step up from the Gettysburg Address PowerPoint here ...

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Related Posts:

Cinderella PowerPoint
Suicide note PowerPoint from The Onion (pretty darn sick!)

Gettysburg PowerPoint

Technical presentation by an "Infosec Rockstar"

2011-07-19T16:53:00.001+01:00

Mikko Hypponen presented at TED Global in Edinburgh last week. I've long been a fan of Mikko's due to an involvement in the Infosec space some years ago and follow him on Twitter. so when I saw him mention that he had locked his slides for TED:

I retweeted it with some amusement, wondering what he had in mind. Watch and enjoy - here is an amazingly technically-minded person talking to a bunch of ordinary folk, using props, pictures, live demos and just a little theatre to give a rich context to the problems we face now, and for the future, on the net.

Readers on RSS feeds will need to click through to the post - it's a TED thing, sorry.

A brilliantly conceived and executed talk that manages to simplify complex issues without patronising the audience. Watch and learn.

UPDATE: Mikko answered questions about his talk in an "ask me anything" session on Reddit.

Related Posts
How to smoothly move back and forth between apps when presenting and demoing
Doing something unexpected to snap your audience back to attention

Oh dear god! (A very special VC pitch)

2011-06-29T00:16:00.000+01:00

Oh. My. God.

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I don't wish to be churlish here, but it's hard not to notice that practically ALL of Ms Sequoia's slides consist entirely of bullet points. So even that element of possible respect and concern for her audience was left by the wayside.

H/T: Luke

My Dotconf 2011 talk

2011-06-08T17:18:00.000+01:00

I was invited to give a deepdive talk on presentation skills at Dotconf 2011 here in Dublin. The deepdive format is great - you give two 30 minute talks to two different audiences and based on the assumption that people know the basics of the topic - hence deepdiving.

I drilled in on a number of aspects of presenting and responded to questions that had been posted in advance on Twitter and Linkedin and by email. The two sessions ended up being slightly different in tone and focus, but I have summarised them with the 4 Point presentation below. I've annotated it so it makes sense, and I've left it run long so as not to clutter up the visuals. It takes about 6 minutes to click through.

4 Game-changers for Presentations

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Comments, addenda, questions and rotten eggs all appreciated.

Holy crap that's well-rehearsed Batman!

2011-05-13T21:57:00.004+01:00

The always-extraordinary Marco Tempest from this year's TEDx Tokyo. Watch it once and enjoy it.

Magic Projection Live @ TEDxTokyo 2010 from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.
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Now watch it again and pay attention to how fluidly Marco interacts with the film. Think about how much rehearsal that must have needed. Even if he's triggering each element as a mini-animation in its own right, so he can pause between the bits and take a rest, it's a massively demanding piece. The precision!

In recent seminars and presentations about presentation, I have centred the Rehearsal discussion around what the participants at the session typically do. My key question - what, to you, constitutes rehearsal?

It is interesting to hear how much "fiddling with slides" and "tweaking language" goes on at the last minute before going live. In my opinion, neither of those things constitutes rehearsal. Look it up because what rehearsal means, how it is defined, is probably not what you are doing in advance of your speech / talk / lecture / presentation.

I watched the rehearsal film that was released after Michael Jackson's death - This Is It. Boy, did that guy not leave things to chance! I watched the DVD again after the kids had gone to bed, just to see Jackson honing the details as the rehearsals progressed. He was talking about beats and pauses, getting a really low light that would show off his sparkly socks, how long the applause would last after one effect and the signal he would give the band so they could proceed. Every minuscule detail ... And given what we later discovered about the pain he was constantly suffering and the pharmacological cocktail he was taking every day, his professionalism, his attention to those minuscule details, is all the more impressive.

Now, to be fair, you're probably not going to earn 50 million bucks from your next presentation, no matter how many times you deliver it; so there is a cost-benefit element at play here. But how about this? I had a client who pulled us in for the latter stages of rehearsal on a good-sized tech conference a while back. He was open to trying ideas and very diligent and uninhibited in his rehearsal. When he stepped onto the podium, he lit up the building with his ideas, his energy and his confidence and the Twitter channel exploded with feedback about his talk. He knew that the conference was going to be a good opportunity for his company, but he had no idea how good. There were lots of decision-makers in the room, and a few international players and the next thing you know, he's landing contact after contact and contract after contract.

If you're going to speak to any audience other than your cat it's worth giving real consideration to your words and ideas. If there's anything at stake for your business as a result of your talk, you need to stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about your audience. Do them a favour, find some humility and do some grown-up rehearsal.

By the way, here are my two seminar slides on the subject of rehearsing:

Slide 1
PROFESSIONALS REHEARSE

Slide 2
AMATEURS DON'T

"I wanna sit at the front!"

2011-05-06T13:25:00.000+01:00

Ric Elias was in seat 1D on US Airways flight 1549. Five magnificently expressed minutes.

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Trimming down the bullets

2011-03-30T19:04:00.001+01:00

This one is from a few years back - a lecturer in a teacher training college asked us to look at his presentations following some very direct feedback from the student body. It was standard, soporific, headlines-and-bullet-points stuff, guaranteed to render any audience unconscious in minutes. A sample:

Pretty awful, but nothing we haven't all seen a thousand times before:

Slide overloaded with text.
Entire sentences up there, slavishly read out by the presenter.
All the elements displayed at once, so the audience is guaranteed to read ahead.
In short - a slide that is entirely for the presenter's benefit, not at all for the audience's.

And the whole lecture series was composed of slides like this. This was not a malicious, or even a lazy act by the lecturer. It had genuinely never occurred to him that his slides were this bad - after all, he had been using them without complaint for years, and he saw slides exactly like this every day, displayed both by colleagues and by his students. He liked the visual version of his material that we produced (we animated each of the three concepts to appear onscreen individually, in time with his talk):

His only concern was that, while he was intimately familiar with all the material in his lectures, he was used to having the 'crutch' of his verbiage up onscreen to refer to during his talks. We solved this by dropping the text of his bullet points (there had been an average of 3,000 words onscreen per lecture) into the notes section of his PowerPoint and showing him how to use Presenter Tools when he was lecturing. This had the added benefit of providing him with student-friendly handouts to put up on the server.

Are you still having endless streams of bullet points inflicted on you in your working life? Perhaps you are the one doing the inflicting? Why? Why are bullet-heavy slides like this still so prevalent? I was doing a look-see for a big law firm recently and their material was even worse than this - logos on every slide, page numbering, pointless floating elements, and lengthy paragraphs of text on every slide, rendering the presenter more or less superfluous. When I gently (I was gentle - honest!) asked them why they were so vested in this style of presentation they said:

This is what everyone else is doing - it's the industry norm.
We need lots of text on there for when we hand out the presentation after the talk.

If you are reading this blog, it is likely that you disagree with both of the defensive statements above. How would you disabuse them of these notions? Would the solutions I presented above work for a law firm? How would you get them to change? What would you say to them?

The full preso on how to avoid using bullet points is up on Slideshare (40,000 views, 3.5 mins to watch)

Your preso toolkit

2011-03-29T15:39:00.006+01:00

The first time I burned my fingers changing out a lamp in an overhead projector was a salutary lesson for me. From then on, I always carried a glove in my presentation bag. Over the years, the contents of my bag have evolved to reflect the technology that I am using and every now and then, I sit down and strip out items that I no longer use. But it's still a fairly long list - not that I'm a nerd or anything like that, I hasten to assure you. I guess this all comes down to (a) how you present, (b) how often you present and (c) where you present.

(a) I use my own kit when I present. Always. I am unfailingly, cravenly, nice to conference organisers and to the AV staff at any venue at which I am presenting; but I always quietly insist on using my own laptop and remote. For me, that's a MacBook Pro running Keynote, with my own preferred fonts, and all kinds of Quicktime Codecs for the embedded movies I use in my talks. My talks can't be exported to PowerPoint and the visuals lose a lot of their impact when I am forced to present a PDF version or a slideshow of JPEGs; this is why I quietly explain to the organiser that this is why it is better to just let me use my own kit. Tapping my equipment into the local AV setup is usually very simple, but I bring my own cables, extensions and adapters just to make sure:

10 meter VGA cable (this means I can have my laptop out in front of me and can use the Presenter Tools to full advantage).

Various VGA adapters to allow for extension / connection with the projector cables.

10 meter sound cable for speaker system (for small venues, I bring my own speakers) with various adapters so I can connect in to the local amplification.

10 meter power cable with 4-gang sockets.

Duct tape to secure all the cables.

My own remote control with fresh (and spare!) batteries. I alternate between the Kensington remote, which is chunkier and feels nice in my hand and, for larger venues, the Logitech one which has greater range.

(b) I present quite a lot so, statistically, the chances of something going wrong during one of my talks is growing by the day. As a result, it would be fair to say that I try my best to be prepared. A lot. Thus, in addition to the items listed above, I also bring:

Spare fuses for all my equipment.

A set of screwdrivers.

Gloves for handling hot lamps (I have been known to remove bulbs from light fittings near screens too ...)

A spare projector in the boot of my car in case the projector provided is damaged or of too low a quality. What is it about hotel conference centres? Don't they realise how important a decent projector is? I presented in one venue last year in which the projector resolutely refused to project any yellow hues.

For a major presentation, I would also have a backup laptop with the presentation tested, locked and loaded on it.

A PDF copy and a JPEG copy of my presentation stored in my Dropbox and on a USB stick - these can be used in full screen mode on any computer.

(c) Where you are presenting can have an enormous impact on the way you present. Is it a meeting room, a boardroom or a ballroom? Your flipchart schtick may not go down well in a cavernous environment, so it is always worth visiting the room you are going to present in or - at the very least - getting the organiser to email you a scale diagram of the room with power, light, network, sound and projection facilities highlighted. Even then, I would get along early and check out the space. (horror story below *)

Amplification. Small rooms won't need this, but larger audiences suck up a lot of sound waves, so you'll need to familiarise yourself with the sound setup. Far too many conference facilities have only a fixed-mic-on-a-podium setup. Don't let this come as an ugly surprise to you - if you need to be mobile for your talk, let them know early and get clarity about the equipment they are going to use. I bring my own well-worn, wireless lavalier mic with me and this can usually tap into the local setup, but sometimes it doesn't. Find out in advance.

Light - are you going to be talking to a small bright room or to a ballroom that has been plunged into darkness with only a dazzling spotlight trained upon you? This is not so good if your preso style requires lots of interaction and on-the-spot surveys by show of hands. Again, find out well in advance and tailor your talk accordingly.

I try to avoid using the internet when I am presenting as there are so many potential pitfalls. If there is a piece of video I want to show to an audience, I download it, convert it and embed it into my slides (this obviates the need to change apps in mid-flow). If I want to show a website, I take screengrabs and use those. If I do need web access, I usually go for a hard-wired connection and bring my own long CAT 5 cables. The web is a dangerous place in a live preso, don't make it the cornerstone of your talk - here be dragons!

* Horror Story: I presented at a major conference in the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, just after it opened. The conference room was basically a section of corridor with a bar at one end, a screen at the other, and a fabulous view of the hallowed turf of the stadium through an all-glass wall. Every presenter at the conference was going to be using slides, so the room and the projection facilities were very much front-and-centre.

Light was quite a problem and when I got into the venue the night before, I got the organiser to show me how to use the blinds to kill the direct sunlight that would be streaming into the space the next morning. We also needed to get a maintenance engineer on a long ladder to remove all the lightbulbs that were bathing the screen, completely washing out all the presenters' slides. Then we checked the projector. Both it and the screen dropped from the ceiling via remote control - all very posh and high-tech. The problem was that the room curved off to one side, following the elegant lines of the stadium. I projected a tester slide, this is what I should have seen:

This is what I saw:

Unbelievable! Some genius had not allowed for the slight curvature in the room when fitting the projector; and it looked to me as though the projector had never been tested, or even used, before. It took the maintenance guys over 90 minutes to sort this problem when their duct-tape-and-hope-for-the-best approach did not work. The staff could not have been more helpful and friendly, but I am very glad I did not discover these problems on the morning of the conference.

Joining the dots with data

2011-03-15T10:14:00.000Z

Oh my god.

Deb Roy receives a standing ovation at TED 2011 for an astounding presentation. He starts with the personal - the extraordinarily personal - and then zooms out to show the same tools analysing the wider world before coming back to a stunning finish that any parent in the room will just beam at.

Superb, low-key storytelling, mindblowing use of new graphical and analytic forms; told with love, respect and a real sense of wonder.

Enjoy

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Ignite - Enhanced fairy tales

2011-02-25T14:00:00.000Z

I was invited to Ignite Dublin #6 a few weeks ago and decided to do my PowerPoint-enhanced version of Cinderella. A lovely response from the audience and very kind tweets and links from Nancy Duarte, Guy Kawasaki, Linda Johannesson and many others to the video.

The judicious application of bullet points and animations can enhance any story. My kids don't like this version of Cinderella, but what the hell do they know?

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Embrace the bullet point! Resistance is futile!

Ask not what your country can do for you ...

2011-02-22T17:21:00.000Z

50 years later, the JFK Inaugural speech still resonates with anyone who appreciates fine writing. A stunning piece of rhetoric from a bygone era.

A great article here in the New Yorker about a just-discovered draft of the speech. I'm always fascinated to see or read about the evolution of a piece like this. I hope you enjoy.

Telling a story

2011-01-21T10:57:00.000Z

Graham Norton's show on the BBC is usually worth a look-see, as he has a knack for getting his guests to chill out and tell a good ribald tale. No sign of Sad Keanu here - a tight little story, very well told. I'm not sure why this tickled me so much, but it did:

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"Bone-white is really white!"

Your data is not boring - you are.

2010-12-14T07:24:00.002Z

Your PowerPoint is not crap - you are.

Your audience is not asleep because of boring data or crappy PowerPoint - they are asleep because you decided that there was something more important than producing an interesting, relevant, engaging presentation for your audience. They are asleep because you decided that all the rehearsal you needed was to fiddle with your slides for a couple of hours and mull over a few half-formed ideas the night before your talk. If 90% of presentations are average-to-poor, it's because 90% of presenters don't treat their audiences with respect.

I was working with some fabulous Neuroscientists and Psychologists last week who were talking about their experiences of presenting to audiences of peers and professors at major conferences. Their number one piece of advice?

"Don't waste your audience's time. Time is precious, and if there are 250 academics in a room, you are wasting 125 person-hours that could be spent reading, writing and researching, instead of listening to a bad talk for 30 minutes. Don't present unless you have something to say."

Great advice.

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The inimitable Dr Rosling shows how it is done. Forget the fancy, floating graphics and just watch how he does it. Observe how he sets the whole thing up; how he takes pauses to point out the big things we need to pay attention to; and how he chooses every syllable he utters with care and respect. This is a man who cares deeply about communicating his message. He is hugely passionate about his subject and takes whatever time and trouble is needed to ensure that he is communicating it to maximum effect. If he did this on a flipchart, it would still be amazing. Watch and learn.

A very articulate 15 year-old

2010-12-11T00:51:00.000Z

I suspect this splendidly passionate and articulate fellow may have read one or two of Mr Atkinson's books. Either that, or he is a scarily natural orator.

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Background: Our young friend here is talking about the London Metropolitan Police "kettling" thousands of young teenaged protestors at a recent peaceful demonstration. The Conservative/Liberal coalition government have introduced a range of education cuts and new fees in their austerity budget and students across the UK do not like the trend and are being most vociferous, and articulate, in their rejection of the moves.

Loooove Ignite

2010-11-05T12:45:00.000Z

I love Ignite and was so sorry to miss Defuse this week. The next Ignite Dublin will be ... soon I hope. In the meantime, enjoy Tom Scott from Ignite London earlier this year. Great pace, great delivery, and really innovative slides:

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Rehearsal really really matters

2010-11-02T22:29:00.002Z

A lot. Really. A lot.

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"Forget everything else and just say it to me"

2010-10-22T08:59:00.000+01:00

I literally cannot count the number of times I have said that to a client.

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I'd just like to say this here and now - if Geoffrey Rush utters the phrase, "Think of me as your personal Insultant your majesty" I'm suing!

Can't wait to see this film, it's got a cracking cast and the subject matter is very close to my heart.

The King of data presentation

2010-10-08T00:30:00.004+01:00

The inimitable and always-excellent Dr R is back, this time at TEDx Change from a few weeks back ...

1. Look at how masterful he is at the very outset as he lays out the 8 criteria for success and then his almost poetic summary of that.

Learning point: he has his material down cold. I suspect that if Dr Rosling's computer exploded in the middle of his presentation, he wouldn't miss a beat and would start energetically drawing on the walls to illustrate his point. I'd love to know what his rehearsal routine is. I must ask him ...

2. See how he takes his time and gives the audience plenty of time to absorb what they are about to see?

Learning point: take your time! If your material/data is important, it's worth taking some time to ensure that your audience can follow you in your presentation. As always, he sets up and explains the axes, explains the origin of his data and explains why it matters. Almost no other presenter of complex data ever does this. I wonder who his crash test dummy is? His dog? A cynical 11 year old? I must ask him ...

3. Watch how he tells a story, with a timeline and characters - the Demographic Health Survey, the UN, Himself and, most importantly, the children of Kenya.

Learning point: 2+2=4, while being accurate, true and inarguable is not particularly interesting. Find the story behind your data. Think about how it will, or should, matter to your audience and then think about how you are going to tell that story. Dr R makes it look easy, conversational even. I wonder how long it takes him to come up with his story? I must ask him ...

4. A key observation - Dr R has one big fat hairy point to make and along the way he makes some huge observations. One that really resonated with me was: "Time has come to stop thinking of sub-Saharan Africa as one place. The countries are so different! ... We don't talk about Europe as one place."

Learning point: distil your thinking. What's your point? If you only had 30 seconds to say the big fat hairy thing that matters from your presentation, what would you say? I love when Dr R tears a page out of the latest UN report and proclaims it to be "Crap!" With such a bewildering array of data coming at him on a daily basis, I wonder what filtering mechanism to good Doctor uses to distil his message down so effectively? I must ask him ...

5. Notice how animated Dr R is - and I don't mean his all-singing, all-dancing Gapminder animations. I mean him. His voice, his prowling back and forth across the stage, his liberal and effective use of his ginormous pointer.

Learning point: passion is infectious. Monkey see, monkey do. If you have no passion for your subject, you can't reasonably expect your audience to have any passion for it. Actually, scratch that - if you have no passion for your subject - stay at home! I don't think I need to ask Dr R where his passion comes from. I do wonder did he always have the courage and lack of inhibition to wear that passion on his sleeve as he does so effectively now? That - I must ask him ...

Without further ado - Dr Hans Rosling of the Karolinska Institute. Enjoy.

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Related Posts:

HIV stats done right

A presentation Dr Rosling gave in Ireland
The solidified law-ser beam
Rosling on TED

Clever use of Whiteboard by White House

2010-10-01T23:07:00.000+01:00

Smart rhetoric, very well delivered in plainspeak and nice, non-slick 'graphics' on the whiteboard.

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Clever.

Nervousness - it's not just you. Really.

2010-09-14T16:57:00.001+01:00

The old saw about not comparing your inside to other people's outside became an old saw because it is TRUE!

I have been closely observing presenters since the late 1980s, professionally since the early 1990s. I would make the following observations:

If they're not keyed-up, they are almost always poor-to-dreadful.

Keyed-up is not the same as paralysed-by-fear.

If they are keyed-up and well-rehearsed to boot, you (the audience) are probably in for a good time.

If you have any doubts about this, charm your way backstage just before the curtain goes up on a professional play; it's worth the visit – calm, suave, beautiful, highly trained and impeccably rehearsed actors just dying because the curtain will be going up in a few minutes!

Data Visualisation - making sense of the numbers

2010-08-24T09:31:00.000+01:00

I love Dr. Fred Menger's great line - "If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything."

David McCandless is a wonderfully subversive Data Miner - subversive in that he regularly uses his infographics to point out the absurdity of much of the 'data' reported in the media. He spoke at TED Global last month in Oxford. Here is his excellent talk:

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Typography - Pt 1

2010-07-16T13:41:00.000+01:00

More of this material here

Early poster design work from Buckled Cranium - a young Irish film company [disclosure: BC is run by my beloved godson Luke]

Really, really nice use of typography.

Hans Rosling TED Cannes - Global Population statistics

2010-07-10T17:38:00.000+01:00

Always a breath of fresh air, Prof Rosling outdoes himself with this talk:

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Words, tone and body language

2010-07-07T16:13:00.004+01:00

The words you say.

The tone you say them in.

The larger non-verbal cues you use to put them across.

We can all agree that all three of these elements are important in the communication of your message in a negotiation, a job interview or in delivering a presentation. But can you do a neat pie chart of how much impact each of those elements has on your audience? As with so much of life, scientists answer that question by saying, "It's not that simple." [How very tedious!]

In Where's My Oasis? I included a brief chapter on body language, highlighting the elements you need to become aware of in your practice for face-to-face situations. I posted some thoughts on your verbal tics and irritations and some other thoughts on Phil Schiller's physical and vocal presence when he stood in for Steve Jobs at an Apple keynote here on my presenting blog. Here's what I wrote in Oasis:

Psychologists across the world argue as to just how much information we communicate with our bodies; but put a group of them in a room together and they will all agree that we receive very little information merely from what people say.

UGLY FACT No. 9: Just 10-30% of all the information an interviewer takes on board will be as a result of what you say.

Harsh eh? (With the obvious exception of a telephone interview). Okay, an interview is a rarified circumstance. Most of the candidates will be trying to say the right thing and to not put their foot in their mouth as they speak. Many of the candidates will be displaying a certain ... moral flexibility ... when it comes to the truth, and will either be economical or inflationary with that truth. Which means that interviewers, over time, learn to become very interested in how you say things - sometimes to a greater extent than what you are saying.

How different is that in a presentation setting? Lots of "It depends" qualifiers in response to that. Your audience will listen to how you say things a great deal if you are one of 20 start-ups presenting to a group of VCs, but if you are the all-knowing professor delivering a fact-based, 101 lecture, your students will be almost exclusively concerned with what you are saying.

Which brings us to the Mehrabian Myth that only 7% of the information that human beings take from one another derives from the words that we speak. This is obviously twaddle, based on multiple misinterpretations of the research and I loved the Creativity Works' simple debunking of the notion:

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If you still need to read more on this, I'd recommend Olivia Mitchell, Lisa Braithwaite and Max Atkinson's thoughts on the subject.

Presenting data

2010-06-28T09:49:00.000+01:00

Can't wait to see Prof. Rosling's new talk from TED @ Cannes - including his latest technological breakthrough in the analogue presentation of data.

(Pic credit: TED)

He's ba-ack! (Sir Ken)

2010-05-25T23:40:00.000+01:00

One of the best of the best, doing what he does best ...

RSS readers may need to click through to the post - it's a TED thing, sorry.

An unusual presentation by a CEO

2010-05-14T11:24:00.000+01:00

I don't know about you, but when certain CEOs, from certain airlines, open their mouths I regularly have to suppress my desire to respond in the same 'service with a snarl' motif with which their staff consistently treat me.

Rob Fyfe of Air New Zealand however, breaks this mould. Great presentation response to an erroneous piece of reporting by a New Zealand newspaper. Click through for 3 very innovative minutes:

There are times when you need to learn your stuff off by heart

2010-04-29T23:30:00.000+01:00

... and the closing remarks of a final political debate is one of those times. Brown, Clegg and Cameron finished the third debate tonight and Clegg blew his close.

I haven't closely reviewed the tapes yet, but he had 90 seconds to say his piece and he kept breaking eye contact with the camera lens to look at his notes. Clegg's words were by far he most powerful of the three closing statements and if those words had appeared to come from his head and his heart, they would have been superb. But he was tired and he had to keep checking his notes.

It will be interesting to see if any of the pollsters pick up this as being a contributor for Clegg's flattening out.

By contrast, although Cameron comes across as an oily dilletante, he stared straight down the lens and gave it with both barrels for his close.

Sometimes you just need to learn your stuff off by heart.

If PowerPoint is the answer, it must have been a stupid question

2010-04-29T18:16:00.000+01:00

"Enlighten us, but make it quick"

5 minutes, 20 slides, auto-advancing every 15 seconds - I love Ignite; so I was delighted to be invited to speak at Ignite Dublin a few weeks ago.

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I was mortified to be the only speaker who over-ran his time on the night. I could blame my butterfingers, my lack of a lavallier mic, or admit to under-rehearsal - but after extensive consultation with my PR people, we've decided to lay the blame squarely at Satan's door. My 15% over-run was plainly a consequence of my attempt to unmask the Lord of the Flies' pernicious activities using his unthinking minions in Redmond.

H/T to Demetri Martin for the wonderful pie chart.

The 10 Commandments, Mk II

2010-03-15T12:13:00.000Z

Christopher Hitchens with an interesting text-based presentation on that most non-controversial and easily agreed of subjects, the Ten Commandments.

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Twitchy body language, but easily eclipsed as a distractor by Mr H's impeccable pronunciation, intonation and clarity of thought. I really liked his tagline at the close.

Sit up straight! I'm about to read to you!

2010-02-22T12:38:00.000Z

It would appear that Mr Scott Adams is a reader of presentation and speaking blogs. Where else could he possibly have got this idea?

If you have artistic talent ...

2010-02-05T10:04:00.001Z

... PowerPoint need no longer be your tool of choice. Extraordinary lightbox and sand images from the winner of the Ukranian version of Got Talent:

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I very rarely see business presenters bringing their artistic talents into their delivery - apart from an occasional smiley on a flipchart. It's a pity, because if you have any talent in this area, it can make for a very arresting addition to your presentation. The UberAnalyst, Declan Chellar illustrates his own PowerPoints and blog posts with his highly memorable cartoons. I liked this example from a presentation on requirements analysis:

So the client describes their need - "I want to get a person to the other side of this gorge."

"No problem," says the Analyst, and tells the coding team what's needed and the coding team build the best cannon you ever saw. Result - unhappy client."But I need (a) for the person to be alive when they reach the other side of the gorge and (b) it would be kinda cool if they could come back across the gorge too."

"Gaaaaaah!" says the Analyst. "Why the hell didn't you tell me that back when we were doing requirements analysis?"
"Well I just sort of assumed you'd know - ya know?"

"So what you're really telling me is that you need a bridge?"
"I guess I am. I realise it's not as exciting as the cannon, but it's what we need."

And when Mr Chellar delivers this, it's a ~~highly memorable~~ never forgettable message.

Think about what talents, skills or party pieces you can bring into your presentations to make them more effective ...

Hardware tip for seamless presenting

2009-12-17T13:39:00.003Z

If you have to present multiple elements over the course of a seminar or long meeting, it can be very annoying for your audience as they watch you jumping around from app to app and or from one slideware file to the next.

Nowadays, most computers have sufficiently powerful graphics cards, that you can use the 'Presenter View' in PowerPoint ('Presenter Display' in Keynote) and I have written about the value of - nay, the essential need for - these tools - in the past.

Using a multi-screen approach requires that you have an extended desktop with a second monitor - either a physical large-screen TV, or a data projector - connected to your computer. Here's the trick:

When you are setting up your system at the beginning of your session, open the desktop control panel and change the background colour for the display monitor to white.

That means you can move around between apps and files to your heart's content on the desktop of your actual computer, while your audience remains blissfully unaware of how much technical fiddling is going on in the background.

Most of my lectures and training presentations are on white backgrounds now, which makes this technique work particularly well. I set my screenshow view options to present all my slides on the second monitor, giving me my messy desktop, my tools and notes on my laptop. You should also set up:

A browser window set to full screen for anything you want to show live from the web (I simply hide or minimise this once it's set up, then use a browser window on my laptop to find what I am looking for and paste the URL into the display window when I want to show it).
A video tool and DVD player - set the full screen option to show videos on the big screen.
A graphics app to show images, similarly set up to display on the main screen - I use slideshows in iPhoto and present single images from folders using Preview.
A PDF viewer similarly set up to display on the main screen.

Using this set-up, I can retrieve anything from the bowels of my computer and have it up on the display screen in a matter of seconds; very useful in an interactive session where questions need to be addressed straight away.

Another simple strand to this technique is to have your PPT files open on your laptop in 'Slide Sorter' view. This gives you the flexibility to jump around in your presentation, and skip something you may have already covered in response to an interjection, or which you have discovered is not going to be or relevance to this particular audience.

I recently used this file and skipped Section 3, which is all about fonts, saying "We've already covered Section 3 in our earlier in-depth discussion of onscreen fonts [click - display the number 3 slide] so I'm going to jump on to point 4 here [click - displayed the number 4], and talk about everybody's favourite subject - bullet points" [click - and proceeded with the preso]

We have all sat through talks where the presenter clicks frantically past a series of, "We don't need to get into this material" slides. Far better that you accomplish that seamlessly and without your audience's knowledge.

I say again, this approach is primarily needed in longer sessions, be they meetings, training days or lengthy seminars; but no matter how long or short your talk, it is very useful to be able to bend the technology to your will, rather than having to slavishly follow its whims.

RTFM.

Sometimes it's the simplest things

2009-12-11T22:02:00.001Z

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H/T: Grannymar

Wouldn't it be great if all teachers worked this hard?

2009-11-16T17:27:00.000Z

Nerdy, but very, very good:

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PowerPoint turns 25 - on radio

2009-10-14T15:42:00.002+01:00

I wonder if the guys and gals of Forethought Inc ever thought their app for helping visualise complex statistical data (imaginatively entitled 'Presenter') would be used as widely as it is now, 25 years later? I was asked to deliver a PowerPoint presentation to celebrate the 25th birthday of the inception of PowerPoint. So, there are 50 people at a business breakfast in a Dublin city centre cafe and I have to answer questions about the good and the bad of PowerPoint to them from the the moderator, the excellent Mr John Murray.

So far so good. Poke fun at PowerPoint to a live audience? Who ya gonna call? [hint - not Ghostbusters] Hoo-ah!

"Ah yes," say the nice people at RTE, "but you also have to make the presentation comprehensible, useful and enjoyable to the 300,000 listeners on the wireless radio."
"Hmmmmm ... Have you ever seen a braille version of PowerPoint?" I ask.
"Can't say we have," chirp the producers.
"I suspect there may be a reason for that," I opine. [It's true - sometimes I opine]

So, what was going to be an all-singing, all dancing PPT extravaganza, was very sensibly condensed down to a few, cheap-laugh, slides while I dealt with Mr Murray's thoughts and questions on the topic. It was great fun to do, but I felt a bit like Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea-party ...

Here's the audio of the piece (about 7 minutes including a soaring version of Happy Birthday, sung to PowerPoint by a 15-strong choir. Really.)

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And here are the slides I put together to get the conversation going. I was sorely tempted to compile this preso in Keynote, but I was battered down by the scary hairy creative types in the basement, who felt my credibility might suffer as a result. [Ha!] So I was a good boy and used the old workhorse:

View more presentations from Rowan Manahan.

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post - it's a SlideShare thing, sorry

We've come a long way from the 1987 press announcement in the New York Times that Microsoft were acquiring Forethought Inc for $14 million:

"Forethought makes a program called PowerPoint that allows users of Apple Macintosh computers to make overhead transparencies or flip charts. Some industry officials think such 'desktop presentations' have the potential to be as big a market as 'desktop publishing'"

I also loved Mr Gaskin's original product proposal from 25 years ago. You can find the full document on his website.

[Click to enlarge]

Happy birthday PowerPoint.

"If only I had the time ..."

2009-09-23T15:40:00.002+01:00

I have lost count of the number of times clients have said that to me. My thoughts on people who produce and deliver cruddy presentations citing "lack of time" as the rationale for the cruddiness:

If it's not worth doing properly, what makes you think it's worth doing at all? The most common outcome of a company hiring me for Presentation Skills training is that they do a lot less presentations. And those remaining few presentations have the desired effect – they are worth attending, they make the sale, convince the sceptical, or whatever ... But no-one is sitting through an interminable list of bullet points and indecipherable flowcharts anymore.

If you don't have time, don't deliver it as a presentation. Most corporate presentations consist of a bunch of people sitting around a table working their way down through a document – and then some genius thought it would be helpful to project that document up on a screen at the end of the room. Suck it up, kill a tree and PRINT the wretched thing. Do not make someone stand up with chunks of War & Peace projected on the wall beside them.

Would you be happy to pay money to watch a play in which the actors visibly didn't know their lines and which rehashed sets and props from other plays you had recently seen? There would be a riot on opening night. And make no mistake folks – each and every presentation you sit through, directly or indirectly, costs you money.

We reward all forms of information and entertainment with our attention and punish those that displease us with lack of attention. That's fine when you can click off the latest lousy sitcom and watch something well-crafted instead. It's not so fine when you are stuck in the room with Mr Bear-With-Me-While-I-Read-These-75-Slides-At-You ... We punish bad presenters by ignoring them but seeing as most of them are too busy reading their slides to notice that lack of attention, I think we need to step it up a gear. Crocodile pits have been mooted for a long while now, but no-one seems willing to take that first step. On the phone-in television Talent shows, they have the ubiquitous X for each judge. This can be a little mean when they make the lickle girls cry, but it would be a great idea in a meeting room. We could all start channeling Simon Cowell:

"You have no belief in what you are saying, you obviously haven't got a clue what you're talking about as you're continually referring to your notes, I can read faster than you can talk, and your slides look crap to boot."

It's got to stop folks, and it won't while we continue to tolerate lazy, clueless, self-centred presenters. What can you do to 'up the game' at your place of work? What can you do to make the lousiest presenters in your organisation 1% more aware of how lousy they are. All the 12-Step programmes start with the Acceptance step and acceptance requires insight:

"Hi, I'm Rowan and I'm addicted to bullet points ..."

What can you do to grant a lousy presenter in your life that smidgen of insight? Have a look at this extraordinary advertisement:

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post.

They shot 60,000 photos, developed almost 10,000 prints and then shot over 1,800 photos again, using no post-production techniques to produce that glorious ad. The equivalent that we tolerate every day in our working lives would look like this:

Do a presenter a favour today – tell them how lousy they are. You might want to use fractionally more diplomatic language than Mr Cowell [or me!], but do them, and yourself, a favour and tell them that what they are doing now is not good enough.

Related posts:
Rehearsal = staleness?

Finding images online

2009-08-21T07:45:00.003+01:00

Now that Yahoo have given some whistles and some bells to the Flickr search results:

Click to enlarge

I see that the nice folks at Google have riposted with another update on their image search. Nice features down the left hand side.

Click to enlarge

So now, it's easier than ever to find those alarming, hi-res, images of Bono's nasal hair ...

Presentation animation - keeping it simple

2009-08-10T12:45:00.000+01:00

Have a look at this one and see if you get a couple of ideas

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Productive workflow when working on a presentation

2009-07-28T08:00:00.001+01:00

I usually get to the slideware quite late in the process of producing any of my talks and I try to instil the same approach in my clients. My build usually goes as follows:

Who are these people?
The big idea
The core points
The words I'm going to say
The images I'm going to use to augment my talk
Hone / Rehearse / Hone / Rehearse / Hone ... ad infinitum

Thus the Keynote (or more usually PowerPoint) part of the presentation tends to happen at quite a late stage and when it does happen, it tends to be quite intensive and focused, as I have done all my basic thinking by then.

So I get really jangled when anything holds up my flow as I'm building the physical presentation. If I'm working on a Mac, I generally have Keynote or PowerPoint on my main monitor, with iPhoto and Firefox open on the second monitor and, if I need to fiddle with images, PhotoShop running in the background on the main monitor. If I'm working to a tight script (and I usually am), I'll have the Word document with the verbiage up on my second monitor. With this setup, I can work seamlessly, flipping back and forth between apps, like a somewhat rotund Flying Wallenda.

I was working at home over the weekend on a piece for a client in PowerPoint 2007 using a Dell laptop running Windows Vista. The first thing I noticed was the lack of desktop acreage really slowed me down. I was flipping between the script and the PowerPoint file quite comfortably; but whenever I needed to rummage out an image or check a detail on the web, things started running like molasses and that spinny blue wheel thing gets really tiresome after a while. I ended up printing out the Word doc, just so I could close that app and spend a little less time waiting for the computer to get its act together.

Oh – and my favourite! Every time I plugged a USB stick into the Vista machine, the same rigmarole took place. It thought about it for a little while and then popped open a window offering me a dozen alternatives as to what I could do, including the thing I did every time, which was open the stick in a new folder and review the files in it for copying and transporting. Every time. Somewhere around the seventh time, a persistent tic began above my left eye.

I haven't had to work from scratch like this on a Vista machine for quite a while and I pity anyone who has to work in this way on an ongoing basis. With 4GB of RAM and a reasonably zippy chip, all the upgrades and patches known to man and (if I say so myself) unstinting patience on my part I still spent an inordinate amount of time watching the spinny wheel while the computer took its own sweet time to wind down one operation and slowly grind another up to speed. Maddening!

My desktop machine at the office is a pre-Intel Mac, with just 2GB of RAM and yet it runs all those apps, and three times the pixel acreage of desktop, with nary a delay in sight. Also, it has iPhoto, which is an invaluable archiving tool for image libraries. This media library is built into Keynote, but is nearly as quick to use with PowerPoint if it's open on a separate monitor. Most of the blurb out there on the app stresses its use as a family-and-friends-happy-memories tool. But it is a superb image library in its own right for stock photography and other images. You can search in an instant and export images to whatever size you specify, or just drag them across onto your presentation. I haven't experimented yet with building a photo library on my Vista machine and, given my experiences of the operating environment thus far, I'm not going to bother.

So when I came upon my friend GL's take on Vista today, I had to smile a rueful smile:

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I will have no truck with tools that answer me back. If I pick up a hammer, it's because I want to drive a nail into a wall, not because I want to have a conversation with my hammer about whether I really want to drive a nail today, and have I considered using rawlplugs and screws, and anyway don't I want to upgrade to Hammer Service Pack 23?

I'm no evangelist for anyone, but I have found a way of working that means my tools never, ever, argue with me. I can see why so many people still use built-in templates and death by bullet point - using the system I was on over the weekend, anything else is just too much like hard work! If you have to create a lot of presentations, I would suggest that you look around and make sure that you have the optimal toolset for the job.

If I went back to Dell and told them I wanted a refund on my Inspiron because it was "not fit for purpose," due to an operating system that renders it effectively worthless to me, I don't suppose I'd get very far. I wonder what would happen if 10,000 people did the same thing at the same time? Or a million? From what I understand, the market has roundly rejected Vista and no one in Microsoft seems to want to talk about it at all – mumbling on endlessly about Windows 7 instead. All I will say is that if you are looking for a productive workflow to produce anything other than an endless stream of bullet points, avoid Vista like the plague it is.

Doing something unexpected

2009-07-23T08:00:00.001+01:00

I came across this in The Telegraph a while back and it raised a smile.

It seems the PA announcer at Leicester railway station in the UK is adding in a little thought for the day to help brighten up commuters' journeys. John Palmer said: "I was telling passengers the train was pulling into St Pancras and reminding them not leave behind any luggage or personal belongings. I suddenly decided to slip in at the end of the announcement the question 'Why don't sheep shrink in the rain?' I got some favourable comments and the next week I decided to do it again and it's really just built up from there."

On Wednesday, 24 June, he reminded passengers that the Battle of Bannockburn in the Scottish Wars of Independence was fought on this day in 1314. Earlier this week he asked: "Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?" while last week he reminded passengers: "When in Rome, a street map of Cape Town isn't much use."

He began making unusual announcements while a guard on trains between Derby and London. "I do it because it's a harmless way of brightening up people's days and perhaps because it puts a bit of personality to the voice behind the tannoy."

So you're presenting the monthly health and safety statistics to the management team tomorrow? What can John Palmer teach you about how to make those statistics memorable to your audience? It's a serious subject, I don't think a comedic schtick is the way to go on this – but what would you do to raise the audience from their torpor?

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Effects

2009-07-19T11:00:00.002+01:00

Really nice, it's amazing what you can do with the simplest of tools:

Earth, just swallow me!

2009-06-20T07:55:00.000+01:00

Turn everything off! You can't be too careful when you are presenting ...

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H/T: DR

TEDx Dublin Overview and Pics

2009-06-12T23:30:00.000+01:00

So ... I'm a TEDster.

Just back in from TEDx Dublin. I'll provide more detail in a later posting, but here's a quick overview. 100 or so of us in the auditorium in the Science Gallery in Dublin, with an overflow video feed room next door. Three speakers and two video talks for an excellent hour and 40 minutes in all.

TEDx Dublin twittered its way into life as a result of Dr Aaron Quigley from my alma mater sticking a couple of 140 character musings up into the cloud some 18 days ago. Some of the nice folks in the Science Gallery saw his, "Wouldn't it be cool if ...?" tweets and said, "Why, you can do the show right here in the barn!" [pretty nice barn by the way] then TED HQ said, "You've got some peeps? You've got a barn? A speaker or two? Go fer it dude!" [I may be paraphrasing fractionally, but you catch my drift]

Dr Scott Rickard kicked then night off with a jaw-dropping demonstration of his sound separation software, DUET. My takeaways:

Someone putting on a Michael Bolton track in your house is grounds for justifiable homicide.
Subtraction and division are advanced mathematics. Knowing that, I feel so much better about my performance in secondary school.
Scott did a canned demo of the separation on the fly with a John Coltrane track. This was just a piece of a track from a Coltrane CD that he ripped and then did his separation magic on:

Red for sax, yellow for piano, cyan for bass and blue for drums. He then topped that in a big way by getting three TEDsters to babble into a fixed stereo mic in three languages (Spanish, Irish and, unless I am sorely mistaken, Klingon) and then separated out the sources - perfectly! - live and on the spot. I'll never feel safe grousing at a family party again.

First video talk was the demo of the Sixth Sense by Pattie Maes from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab. A great talk, if you haven't seen it already - link here.

Then our tame Kiwi, Mark Billinghurst from the HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury gave an excellent overview of the background, relevance, and future applicability of Accessible Augmented Reality. "Bringing AR to the Masses" looked at getting over the technology, will and funding hurdles for this world-changing interface. I liked his read on the Gartner Hype Cycle and the trough of disillusionment [isn't that The Dip by a much longer name?] as it applied to his technology:

His video clips were excellent and I look forward to seeing them again when TEDx Dublin is hosted and posted. I loved the fact that all this arose because Mark was disappointed to find that the VR holographic communication from Star Wars did not exist in reality.

I look forward to the Virtual IKEA catalogue. Mark finished with some very cool lessons learnt from his time working on this Reality:

Video number two was the infectious and effervescent Robert Full talking about Biomutualism – where evolution can teach engineers and vice versa. A fascinating talk on the adhesive power of the Geckos's foot and the multivarious functionality of its tail and how the engineers learnt so much from the biologists in this mutual exploration.

The final speaker of the night was Blaise Aguera y Arcas [he of the amazing Photosynth demo from TED 2007] talking about recent developments in that space in a talk entitled: Cyberspace arriving - Using computer vision to reconstruct and connect the world.

Blaise gave us some insight into the challenges underlying the Photosynth project. Yes, there are 88,000 images of Piazza Navona available after a simple Bing search [ :) ], but the vast majority of them are below 1 megapixel (way too small) and nearly all of them are taken from the same shooting position (way too lacking in imagination), with the result that you end up with a few major clusters of information, but far too many disconnects to synthesise the pics. He illustrated this problem with some analysis of the pics available for Ta Prohm, one of the lesser-known temples at Angkor Wat:

A couple of nice big detailed clusters (basically the front and back doors) with a little bit of 'connective tissue' between them, but nowhere near enough to make for a comprehensive synth. You simply cannot wander around Angkor Wat using Flickr photos.

Bummer.

However, he noted that the very existence of the PhotoSynth technology and site is causing some photographers to alter their behaviour and showed examples of individuals who had become almost Terminator-like with their grids of shots of major locations – systematically quartering the site from every angle.

An excellent talk, showing us the potential of this exciting new tool. As Blaise put it,

"PhotoSynth can grant us superpowers. Soon, we will be able to teleport anywhere in the world, extending our abilities and our senses, our perceptions and understanding of the world around us."

Roll on TEDx Dublin 2 ...

Presenting - they shouldn't notice your technology

2009-06-09T00:20:00.000+01:00

I loved Laura Bergell's response to the oh-so common request: "Great presentation! Can I have a copy of your slides?" Laura's answer is: "My PowerPoint slides are my props. They're not my presentation."

I get asked for my slides every now and then. Usually the asker says they want to use them to persuade people in their company that there is a way of presenting that doesn't require an endless stream of text. While it's flattering to be asked, I usually gently deflect the request by sending the person to my blog and/or to my public presentations on SlideShare.

On one hand, I echo Laura's sentiment – my presentations usually make no sense at all if you read them as a standalone – but there's more to the question than that. Broadly speaking, I have noticed that I get asked for a copy of my slides by four types of people:

Competitors who are looking for free materials.

Potential clients who are looking for free advice.

Potential clients who want to evangelise in their company using the material.

Techies, who want to play with the toys and who want to see how we have built the presentation.

When any of those groups ask me for a copy of my slides, I usually have a slight pang of disappointment, as I have the feeling that the graphics and technology may have distracted the asker from whatever message I was propounding. *

The technology must never, never, distract from the message. Because the vast majority of PowerPoints are nothing more than an AutoCue for the presenter, if they are heeded at all, they distract by irritating the audience. That's why a graphic-rich presentation still stands out a mile, even in supposedly enlightened 2009. But it's also why you have to be so careful in building a presentation that consciously minimises the use of text. We've all seen presenters who are trying, but who don't quite make it:

Distracting or pointless visuals.

Noticeable transitions or animations. [As a rule of thumb, if you ever find yourself wondering "How did s/he do that?" the animation is too obtrusive]

Lack of cohesion in the visuals – a hodge-podge of clipart, stock photos, stick figures and Google Image/Flickr grabs of varying resolutions.

Clashing colours.

Inappropriate fonts.

Interesting little clip from MSNBC on a fairly well-known presenter whose use of technology is becoming noticeable and sometimes distracting ...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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On one hand, Mr Obama's detractors are working very hard to place this he-can't-speak-without-the-Prompter concept into the zeitgeist; presumably in an attempt to distract from the message he is propounding. It's hard to view this as anything but sore-loser, mealy-mouthed talk, especially given that no modern President opens his mouth in front of any audience without prepared remarks sitting in front of him. I would also make the point that any senior executive is wasting time if they are learning off speaking points for minor events – and if The West Wing illustrated anything, it was that the President of the United States spends a whole lot of time speaking to hockey teams and primary school groups – all of which makes using the Prompter the sensible thing to do.

On the other hand, Mr Obama's detractors have a point – not because he relies heavily on the Prompter, but because he doesn't use it very well and, for his less-than-soaring rhetorical moments, that can distract from his message. I haven't noticed him 'blow it' on the prompter during an important speech, but his ping-pong head movement does become noticeable when I see him doing minor stuff under the 24 hour glare of coverage.

He should slot a few hours into the schedule here and there, get a few straight-talking experts to instil improved skills in this area into him, and let's start listening more closely to what the man has to say.

The technology must never distract from the message.

Related Posts:
Prepared remarks - Richard Nixon
Getting distracted by Phil Schiller

* Oh, and my other answer to people looking for my slides? "It's a Keynote file. Do you use Keynote?" That eliminates more than 90% of requests straight off ...

Pitching - Dragon's Den

2009-05-29T00:30:00.000+01:00

A great spoof on the BBC's Dragon's Den with our intrepid entrepreneurs making just the slightest of boo-boos in the midst of an otherwise flawless pitch:

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I particularly love the profuse sweating. Saddlebags!

For a further treat, you can click on through to this charity special Dragon's Den, in which a Victorian gentleman named Krapper pitches a "home body-waste dispenser," seeking an investment of eight shillings and sixpence ha'penny – well worth your click methinks.

God I love the BBC!

2009-05-22T00:01:00.000+01:00

There are films and there are turkeys and there are movie reviews and there are live, unanaesthesised eviscerations:

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That movie reviewer sure do talk purty – and fast! This whole piece reminds me of my beloved Opus, when he was the movie reviewer for the Bloom County Beacon ...

The Design Police

2009-05-15T08:00:00.000+01:00

Remember Lynne Truss' Eat, Shoots & Leaves? A book much admired by curmudgeonly, grammar-loving anal retentives everywhere. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. A grammar book – albeit a very funny grammar book – selling like Dr Phil's latest offering? Apparently Ms Truss' book sparked hordes of people carrying thick markers crossing out redundant apostrophes and correcting spelling errors on public signage.

It's nice to know I am not alone in this world ...

In the same vein, I love the Design Police site – for when a document or presentation makes you wince. They have a disclaimer saying they do not condone vandalism or criminal damage. Wusses!

Hans Rosling - HIV stats

2009-05-13T16:59:00.000+01:00

He's ba-ack! HIV in under 10 minutes:

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post – it's a TED thing

Just stunning. THIS is how you present complex statistics. And by that, I don't mean that you have to invest in all-singing, all-dancing, GapMinder software, I mean you need to be:

100% on top of your data
100% willing to break down the axes and explain what the charts mean [up to and including clambering all over the furniture as Dr Rosling does]
100% capable of explaining why that data is noteworthy/relevant
100% clear about the bits that are going to be of interest to your audience
100% passionate about your topic
100% capable of solidifying a laser ("law-ser") beam into a solid pole

UPDATE: Prof Rosling very kindly commented and invited us all to visit Gapminder to play with the material there. If you are someone who ever has to present statistical data, it's a must-see, for everyone else, have fun with the toys.

More Rosling:
A presentation Dr Rosling gave in Ireland
The solidified law-ser beam
Rosling on TED

No really, there's a gorilla ...

2009-05-08T13:49:00.000+01:00

Just watch:

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Big H/T to the ever-excellent What Would Dad Say?

Proofread your presentation!

2009-05-08T01:00:00.000+01:00

The extraordinary Taylor Mali. 'Nuff said.

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Outbang - phasing your presentation

2009-05-07T00:01:00.002+01:00

I was watching Nancy Duarte's excellent advice on how to deliver an effective remote presentation, and I was particularly struck by her excellent illustration of one of her points – mapping out your presentation:

Even if you are presenting nothing more exciting than the management accounts or the debtor's ledger, your presentation has a rhythm. It has a beginning, a middle and an end and it has beats.

Your thinking on this must start with the most fundamental question – what is the purpose of your presentation? What information do you want your audience to digest, what action do you want them to take, what change in their mindset do you want to effect? When you are clear, really clear, about that, you can sketch your thoughts out on a sheet of paper. I have always taken this approach to formulating my talks and I have spent many years hauling over-eager clients away from their Slideware in the early stages of presentation planning. Map it out, use a small number of words or phrases and think only about how your audience will feel receiving this information, not how you will feel delivering it.

I did a talk for an industry group recently, and that industry is feeling major pain in the Irish recession. Phones not ringing, tumbleweed blowing down main street, 33% reduction in the workforce (so far) and sectoral feedback that they have not yet hit bottom. My message to them was simple:

EVOLVE OR DIE

I broke the talk up into three sections:

What the market is saying about you

Wrapping your head around this new reality

The 3 keys – Relationships, Adding value, Integrity

Not exactly earth-shattering stuff, more like someone-has-to-say-it common sense; but very well-received nevertheless. A bucket of cold water in the face, followed by some headline-level thinking on how to rapidly re-invent yourself in a market that says it doesn't need your services right now.

I started on the back of an envelope, expanded to a single A3 sheet, and when I was clear on what was staying and what was going in the talk, I started thinking about the beats ...

1. What the Market is Saying

Simple, almost flat, opener. (sombre with one little laugh)
Placing the sea-changes that the industry is going through now in context. (big examples, heads coming up)
The market feedback – ouch, ouch, ouch. (pin-drop silence in the room, shocked faces)
However ... there are a couple of glints of light. (furious note-taking)

2. Your New Mindset

Lie down and die?
Get up and fight?
Hold on for dear life and hope you are the last person standing?
Evolve?

3. The 3 Keys

Needs VS Wants (examples, mix of light and serious).
Get into their heads – understanding your customers' pain.
1. Add value or go away (examples of places to look for business – more furious note-taking).
2. Relationships – no-one wants to deal with strangers right now.
3. Evolve with integrity – (examples)

And I finished with an "Outbang"

The wounded caveman (sombre – a lot of recognition on faces)
Back-reference to the stand-up-and-fight joke from earlier in the preso (not at all sombre!)

I define an outbang in a presentation as, "Taking back control of the room (usually after Q&A). Bringing eyes, attention and mindset to the place you want to bring them. Your big finish, the strand they walk out of the room remembering."

One Mr Steven Jobs has become famous for his "one more thing" in his keynotes – those are outbangs. [I would point out that massively irritating 1970s TV detective, Colombo used to do the same thing – "Oh, there's just one more thing. You forgot to take your fingerprints off the bullets. You're under arrest!" – so it's probably fair to say that there really are no original ideas left out there ...]

Too many presentations just ... sort of ... fizzle out ... with a limp "Thank you" at the end. Instead, try wrapping up the main part of your presentation and finishing with an outbang.

Have a look at this wonderful piece of video (workplace safe, but kinda loud):

You can find the YouTube clip here because they've disable embedding.
Right click and open it in a new window, have a look and come on back now, y'hear?

My breakdown of the very carefully constructed beats in this less than two minute routine:

Establish attention with slow build and then BANG! into the core, synchronised stuff. (15 seconds – we own the stage)
Bring in some variety on the core synchronisation – some left, some right, some high, some low. (15 seconds – we own the entire theatre)
Break and let the audience 'come up for air' for a moment. (5 seconds)
TADA! as gymnastic kid with 'Awwwww' factor springs on from stage right. (10 seconds)
Big change of pace into hilarious, iconic, film reference. (10 seconds)
Bring all eyes onto one spot on the stage and let the cat out of the bag. (10 seconds)
Down to business – tight, smart, innovative, synchronised. (20 seconds - remember us? We own this place!)
Bring all eyes into one spot on the stage with another 'Awwwww' moment. (10 seconds)
Big, kick-ass, synchronised finish – with stillness to let the audience come down.

These guys understand beats and controlling an audience's eyeballs (notice how their costumes help in that regard, the white palms on their gloves, the way they hide and reveal their faces with the peaks of their caps) – on oh so many levels. The question is, how do you get those beats into your next presentation of the trial balance of the monthly management accounts?

UPDATE: My boys above, Diversity, went on to win the entire Britain's Got Talent series, even beating Susan Boyle who got the Oprah appearance and 200 million views on YouTube. These guys understand phasing and peaks in their presentations like few other acts I have ever seen. Catch them all over YouTube.

UPDATE 2: M'man Adam has a superb analysis of the 'Boom wow-wow-wow BOOM' structure of a good show over on Work.Play.Experience. He's always worth a visit, but this post is superb.

Slide makeovers - good and bad

2009-05-06T11:00:00.000+01:00

There are lots of sites and blogs which point out the foibles and follies of SlideWare, indeed I've done it here myself a number of times. Inevitably, there is a spectrum among these sites – some are good, some are very good and some are not good at all. I came across two slide makeovers recently that I thought I might share with you. One very good and one so bad, I madeover the makeover.

The Good
Jan Schultink over at Slides That Stick did a tremendous overhaul on a financial performance slide from Skype. Here's the before:

Click to enlarge

And here's the after:

Click to enlarge

Now, I'm no graphic designer [I have the hairy scary bunch in the basement who fulfil that function] but to my eye, this work is excellent and to my presenter-brain, it is even better. The point of the slide is to illustrate the tremendous, consistent growth the company has enjoyed. That message is significantly diminished by the clutter and clumsy handling in the Before version. But just look at the clarity of the After – job done. Click on over to Jan's blog to read his thinking on this overhaul, it's good, good stuff.

The Bad
Dave Paradi did this slide makeover as part of his makeover video podcast series. Here's the before:
... which we can all agree is a stupid and audience-irritating way of presenting this information. Here's Dave's take on the after:

... which I think is just awful! It's cluttered and fussy; he leaves already-presented material sitting on the screen; and there are too many elements onscreen (although to be fair, Dave does introduce them sequentially in the podcast). This was very interesting data, which leaves no room for argument in the death-by-bullet-point discussion, but I really don't think this makeover does justice to the material. My sneaking suspicion is that this slide needs to make sense to a reader after the event as a leave-behind, hence the squishing and clutter.

Now, don't get me wrong, I've read Dave's blog and he knows what he's talking about and has produced a book through a reputable publisher on this topic. Here's some video of Dave doing his stuff – and he's good. His research is strong, his points are clear and his delivery is fine. But I can only assume that Dave was having a bad hair day when he produced the above, because this makeover needs to be madeover:

What people hate about your slides

View more presentations from Rowan Manahan.

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PS: Friend-of-the-blog, Ed, was also less than impressed by Dave's makeover. You can find his cogently expressed thoughts on this slide here and he also madeover the makeover:

Slide Makeover... of a Slide makeover

View more presentations from edfk.

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Arguing with a hammer

2009-05-01T08:00:00.000+01:00

An hilarious, and eerily familiar, description of a tech failure by Sabrina, who was presenting at the FOWD (Future Of Web Design) conference in London. I can't do it justice, just click on the pic and head on over. By the way, when you are there, do have a rummage around, Sabrina's blog is the biz and her work is stunning.

The post title refers to my unwillingness to engage in negotiations with my tools. I pick up a hammer, there's a nail going into the wall, no discussion. I boot up a computer ...

The mighty Rands

2009-04-28T06:00:00.000+01:00

I've been a Rands reader for as long as I can remember. A very interesting post here on mastering your presentation software; but the post is made more useful by the insight it gives into his mindset as he prepares a talk.

Presentation Kung-fu? Eerily reminiscent of Damian Conway's Presentation Aikido methinks ... typical of Rands' wry style. Clicky clicky - it's well worth it.

Is it just me or are all the best stand-ups dead?

2009-04-24T06:00:00.000+01:00

Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Richard Pryor. Oh, no, hang on! Dylan Moran is still with us. And Tommy Tiernan. Demetri Martin. Scratch that ill-considered title – we've still got a few proper funny-men. But Mitch Hedberg is dead – and he was gooooood:

A lot of times, I'll drive for like 10 miles with the emergency brake. That doesn't say a lot for me, but it really doesn't say a lot for the emergency brake.

I want to hang a map of the world in my house then I’m gonna put pins into all the locations that I’ve travelled to. But first I’m gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won’t fall down.

One time, this guy handed me a picture of him, he said,"Here's a picture of me when I was younger." Every picture of you is when you were younger. "Here's a picture of me when I'm older." "You son-of-a-bitch! How'd you pull that off? Lemme see that camera!"

My sister wanted to be an actress, but she never made it. She does live in a trailer. She got half way. She's an actress, she just never gets called to the set.

An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.

And my favourite:

I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.

The speech you never gave

2009-04-22T12:00:00.000+01:00

It happens to us all – a big presentation gets cancelled, your part of the pitch gets pulled or you decide to leave out a section of a presentation that you had worked on long and hard.

I was working with a client recently on a major presentation and we had included a very nice aside that set up an important point. But as I heard him deliver it in rehearsals, I realised that the presentation had moved on since we had originally included that aside and that it was no longer necessary.

So we pulled it.

No hesitation, no recrimination, no regret for all the time invested in putting it together, scripting it and rehearsing it. Gone. And the presentation will be the better for it.

Then, while finalising the closing remarks of the talk, my client was told by the powers-that-be that he couldn't use his intended closing – apparently, some very thin-skinned personage is going to be in the room and the powers-that-be don't want the hint of a risk that this august person might take offence.

Cue frantic scrabbling as we tried to come up with a new close. And there it was – our dropped aside. It set up the new close very nicely and my client now has a stronger presentation because of it.

Funny how these things happen.

This weekend, I came across a speech that Richard Nixon never made. Sitting in the archives are all his prepared remarks, including a version of a speech relating to the lunar landing in 1969. Penned by William Safire, the words would have been used if Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had not been able to leave the moon's surface and rejoin the orbiting command module:

In the event of Moon disaster

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edward Aldrin, know there is no hope for their recovery but they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied but these men were the first and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the Moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

Great words, and even better that they did not have to be used. Never be afraid to put your good stuff back in the cupboard.

If content is king, design is the castle

2009-04-18T16:00:00.000+01:00

In a homogenised world, of similar products, serving similar functions, at similar prices, how do we make our purchasing decisions? Whether those decisions be which kettle to buy or whether or not to accept somebody's ideas during a presentation?

Yes, the kettle needs to boil the water. Yes, the chair needs to support my weight. Yes, your idea needs to make sense. Yes, the MP3 player needs to hold lots of songs and fit in my pocket. But they pretty much all do ... Time and again, content and substance is taken as read. So what else does that leave you with?

A significant, and largely unconscious, part of this has to come down to design. Just as we eat with our eyes, we decide with our eyes

I'm really looking forward to Objectified:

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This film is from the same people who brought you Helvetica. Gad! A film about a font! And it was good. Really good. Blogging really is bringing out my inherent nerdiness. I need to go and find a small furry animal to hunt and kill for my dinner now ...

Speaking off the cuff

2009-04-14T20:09:00.000+01:00

I'm watching The Speaker on the BBC as I write this. The contenders have been asked to step up in Wembley Arena in front of the three judges and deliver an off-the-cuff speech of 1 minute in duration on the topic of "Why I should win this competition." The contestants are required to address the judges in the empty arena (normal capacity 12,000) using a megaphone.

Tough challenge. Many dry mouths and loooooooong pauses.

My immediate thought is that I would step aside from myself and have a double-header - one character saying why this excellent fellow, Rowan, should win and the other character (Rowan) essentially demurring and saying, "Thank you very much."

I've only seen one with any humour or positivity in her delivery thus far.

More to come on this.

A great presentation - compelling slides supporting an excellent talk

2009-04-09T14:00:00.000+01:00

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's talk from TED this year, where he shows how to use Game Theory to predict large-scale negotiations. I noticed that his slides were particularly strong in illustrating his talk and wasn't surprised when I found reference to them in a Duarte Design blog post detailing the makeover. The 'Before' slides are spectacularly bad [think Thomas Barnett bad :) ]. It's great to see what a little time and effort can do to boost what was always going to be an arresting talk.

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post - it's a TED thing, sorry.

Lovely post here too from Apollo Ideas with a clear example of breaking up a bullet-pointed slide into a far more memorable and effective series of images. Give them some clicky goodness - it's well worth your while to see how simply and well this can be done.

Cirque du Soleil - a mindblowing presentation

2009-04-07T09:01:00.000+01:00

I went with my family to Quidam, Cirque du Soleil's current touring production.

Mind-blowing – to see the entire cast hopping in patterns through six sets of overlapping skipping ropes.

Mind-blowing – to see one clown command pin-drop attention from 10,000 people with a wave of his hand or a turn of his head.

Mind-blowing – to see Adam and Eve test the capabilities of the human body (in slow motion) in this piece called Statue:

Just mind-blowing.

If you ever have to present to any audience in any setting, go to Cirque du Soleil and pick up some ideas. [Even the way they present the map of the world on their website is just wonderful.]

A presentation without pictures

2009-03-28T00:01:00.000Z

Hang on a second Robo, isn't a presentation without pictures just a speech?

Well yes, it should be, but not in this case.

In this case we have Mike Rowe (from the Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs) giving a highly evocative and visceral [you'll see what I mean in a moment] presentation about shooting an episode of the programme on a sheep farm. No video, no pictures, just Mike in a black shirt against a black background – an absolute paucity of visual appeal.

But he talks. And boy, can this man talk! "Let the words be the pictures." His thoughts on the world of work and our attitude to the people around us who do the invisible, thankless work are just superb. In Mike's world, imitation and repetition are every bit as important as innovation and design genius – the value of skilled, manual labour has been eroded to an unhealthy extent.

I always enjoy the moment when I have brought a client to a self-sufficient level in their application of narrative and their use of the slideware and we arrive back at first principles. Words, voice, emphasis, delivery. The music of the language. The emotional impact of one word versus another. The power of a pause ...

I have added Mike's talk to my examples folder for this topic, because he's an old-school orator of the highest order.

Enjoy:

And let us not forget that it was not electricians, carpenters or farmers who brought the financial markets to their knees – so who really does the 'dirty' work on our little blue planet?

If you have a lot of time on your hands ...

2009-03-26T09:00:00.000Z

Maybe you could design a presentation that is one tenth as cool as this:

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I always have a lot of fun when I present Cinderella, but this is just superb.

H/T: Information Aesthetics

Because it's Monday

2009-03-16T08:01:00.000Z

Baz Luhrmann gave us his version of Romeo & Juliet in 1996. I remember my 10 year-old godson coming barreling into my house procaliming how fab and exciting this film was and had I ever hear of a fella called William Shakespeare?

Mr. Vince Connolly (God rest him) was my inspirational and extraordinary English teacher in secondary school. He was the man who let us know that it was okay for big strong men to appreciate beautiful language and even to be moved by it. [I remember his excitement many years later when I told him I was going to the Royal Shakespeare Company for presentation skills training]

But it was at that moment, with a 10 year-old babbling with excitement about a film he had just seen, that I understood the brilliance of Shakespeare – that his work could be enjoyed by illiterate 16th century peasants standing in the mud, as well as by scholars. That it could have equal appeal for a gifted 10 year-old and to those whose hearts Leonardo DiCaprio makes beat faster.

For anyone who doesn't like the "Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em" approach to presentation, I always recall the Prologue of Romeo & Juliet. Out steps Chorus, usually dressed in simple black and declaims the famous, "Two households, both alike in dignity ..." speech. Chorus tells you the whole story [including the ending!] but does that detract one jot from what you then watch? It never has for me. So, by all means, tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em; but do it really well, do it intriguingly, catch and hold their attention.

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How about Luhrmann's news anchor approach to the Prologue?

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Or, for those who like a more visual style, how about Luhrmann's somewhat more frenetic/kinetic delivery?

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DiCaprio was a great Romeo, so good I forgave him Titanic, The Man in the Iron Mask and The Beach. And while Clare Danes was a little indistinct for my ear, she was so lovely she made you realise why someone would be willing to die for Juliet. So, just because it's Monday and I lurve you, this is the meeting scene at the Capulet party:

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What your audience is thinking

2009-03-14T08:00:00.000Z

Don't mind me dawg - but I finished reading all your bullet points before you had fully explained the first one and now I'm twittering all my friends about what a lame presentation this is ...

Andrew Lightheart from the excellent Real. Smart. Now. blog, which conveys honest-to-goodness presentation superpowers upon IT professionals has shared some thoughts he twittered during a morning of presentations at the IDC Cloud Computing Conference. Some of my faves:

If you’re using a non-standard chart, explain the significance of the graphics in general, before talking about the specifics.

If you say your video is short, make it under 120 seconds. Otherwise say how long it is in minutes.

If you ARE talking to a tech/specialist audience DO use jargon as a shortcut.

Repeat after me: Teaching is the new selling.

Multiple bullet points make me go ‘Ok, what’s your point?!’

And the coup de grace:

If you don’t want to go through all the POINTS why put them on the SLIDE? Didn’t have time to prepare things for me? So kind.

Click on through and enjoy the rest. And while you're there, be smart – subscribe to Andrew's blog. A more on-target set of posts on the practicalities of business presenting you will not find.

[08.00 on a Saturday morning? A bit out of character I realise. But we got a puppy and guess who gets to do the early morning housetraining? Deep sigh.]

Another marvellous source of presentation ideas

2009-03-12T09:01:00.000Z

Academic Earth. Lectures from the brightest and best academics out there on a broad range of topics. Stunning stuff, can't recommend it highly enough. Click on the pic ...

H/T: Mark C.

Shiny toys ...

2009-03-12T09:00:00.000Z

So, you know the way I railed against ever owning a mobile phone for ever such a long time?

And then I railed against WAP and and all its associated twaddle?

And more recently, I was a little cross about the cost, pricing plans and lack of key features on the iPhone here in Ireland?

Yeah ... well ... shuddup.

I feel a bit like Giles from that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "All red and sporty ..."

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Scott Adams is, as ever, on the money:

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All black and sporty – little trollop! My rationalisation is that I can use it as an ass-kicking remote for my Keynote presentations. So there!

What makes for an effective presentation?

2009-03-02T10:00:00.000Z

The age-old question.

Well, it's not the knowledge level of the presenter. We've all been bored to tears by subject matter experts who could probably be cited for breaches of the Geneva Conventions, so awful are their presentations.

It's not shiny slides. Great graphic design doth not a great presentation make.

It's not a fluent, personable presenter who tells a great story – too many times this deteriorates into a triumph of style over substance and you walk away having enjoyed the honeyed words, but feeling vaguely dissatisfied because there wasn't really any point to the presentation.

So what is ingredient X? What makes for an effective presentation? How about starting with this?

If any of the four C's are out of kilter, your presentation won't achieve what you want, or need, it to achieve:

"I see where you're going with this Robo. I understand you perfectly and I care passionately about what you've just said. But I don't agree with you, therefore I am going to take action different from that you were hoping for."

"I see where you're going with this Robo. I understand you perfectly and I couldn't agree more with you. But I don't give a damn about your topic, I don't see what's in it for me and therefore, I'm taking no action at all ..."

And so on. Deep sigh. And the real problem with feedback like that above is that you never get feedback like that above. Those are the unspoken thoughts of your audience. How do you crack this?

The end-all, be-all of this is that presentations that are going to be effective require hard work. Lots of hard work. What continues to amaze me is that when I get into the nitty-gritty of this in training sessions 100 percent of corporate audiences tell me that they (a) wouldn't be allowed present outside of the current bullet-pointy model and (b) wouldn't have the time to design and deliver what they recognise to be an effective presentation. Both of which, to my ears, are variations on the theme of, "I don't really give a damn about my audience."

The only organisations where I have cracked this are when we have been called in at the senior-most level and have had our ideas embraced by the CEO. Suddenly his/her tolerance for bullet-pointy presentations evaporates and his/her Officers and Heads of Function are forced to dramatically revisit their approach to presenting. The change I consistently observe when this happens is ... a lot less presentations. When you have to be good and when your audience is highly critical, highly vocal, and consists of your boss, you tend to pick your battles. Same number of meetings, but far fewer presentations and those that are made are of a much higher quality.

Thoughts?

Related posts:
Placing a value on your audience's time
A stunning presenter

Your first 10 words - a follow-up

2009-02-12T23:00:00.000Z

My post on grabbing your audience's attention from the outset generated a really interesting contrarian view from Olivia Mitchell. I was going to keep responding back and forth in the comments, but I asked Olivia's permission and we're posting it here in the hope that it will keep the conversation going and widen that conversation.

This piece is a bit wordier than our usual fare here, but I hope you will agree it is worth it. One of Olivia's earliest posts on her excellent blog was on this topic – you can find that post here [with some very interesting comments] and I highly recommend reading it. My original post on grabbing your audience's attention is here and my dialogue with Olivia is below:

Olivia: I'm a contrarian on this subject. I don't think it's necessary for non-professional speakers delivering everyday business presentations to be so focused on the first few words (though I would agree on avoiding your first example). There's 3 reasons for this:
1. Many people are most nervous at the start of a presentation and I don't think it helps them to be thinking "I must get my first 10 words absolutely right".
Rowan: Thanks, as always, for your thoughtful points Olivia. My thinking: (1) It is precisely because so many people are nervous at the outset of their talks that they should have their opening so carefully worked out. A well-scripted and well-rehearsed opener means the presenter can focus where he/she should be focusing – on the audience. It's like when you get into an unfamiliar car and spend time fiddling with the ignition key, the light switches and learning where reverse gear is – rather than keeping your eyes on the road.

Olivia: Maybe it would be useful to make a distinction between a strong opening and an attention-grabbing opening. We could define a strong opening as one where the speaker sounds confident, is clearly organised and doesn’t waffle. The audience gets the feeling that, “Yes, this person is prepared and in control and this presentation is going to be a good one.” I think every presenter should aim for this result. An attention-grabbing opening is where the presenters starts with, say, a startling statistic or an intriguing story. I think this can be effective for some presenters and for some presenting situations. But I don’t think people who are nervous or who don’t have much experience should feel like they have to have an attention-grabbing opening.
Rowan: Smart distinction Olivia, I like it.

Olivia: Point 2 – I interpret the graph you've shown as saying people are already paying attention at the beginning of your presentation (therefore you don't have to grab their attention). But you do need to hold it through the middle of the presentation when attention is likely to flag.
Rowan: In my experience, that classical U-shaped graph rarely happens in the real world. The audience has the potential for highest attention at the outset, but presenter after presenter blows that potential with a weak opening. In the age of 500 TV channels, audience tolerance is a thing of the past – particularly in business settings. I'll be posting separately about the other end of that graph and how the high attention is rarely achieved at the closing either.

Olivia: I think it does happen often in the real world. The graph above is one that John Medina uses in his book Brain Rules and which is referenced to a research study. It measures the self-reported level of attention of students during a university lecturer. I do acknowledge that there’s not a huge amount of research on this issue and it would be great to have more solid evidence. There may also be cultural differences to in the amount of time an audience is willing to give a presenter before fading out.
Rowan: I loved Brain Rules, but my work in academic environments has showed more ruthlessness than that kindly 10 minutes of attention. Nowadays, unless attendance at the lecture is mandatory (and measured), below-par lecturers in Irish universities are seeing very low attendance rate – students just download the notes or presentation from the server rather than sit through lectures with no added learning value delivered by academics who simply read from the PowerPoint. A slightly tangent, I realise, but with habituation to application-switching on computers, 500 channels on TV, and thousands of songs at the touch of a button, I can only describe the behaviour of most audiences now as ruthlessly intolerant – particularly young audiences. And that's before we even get into the business environment ...

Olivia: The common public speaking advice that you must have an attention-grabbing opening is borrowed from advertising. For instance in Toastmasters many years ago I was taught to use the AIDA structure (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) used in advertising. In advertising you do have to grab the prospect's attention to get them to read the rest of your ad – but not in speaking/presenting. Your audience is right there waiting to hear you speak. So although I agree that the audience will switch off if your presentation is going nowhere, public speaking advice tends to overdo the "attention-grabbing opening."
Rowan: I well remember being taught the AIDA approach both on marketing courses and in sales training. Funnily, I've never had anyone use it in any speaking/presenting courses I've been on, rather I've heard lots of references to theatrical and filmic 'grab-their-attention' approaches. The majority of my work is in corporate environments and it's true that when the CEO steps up to speak to the financial community, everyone is listening intently, even expectantly. But for more humdrum presentations, my experience is that you have 20 seconds or less. I liked Gladwell's thoughts on the 'thin-slicing' phenomenon in Blink and I've certainly seen them borne out time and again when credible, knowledgeable presenters fail to catch their audience's attention and out come the Blackberries ...

Olivia: Point 3 – I think for a normal business presentation it's more effective to start in a conversational tone and build rapport with the audience.
Rowan: For an internal update or low-key presentation, I agree with you. Conversational is probably the route to go. But if it is a presentation with a serious business purpose, if there's the potential for significant gain (or loss) as a result of the presentation, then I would argue that your opener should feel natural and relaxed to the audience, but that they should find themselves captivated without really knowing why ... And I've encountered few, if any, presenters who can do that without giving the matter deep consideration. To paraphrase Mark Twain: "It usually takes me about three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech."
Olivia: I agree with this. There is a shift happening from a formal speech-making approach to a more conversational approach. It requires concentration to listen to a formal lecture. A conversational presentation is easier for people to listen to and to process. That’s because we listen to and process conversations every day.

It is understandable that so much focus is given by trainers and writers in this space to "making a good start." What Olivia has made me realise here is that so much of that advice is acted upon so badly. But I don't think that makes it bad advice. As I have cast my jaundiced eye over myriad lousy presentations over the years, I have come to the conclusion that this all comes down to humility and effort. If it's a brainstorming session, then you may not need to put much advance thought into what you are going to say. Likewise for an informal review session that is more discussion than it is presentation.

But if it is a presentation, if there is something riding on the outcome of your efforts, then it requires real effort, especially for the beginning when you will either hold them or lose them ... and then more effort for your major points and even more for your close. But all that effort will be largely wasted if you have an audience who are largely ignoring you in favour of their Blackberries because you didn't hold their attention at the outset.

I think it's fair to say that most people dislike the formal, sage-on-the-stage presentation, but the problem with the more conversational, relaxed format (and that is very much my preferred style) is that it requires far more forethought than the tell 'em what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you've just told them style of old ...

I loved Norman MacLean's description of learning to fly-fish in A River Runs Through It:

"My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."

Art does not come easy.

Your first 10 words

2009-02-05T10:00:00.000Z

We've all seen the classical attention-over-time graph demonstrating the importance of Primacy (what you say first) and Recency (what you say last) in any lecture, speech or presentation. But how often do you see a strong opening? A really strong opening?

Most often, you hear either:

" [mumble mumble] I'd like to thank Mr Last Speaker for the interminable series of bullet points he read out to us. And now, if you'd just wipe that crackly sleep goop from your eyes, I'd like to talk to you about [mumble mumble] exactly what it says here on my title slide and now I'm just going to take a minute or two to read out my very long, very small-fonted subtitle, which will effectively obviate the need for you to listen to anything further I have to say ..."

Or :

"I'd like to TALK to you today about the MOST ASTOUNDING discovery in the history of the universe [dramatic pause] EVER! Without further ado ... ladies and gentlemen ... I give you ... the latest patch for Windows Vista!"

When I talk to people in advance of their presentations and ask them what their opener is going to be, I typically get some version of the first speech above. Rambling, somewhat apologetic, heard-it-100-times-before obvious.

Not exactly attention-grabbing.

Let me ask the same question a different way. What are your first 10 words are going to be? What are you going to say, and in what tone, with your first lungful of air? The people who open as per our second example above, have no difficulty answering those questions, but unless you have something a bit more interesting (to your audience) and a bit more dramatic (to your audience) to say, I think I'd hold off on that kind of overblown, ham-fisted, delivery.

I remember many years ago watching a Karate training course being delivered in my old college sports hall. There must have been 250 black belts milling around on the floor, loosening out, chatting, largely oblivious to what was going on around them. And then the teacher walked in at one end of the hall.

His name was Kenosuke Enoeda, not a particularly tall man, but he had a massive presence. The whole hall fell instantly silent, which was very interesting to me as an observer, because only a very small number of people up near the door where the Sensei had come in could possibly have seen him. It wasn't that people had shushed each other or whispered, "He's here, pass it on" – they just knew.

Presence probably isn't a big enough word to describe what Enoeda Sensei exuded. His nickname was 'The Tiger' and you could instantly see why. It must be nice to be able to command that kind of attention when you step up to do your job.

Take another example. If you have ever seen the Riverdance show live, you will have heard the intake of breath as the lead male dancer comes on stage for the first time. It's a very steady, considered build, as Bill Whelan's Reel Around The Sun develops in pace and volume and then bam! He arrives:

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Now, I'll grant you that Brendán has the advantage of being eagerly awaited (like Enoeda Sensei), and he's the Grand Champion of the Universe at what he does, plus he has Bill Whelan writing his backing music; so when he bursts onto the stage like a wild animal, he has certain advantages stacked on his side.

But, and this is a big but, the show's director still made sure to stack every possible element in Brendán's favour. A deeply-considered build of the voice-over, the lighting, the music, the dance troupe and the pace of the piece – all building so that Brendán has maximum impact each time he appears. And it works like magic every night. There is always the sharp collective intake of breath and the, "Ooooh" from the audience, just as there is always a standing ovation at the end of the show.

That's stagecraft. That's directing. That's sitting down in advance and determining what will have maximum effect on your audience. In a word, that is professionalism.

So there you are with your laptop, your remote clicker, your data projector and your so-so PowerPoint. Have you given yourself any chance of grabbing, and holding, the audience's attention?

Do yourself a favour. Think about your first 10 words. Think hard. Think hard about your first three clicks on the remote and the impact whatever you flash up on screen is going to have on your audience. How about thinking long and hard about your first 100 words? With no malice, no cruelty, no malign intention, your audience are going to decide whether you are worth listening to in the first few seconds of your talk. And if they decide you are not, they will tune you out. Because they are human and that kind of 'thin-slicing' is what human beings do to each other.

So give yourself a chance. T-h-i-n-k about your opening. Then try a version of it. Review and hone, review and hone. Statistically speaking, it's unlikely that you are a Kenosuke Enoeda, or a Brendán de Gallaí. That means you have to think harder, work harder and hone more to give yourself a chance.

Get to it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this – openers that worked, openers that fell flat on their face, openers that you thought were going to be great, but just died. Please do share your experiences and thoughts in the comments.

Putting a value on your audience's time - a case study

2009-02-02T07:00:00.000Z

"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed"

(Sean O'Casey)

Can you imagine if actors behaved the way most presenters do? I don't know about you, but if I'd paid an arm and a leg for tickets to a West End or Broadway show, I'd be a little upset if I noticed the actors reading their lines off Idiot Boards, or listening for hissed prompts from the wings. I don't ever want to see Juliet looking surprised when Romeo walks on stage. Professional actors place value on their audience's time and, in the theatre world, it is not hard to calculate how much that time is worth.

It's a pity more presenters don't do that kind of basic arithmetic. Have a look at this case study.

Presentation 1 is a highly technical, straight informative piece. It basically says, "Here are a bunch of changes that have occurred as a result of a new piece of legislation. Here's some important precedents set in other jurisdictions that will have a bearing upon how cases of this nature are judged here. And here's a dense, 150-page, supporting document giving you the chapter and verse detail of all these changes."

In this highly technical field, that is a fairly bread-and-butter presentation. With one difference. This piece was being presented to and audience of all of the specialists in this arena here in Ireland. A large audience of very serious, very expensive, specialists. This was the meeting of the Five Families ...

So Presenter No.1 took it very seriously. He wrote a densely detailed 150-page book and cherry-picked out the big news headlines and what they were going to mean for these specialists and their clients and put it together into a 45-minute presentation that made the points big and bold and which clipped along at a good brisk pace. Here's the (blurred) Slide Sorter view of his PowerPoint:

Lots and lots of slides (about 160). Lots of colour and imagery. Good visual repetition of themes / refrains throughout. All interspersed with quotes from case-law and the new legislation. Plus this gentleman put in oodles of rehearsal time. I did a quick-and-dirty analysis on his presentation before he delivered it:

He spoke for 44 minutes at an average of 160 words per minute (he had a detailed script in a separate Word document) giving a maximum total wordcount of 7,040 words for the time allowed. When I checked (in the File Properties) how many of those words were up there on screen, I was delighted to see just 1,600. So his audience-reading-what-is-up-on-screen time versus his audience-listening-to-the-presenter-while-the-message-is-reinforced-visually time ratio looked like this:

Very healthy. Especially for such a thorny, technical subject.

Compare and contrast that with Presenter No.2, a more senior and knowledgeable chappie. He also spoke for 45 minutes. His topic was similarly technical and broad. He too had a big, detailed book to give to his audience after the talk and his audience was exactly the same crowd. His (blurred) presentation looked like this:

Very very texty. He pretty much copied and pasted large chunks of his 150-pager into his PowerPoint. When I checked the File Properties for wordcount in his PowerPoint file and did the arithmetic, the reading-to-listening ratio for the audience looked like this:

Because he essentially gave them no choice. If you put words up on a screen, we as human beings, feel compelled to read them. And nowadays, we all know how incapable human beings are of listening when they are reading. So why would anyone do this kind of presentaton any more? I can only think of a few reasons:

Ignorance – they are unaware of all the research that's out there on the topic of how it is pretty much impossible to get information into people's heads using the Death-by-PowerPoint approach.

Heedlessness + Laziness – they don't care how hard they are making it for their audience. This largely stems from self-centredness and you frequently hear the, "Oh for God's sake! These are intelligent professionals!" defence being trotted out by presenters who fall into this category.

Utter self-absorption – they don't know, care, or have clue one about what it's like to have to sit through their slides. All they are interested in is the sound of their own voice and not losing their way, so they use the slides as Idiot Boards. [I used to attempt politeness and call this approach PowerPoint-as-AutoCue, but I've decided it's time to call a spade a spade ...]

To go back to my analogy, can you imagine paying through the nose to have professional actors behave this way towards you? We'd be throwing rotten eggs and fruit in no time. [Hmmm ... Come to think of it ...]

Let's look at the cost of this for a moment. In this situation, the audience consisted of 420 high-level professionals. These are people who charge by the hour and let's just say they're not shy with their fee structures. We estimated that the average billable hourly rate for each member of this audience was €300.

420 x 300 = €126,000 per hour

So it costs about €95,000 to have these people sitting in a room for a 45 minute presentation. By any measure, that is a goodly chunk of change. So how much of your time, as the presenter, is it worth to not totally and utterly waste all of their time?

If your presentation consists of a PowerPoint and the File Properties tell you that the audience will be spending more than half of your allotted time reading your slides, I would recommend staying home and sending an email. Alternatively, use your PowerPoint as an AutoCue, but don't let your audience see the AutoCue script. Either disconnect your laptop from the data projector and use your slides as a roadmap solely for your own benefit or take five minutes and learn how to use the Presenter Tools function in PowerPoint and get some real value out of the software in your next presentation.

Because you never know, your next audience may have an interesting melange of fruit, veg and eggs hidden in their pockets ...

Phil Schiller's keynote - how to not confound expectations

2009-01-20T07:00:00.000Z

Have you ever gone to a play or a musical and heard the dreaded announcement before the curtain goes up? "For this evening's performance, the role of the role of XXXXX will be played by (insert never-heard-of-them understudy name here)." And you only came to the play because Denzel Washington, or Patrick Stewart or Dame Judi Dench was starring in it ...

Well, however bad you feel, having parted with your hundred bucks for your ticket, can you imagine how bad Mr/Ms Understudy feels, knowing that the audience is not going to be remotely interested in the nuance of their performance? I suppose the only consolation is that the only way is up – you start out with the expectation that the audience is going to hate you, no matter how good you are ...

Tough life.

So, yes, I felt some sympathy for Phil Schiller as he stepped out onstage. But if you were Phil, what would you have done? How would you have presented yourself? My advice to him would have been (a) to truly make it a 'Philnote' – to find his own voice, his own pace and his own style to deliver with and (b) to be better-prepared for this event than for anything he has ever done in his life. Anyone interested in presenting or public speaking can learn a lot by watching Mr Schiller's effort in this outing.

My sympathy for Phil evaporated when he started off weakly and lamely:

He had quite a quaver in his voice coupled with very shallow breathing, which did not help matters.
He flashed some images of Apple stores up and basically appealed for applause. There was no bang and no pow to his opening. [Boom?]
He looked back at his slides on the big screen and down at his prompt screens way too obviously and way too often.

What are you looking for back there Phil? There's only one word up on the screen dude!

In a word, he was over-anxious and under-rehearsed. Yes, I felt some empathy for him; but he did nothing to win me over with his opening. And he was under-rehearsed. If you have your material down cold – particularly your opening – you simply do not have to refer to your prompt screens that often, and certainly not that obviously. I can only presume that Phil uses a similar rig to Steve's, which places numerous large plasma screens in his eyeline:

[Click to enlarge]

This degree of pause-swallow-and-check on Phil's part was simply not good enough. One thing I have always noticed about Steve's keynotes and product launches is that when he has to read out the list of product specs at the summary of a section of one of his presentations, he can always rattle off the list without apparent hesitation. He may be checking his prompters, but he's learnt to do it subtly and well. Phil needs to take note.

Language
Second, Phil's language. Now, we're all used to hyperbole at keynotes and Steve's verbal tics in this regards have attracted much comment in the past, but simply put, Phil needs to increase his wordpower. Because if everything you are talking about is "incredible" or "unbelievable," pretty soon, nothing is. Yes, I'm pedantic; yes, I was listening with a critical ear –but do you somehow think the tech community and the financial community weren't? Phil used the qualifier "really" waaaaaay to often and seemed to have no adjectives beyond "incredible" and "unbelievable." Might I suggest procuring an inexpensive Thesaurus before his next outing?

Body Language
Next, his body language. As a presenter, it's not necessary for you to stand astride the earth like some sort of rampant Colossus, but Phil's natural resting posture places his feet too close together. He's not centred, he's not grounded; you can hear him breathing from his upper chest which does not grant his voice much resonance, even though he's a big guy. He is also inclined to shift from foot to foot in this narrow stance, which he covers by walking up and down quite a bit.

Too much for my eye.

This was not a restless, caged-animal, excited energy. It was a nervous, anxious, energy. Phil gave no sense that he was 'owning' the stage and he was not projecting his presence, either physically or vocally, standing this way. He also has a tendency to bring his hands up to gesture and manually emphasise a point and then ... drop them, like they're made of lead. They end up resting momentarily on the fronts of his thighs and overall, the impression was not one of someone who felt confident and in control. Significant room for improvement.

Voice
Once he got over the quavery bit at the beginning, Phil settled in quite well. As I said, he doesn't have much 'boom' to his voice and sometimes he is inclined to gabble, but overall, he is comfortably audible and not hard to understand. Phil's problem is that there isn't much 'life' in his voice. He tells us that he's "excited" or that some feature is "incredible," but his voice belies those statements. He's a cool guy, a laid-back guy, but in this environment, that came off as inhibited. He needs to let rip now and then.

He showed us some pretty cool features in the iLife and iWork suites but to a large extent he let the toys speak for themselves [contrast Phil's delivery with young Randy doing his groovy thing talking about iMovie - listen to the warmth and energy in Randy's voice]. Phil needs to think about the highlight moments of his presentations and build toward those – visually, verbally and tonally. [Splendid outbang with Tony Bennett for example, but where were the other high points? Nary a one to my eye.]

Summary
A solid, workmanlike performance. Phil covered the facts and did not drag things out too much. Bottom line though, I would not be happy if a client of mine had put in the level of work that no doubt went into that keynote and produced that performance. More importantly, I would not want him to be happy. Solid, workmanlike, 6.5 out of 10, is not the kind of thinking or performance I expect from the Apple Corporation. I don't think we saw anything like the best that Phil has to offer here and I look forward to watching his development over the next few keynotes. My advice – let Phil be Phil and things will get a whole lot better.

PS: Floyd Norman has a very interesting piece comparing the dilemma facing the Disney corporation in 1966 when Walt became ill to that facing Apple now – really worth a look.

PPS: If you want to get hold of Apple's presentations, and watching this one is very instructive, you can subscribe to them in the iTunes Store as free-of-charge, high quality, podcasts.

Related Posts:
Stan Sigman's woeful performance
Steve Jobs on an off day

PowerPoint Slide design in 2009

2009-01-07T07:05:00.000Z

Olivia Mitchell over at Speaking About Presenting asked me to contribute to a group writing project on what's going to happen (or more likely what we'd all like to happen and what should happen) with PowerPoint usage in the coming year. She's had some great contributions thus far and I'm delighted to throw my $0.02 into the jar. My thought is not on design per se, but rather on using PowerPoint in such a way that makes your life as a presenter easier and more effective when you are up on your feet.

I still regularly encounter lots of presenters who don't know about, or have never tried, the Presenter Tools which have been available in PowerPoint since the 2003 version. Admittedly, the Presenter View screen is fairly clunky in Office 2003, but it's still a whole lot more useful than not using it. In my opinion, if you're on a PC, the sole reason that it might be worth upgrading to Office 2007 is the improved version of PowerPoint. The Presenter Tools in particular are much improved, with customisation of the various elements now available.

On a Mac, Office 2004 has a good, and customisable, Presenter View and the 2008 version is even better. You also have the option of using Keynote on a Mac, which is quite simply a joy. I've witnessed a number of client companies buying a MacBook Pro and iWork just to make their lives as presenters easier. If you present a lot, it is well worth thinking about.

So, just in case you've never seen it before and have no idea what I am talking about - here is what you (the presenter) see when you use Presenter Tools:

This is not what the audience sees – Presenter View does show you what's up on the screen behind you, but it shows you some much more useful stuff than that. Here's a close-up of the screen from the slide above:

[Right click to enlarge in a new window or tab]

Reading from the left then, we have:

A stopwatch showing you for how long you have been speaking.

The green arrow brings you back one step in the slideshow.

Below that, vertically, are thumbnails of the slides in your presentation, with the current slide highlighted.

Top and centre is the slide that is currently being displayed by the data projector - your view of that slide changes in Presenter View to reflect animations and builds exactly as your audience sees it.

The little slide to the right of that is the 'Up Next' slide [you can turn this on or off as you wish and it will be replaced with small text on a white background under the main slide]

The green arrow on the right advances you to the next step in the slideshow.

The big chunk of white space with the text on it contains your speaker notes. I have mine enlarged to 200% here, so they're nice and visible from a good distance off.

Even a poorly-prepared presenter has a big advantage when they are using Presenter Tools like this. As long as you have time for even a quick run-through, you can probably make a fair effort using someone else's presentation. The biggest plus, from an audience perspective, is that while the presenter may still be doing some reading, there's no need to put all the text up on the screen to serve as a road map for the presenter. So, as the presenter, you can move to a less text-dependent style of slides, but still have the security blanket of having your detailed speakers notes clearly visible. Barack Obama is a stunningly articulate man, but you can be sure he will have at least 3 AutoCues in line of sight when he delivers his Inaugural Address later this month. And backups! You have an AutoCue built into your presentation software – please use it.

This still involves more work on your part than the usual Headline / Bullet / Bullet / Bullet approach to PowerPoint, but the benefits are immense. First for your audience, who will be far more likely to engage with a presenter who is not reading at them and second for you, because your reputation as a presenter will very quickly improve. Just one simple tool, one click, that very very few presenters use and yet it can make all the difference in the world.

That's my hope for 2009.

CODICIL: Anticipating the "Yeah, but ..." emails and comments, let me further add:

Cheapie or older laptops frequently will not have sufficiently muscular graphics cards to run two monitors like this. This is tooth-grindlingly annoying, but there's nothing you can do about it. If your computer is powerful enough to run dual monitors, it is imperative that you use your own kit to present on. This can be awkward if you are one of a number of presenters at a conference, but you must exert your control on this and insist on having access to Presenter Tools on a nearby monitor before you agree to speak.

Conference room setups in corporate environments frequently aren't geared up for this either. How bizarre! Who's in charge here, the IT Department or the management team who make presentations all the time? Wheedle, whine, beg, bribe [always a good idea with propellerheads!] influence the Gods, do whatever you have to, but get the board room or conference room set up so that you can use this approach. It's vital, it's transformative and it should be a minimum requirement.

Ad hoc setups in hotels or client premises sometimes make using this approach very difficult. I arrived at one talk I was giving to a Rotary meeting to discover that the projector was set up in the middle of a busy banqueting room full of dinner tables and that there was no way I was going to be able to see my Presenter Tools monitor - my laptop was going to be about 25-30 feet away from where I was standing up by the screen. I reached into my presentation bag and pulled out my super-long VGA cable and a roll of Gaffer tape and ... problem solved.

Being able to consistently use this approach with your slideware is a matter of control and assertiveness. Have the Gaffer tape, the long extension leads, and so forth, to hand – you can control that and that's easy. The assertiveness part can be a bit more tricky; you don't want to appear to be some kind of demanding, insecure diva. Anticipation is the name of the game. Getting into the presentation room and familiarising yourself with it is the name of the game. Establishing rapport with the AV or Conference staff in advance is the name of the game. Once again, all of this is a bit more work, but it quickly becomes second nature and it is soooo worth it.

The power of your voice

2009-01-02T12:00:00.000Z

When you are presenting or delivering a speech, one of the most powerful, and frequently overlooked elements you have at your disposal, is the power of your voice. In working with any client, even over a short period of time, one of my key strands to improving their delivery is to enable them to find their voice.

Many people I work with don't like this because they have come to dislike the sound of their own voice. Remember this scene in The Man With Two Brains? [Not workplace friendly]:

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Unless your voice genuinely sounds like nails being dragged down a blackboard, don't sweat it - you're no better or worse than the majority of people on that front. Now, I'll grant you it would be lovely if you sounded like Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Richard Burton, Anna Deveare Smith or James Earl Jones but most of us are stuck working with what we've got – operative word: working.

If you want to speak in public, you have to work on your voice and that means becoming consciously aware of it and its tweaks and nuances. We'll talk about exercises in future posts, but for now, you need to turn off the radio in the car and start speaking loudly and resonantly to yourself, easing and stretching your voice. Every now and then, hit the 'Record' button on your laptop, MP3 player or mobile phone, and evaluate yourself. Are you audible? Clear and distinct? Or rushed and gabbling? Watch other presenters – top players online and also the good and the bad in your direct professional circle.

Start to become properly aware of this core tool in your kit. If you find presenters / speakers who impress you, define why they impress you. At this stage, we're not talking about content or narrative. Just think about the way they speak and the tonality of their voices. I could listen to Mr Steven Fry reading from the phone book and find it a pleasant experience. Listen to him reading a Roald Dahl story or some Oscar Wilde or just speaking on one of his podgrams, and you'll see what I mean. Forget the accent – we don't all have the benefit of a British Public School and Cambridge education – listen rather, to the enunciation, the pacing and pausing, the breath control.

The first step to finding your voice is to become aware of it. Get chattering.

Meandering speeches

2008-12-23T15:00:00.000Z

Max Atkinson found Peter Sellers' great content-free political speech a few weeks back and I thought I would riposte with my namesake, Rowan Atkinson's speech on purposeless. Ness. Less.

A true classic written by someone who has obviously sat through one too many of these ...

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Presenting without PowerPoint

2008-12-18T07:00:00.000Z

Love Actually was the midweek on RTE this week. Good Bob Dylan homage in this scene.

Yes, thank you, I noticed that it's schmaltzy. But it's still clever. And a bit poignant. Nice language too. And anyway, it's Christmas – so shoot me:

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It is hard to beat the intimacy of analogue presentation.

Related Posts:
The power of the flipchart
More flipchart thoughts
When PowerPoint ruins a perfectly good story

Public speaking fear - get over it!

2008-12-12T06:05:00.000Z

Lisa Braithwaite has a doozy of a post over at Speak Schmeak about a client who came to a startlingly simple realisation:

My client has spent the last fifteen years creating a paralyzing fear of public speaking in her mind. Yesterday she said to me, "I wish someone had just said along the way 'Suck it up'."

Public speaking and communication skills are skills you are going to need and use every day for the rest of your life. I would argue that you will use these skills more often than most of what you learned in school, with the exception of reading and writing.

Suck it up – amen to that Lisa.

I see the end result of these ill-considered, self-defeating, choices every day. The 45 year-old executive who can't access his own email or generate the simplest PowerPoint document without his PA. The researcher who stolidly refuses to learn how to use an RSS Reader and who therefore has to navigate fruitlessly through hundreds of sites every week, waiting for new content to be posted. And the poor unfortunate bozo who has shied away from public speaking since childhood.

We can't expect 12 year-olds to make good decisions about speaking in public, so the encouragement on that score has to come from parents and teachers. But if you find yourself shying away from the podium as you enter the workforce, I suggest you read the following paragraphs:

"I've found public speaking very difficult my whole life. I was slow to learn how to do it as a child and always found ways around my problem, so I stayed under the radar in class and never got picked up for my deficiency. Later, in college, I was always able to get other people to do the public speaking and on team projects, I could contribute in other ways, but pretty much always managed to avoid the public speaking part.

Of course, it's a bit of a problem now. I'm head of my department and I'm constantly having to defer meetings or get my subordinates to stand up and speak to cover my phobia. I probably should have done something about this before now, but hey, public speaking is something you are born for or it's not. And for me, that's definitely a big not! Not being able to speak in public hasn't really hurt my career so far, and I reckon I've just got too much ground to make up in this skill – I just don't think it's worth the effort at this stage in my career."

Okay? Now read the passage again and substitute the phrase "public speaking" with the word "reading" – because in many corporate environments, not being able to stand up with confidence in front of an audience, big or small, is about as career-limiting as illiteracy.

Suck. It. Up!

Lisa's excellent [and much less ranty] take on this is here – clicky clicky.

My thoughts on the value of public speaking for your career are here.

On the street where you live ...

2008-12-06T08:00:00.000Z

Cathy Paine over at Slideology has a great post on the topic of using maps to good effect in presentations, with more to come – not to be missed.

Garr Reynolds highlighted T Boone Pickens' presentation on reducing America's dependence on foreign oil a couple of weeks ago, and this slide really caught my eye:

Isn't that just stunning? There's nothing like a good locational piccie to really put something in context and, for any educated audience, a map is an excellent place to start. But – of course – there is a fly in the ointment. Apparently, the world doesn't look quite what we think it looks like:

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Great speaker - John Cleese

2008-12-05T19:36:00.000Z

As someone who has spent far too many nights in far too many hotel rooms around the world, these words of John Cleese's have an all-too-familiar ring to them. Come to think of it, it sounds like I've stayed in some of these hotels:

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You can find this and much more like it on Mr Cleese's podcast site here and his sublimely funny blog is here.

H/T: Russell Davies

The one key question

2008-12-05T09:15:00.000Z

“You know the Greeks didn't write obituaries. They only asked one question after a man died, ‘Did he have passion?’”
(Jeremy Piven, in the film Serendipity)

What a great question. I don't care if it's true or not – it should be. Passionless presentation – not thank you.

Mark Gungor - stunning presenter

2008-12-02T08:00:00.000Z

I was rummaging around looking for a factoid about the differences between men's and women's brains when lo and behold, I found Mark Gungor. He's a pastor with a difference. He's a marriage guidance counsellor ... with a difference. And his difference is laughter. And, from my perspective, professionalism.

I remember my mother-in-law telling me that the one piece of advice she took from a 2-day pre-marital counselling course [50 years ago!] was to always paint the number of your house on your bin, so that you would never end up in a dispute with the neighbours over who owned which bin. 37 years later, the course I attended with my betrothed was probably a little better in its delivery, but its content hadn't evolved a whole heckuva lot.

Enter Mark Gungor. Knowledge, passion, verve, professionalism, seeking to please his audience, seeking to really inform his audience. Ultimately seeking to equip his audience with the tools, knowledge and determination to effect changes in their lives.

The stage is a strong, simple setup, which helps position the ideas. A woman's bust on the left side, a man's over on the right. Pleasing, familial backdrop [interesting columns off to the side though]. Strong, clear repetition and reinforcement of his ideas. And the whole thing underpinned with laughter to lock the messages home. This piece is from his Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage seminar:

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Okay, nitpitcks:

I'm not sure why he's using any PowerPoint at all, but I'm pretty sure that no-one past the second row can read it from that little itty-bitty screen. He should have a big-ass screen hanging from the chimney breast behind him - it looks like there are about 700 people in that room. [Update: I just heard from Mark, who tells me that there are indeed big-ass screens either side of the stage, they just don't show on the video]

When he does use PowerPoint in this piece (and in the other clips on his YouTube Channel) he reads from the screen. This is the only moment I ever see him disengage from his audience and it's such a shame. He needs a nice low-lying 17" laptop up at the front of his stage, or if he's using a fair bit of Slideware, he could go all Steve on us and use a setup like this:

When Mark uses his remote clicker, there's a long lag before it advances the slide [Vista maybe or a cruddy PC with an entry-level Video Card?] and sometimes he has to contort himself to get the remote to work [batteries low or poor line-of-sight to the PC?] Either way, these are nuisance factors which shouldn't be there. Mark is more than enough of a pro that these don't throw him off his stride, and he obviously has his material down cold, but they are hiccups in the otherwise perfect flow.

My wife didn't like the falsetto female voice that he uses, but that may be a cultural thing; I thought he captured the essence of the comic delivery really well.

I can hear it now. Standard objection number one:

"I can't present like that. I'm an engineer presenting schematics of a bridge to my boss. It's no laughing matter. If I get a number wrong the bridge will collapse and people will die. I can't present like that!"
"I'm a group financial controller ... "
"I'm a tort lawyer ... "
"I'm a physics lecturer ... "

Yes you can.

Subtract the laughter. Subtract the Judy Garland impersonation [it's in a piece called 'Rainbow' - do treat yourself]. Subtract the over-the-top, comedic body language, which works in Mark's setting but won't work in yours. Subtract all that and what have you got? Energy. Movement. Enthusiasm. Professionalism. Really knowing your stuff. Passion.

That is all.

Best pie chart. Ever!

2008-11-18T08:00:00.000Z

This makes me happy in ways that I cannot put into words:
H/T: Information Aesthetics

I, like, sort of love presenting - ya know?

2008-11-14T07:55:00.000Z

Oh thank God it's not just me!

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When did this Valley Girl delivery become the accepted norm? When Alicia Silverstone did it in Clueless, it was a p-a-r-o-d-y. She was laughing at these bozos. Maybe an entire generation missed the joke.

Stop. Tape yourself delivering a section from your presentation and play it back. Is your tone interrogative when it should be declarative? Are you saying "like" "you know" "kind of" "sort of" or any of the myriad other verbal tics with noticeable frequency?

Then stop doing it.

Really.

Stop.

Human speech is a learnt behaviour. You arrive on this planet mute – apart from the highly effective screaming thing. You don't even learn to laugh until a couple of months in. So if somewhere along the way, you have developed a speech pattern that makes you sound like some kind of vacuous simpleton, learn a new one. Quickly. Because there a couple of things you are not ever going to see on your television screen:

"Good evening, it's Friday the 14th of November and this is the 10 o'clock news ... I think?"

"Uuuummm ... Ya, we, like, sort of, can? Ya know?"

If clear, declarative, unequivocal speech is what we expect, what we demand, from the professionals in our society, you cannot afford to stick out like some kind of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel in that society. Here endeth the rant.

Varying your tone

2008-10-31T16:06:00.000Z

Some presentations can, and should, have a consistent tone. You have one or two points to make and you hammer them home with a strong, simple message in a strong, clear voice. Yes, you need your strong opener. Yes, you should have some mini-climaxes in the body of your talk, building toward your big conclusion. Yes, you should have a really strong finish. But overall, the nature of the topic will inform your tonality and you should pretty much stick to that as you talk.

But sometimes, you are talking about the big stuff. Sometimes you need to illustrate a point - as Chris Abani does here by telling how his 14 year-old cellmate was executed by being left to bleed to death in excruciating agony – in such a way as to completely stun your audience. But you can't do that for a whole talk; if everything in your talk is a jaw-dropper, then very quickly nothing is. What Chris does, in this truly extraordinary talk about the nature of humanity, is to tell you something jaw-dropping and then let you recover. Stun and recover, stun and recover.

He gets a standing ovation for this talk from the TED audience and deservedly so. Prepare to be amazed ...

RSS Readers will need to click through to the post to see the video - it's a TED thing, sorry.

Rives – He's back!

2008-10-28T14:46:00.000Z

Rives at TED 2008. It never matters what he's talking about, but this is a stunning interpretation of the hieroglyphics of youthful communication

RSS Readers will need to click through to the post - it's a TED thing

Cranky Middle Manager debut

2008-10-23T15:43:00.000+01:00

I joined Wayne Turmel for a rant about presentation skills. In the past, the storytellers were revered by the tribe, why have we lost that skill to such an extent in the modern workplace? Wayne dedicated the show to Ogmios, the Gaulish deity – typically depicted as a bald old man leading what looks like a willing band of men with chains attached to their ears from his tongue. Ogmios is thought by some scholars to be a metaphor for eloquence, possibly related to bardic practices of the time.

I love Wayne's thought that, in Ogmios' era, eloquence was regarded as a military skill. In the modern corporate framework, presenting certainly has the potential to enhance your career like few other skills have. So never lose sight of the fact that a good presentation can be a serious weapon in your arsenal ...

What did we talk about? Sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings ... Oh, and also:

Why are business presentations so sucky? Are yours sucky? Could they be better?

How? How could your talks be better? What's wrong with them now? Having identified the problems, what can you do about it?

And what habits can you instil in yourself to build a more effective approach than the one you are using now?

People respond to stories. How do you inject a narrative thread into a dry sales update?

Do have a listen to our chat. There's even a Scooby-Doo moment, courtesy of the multi-talented Mr Turmel, in the middle of the conversation ...

"Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words, when short are the best of all."
Winston Churchill

Godin on PowerPoint - again

2008-10-06T10:50:00.000+01:00

It was all going so well!

And I would have triumphed if it weren't for that pesky bald fella from New York. My plan was going so beautifully. Presentations across the world being read out by their presenters. Slides choked with text and clipart. Gloriously incomprehensible flow charts. Aneurysm-inducing combinations of colours. Fly my pretties!

It was so elegant, so simple – render the decision-makers comatose and then let them make their decisions ... Bwuhahahahaha!

But then this, this ... Godin fellow [pronounced with spitting sound despite the lack of plosives in his name] wrote his "Bad PowerPoint" e-book. So many of my wonderful tactics exposed! Practical, clear solutions to counter my cunning plan! I could not let this stand!

Forced out of the shadows, I published my Appalling Presenter Manifesto for the first time. It seemed to work. Slowly, inexorably, my minions did their evil work. Even Godin had to acknowledge the breathless perfection of my counter-move. But now, just as I have brought the business world to the brink of disaster ... he ripostes again!

Gaaaaah! Curses! Who does he think he is!? Just because he has an action figure! It's not like he even has a frickin' cape! Have this Godin person brought to my lair ... and prepare my ill-tempered, mutated, laser-wielding, sea-bass!

Rehearsal - stale or fresh?

2008-09-29T10:31:00.000+01:00

Great post by TJ Walker over the weekend, with his response to the oh-so typical protest about the concept of rehearsals:

“I don’t want to rehearse because I don’t want to seem canned. I want to seem spontaneous and fresh so I’ll be better winging it.”

May I just echo TJ's excellent response by saying, "Gaaaaaaaahhhhhh!" My slightly longer response to clients goes like this ...

There is a one-word difference between someone who likes to wing it and who trots out the "I get stale if I over-rehearse" line and someone who is willing to put in the time to ensure that their presentation or speech is top-notch and that word is PROFESSIONALISM.

Try using that ’stale’ line with a stage actor who endures weeks and weeks of rehearsal and then months or even years of 8-shows-a-week performances. Stale? In front of a full house who have paid 70-100 bucks a seat? I don’t think so! The enormous effort put in at rehearsal and the ongoing cycle of refresher rehearsals keeps the show alive and invigorated and fresh – not stale. What these performers display at every show, at every cast meeting and at every refresher is called professional pride and I sincerely wish that more presenters displayed it too.

Here's the nub – the person who feels over-rehearsed or is afraid that they are going to deliver as though there were a clockwork key turning in their back is forgetting who this process is all about. Your audience doesn't know, realise or care that you have put 40 hours of rehearsal into your one-hour talk. They don't know, realise or care that you are gritting your teeth with frustration and boredom when you deliver your seemingly off-the-cuff humorous asides. But believe me they will very quickly realise if your delivery falls short of the mark; they will immediately know if you keep turning your back on them to read from the screen; and boy will they care if they get any sense at all that you are underprepared.

Laurence Olivier conducted eight weeks of rehearsals for his last performance of King Lear – a role he had been playing all of his adult life. Do you imagine he put in that level of effort because he had forgotten his lines? Olivier's great quote about performing in front of a live audience was –

"You must lead the audience by the nose to the thought"

– but hey, what did he know? I'm sure you'll be just fine winging it ...

You can find TJ's excellent post here.

Wow

2008-09-28T15:44:00.000+01:00

Superb little stand-alone presentation – superb content, great delivery with the kinetic text. The website is here.

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Do something unexpected

2008-09-26T15:14:00.000+01:00

I just found this via Graham Linehan's wondrous blog and it blew me away. 5 seconds in, I was thinking, "What's the big deal? This is just another ho-hum, Mario style game."

Expect the unexpected? Watch and learn ...

Know your audience

2008-09-17T08:52:00.000+01:00

If you've ever given a presentation that fell flat because you misjudged your audience in some way, the following urban tale will resonate with you.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp acquired the New York Post in 1993. Apparently Murdoch bumped into one of the bigwigs from Bloomingdales some time later and, in the course of the conversation, inquired why Bloomies never advertised in the Post.

"Because, my good fellow, your readers are my shoplifters," he was told.

O-u-c-h!

Now, I don't care that Marvin Taub, chairman of Bloomingdales, has denied ever saying that to the illustrious Mr Murdoch, it is simply too good a story to ignore. Just a few minutes of thought can make such a difference in any encounter and if you are going to be talking to a roomful of people, you owe it to everyone concerned to ensure that your presentation is going to hit the right note.

Have you ever been at a wedding where the best man told what he thought were hilarious stories about the groom – stories that fell completely flat with the majority of the audience? It is so easy for this to happen if you don't stop and sanity-check your talk from the audience's perspective. When I saw Mel Brooks' The Producers for the first time, the Springtime for Hitler scene made me laugh, but it was the panning shot across the faces of the stunned audience that made me howl.

At the beginning of your talk, the audience is at Point A – you need to be clear what that means. What is their disposition? What are their beliefs? Are they right or are they wrong? How did they arrive at Point A? When you are clear on that, you can start thinking about what Point B is, where it is and how you are going to bring this audience to that point.

So often, when I ask clients what they want to achieve with their presentations, what the take-aways for the audience are, I get head-scratching and blank stares. You must know this! Otherwise, why are you doing the presentation? And if you are to know this, you must know who your audience are and how they currently think. Or you could take a job as Advertising Manager for Playboy and start calling the Vatican looking for them to buy a year of outside back covers ...

Basic presentation mistakes to avoid

2008-09-05T08:11:00.000+01:00

When I was a wee lad, there was a children's programme on the BBC which featured two characters called "Big Ted" and "Little Ted" [there they are over on the right of the pic]. UBC have come up with an idea for a little TED, which they are calling Terry Talks:

Imagine UBC’s most fascinating and engaging students coming together for a day, giving ‘the talk of their lives,’ sharing their ideas and discussing their visions for UBC and the world.

Nice idea, I'm looking forward to seeing the results. It must be something to do with the air up in BC. Here are their guidelines on how not to suck when you give your talk.

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1 minute and 49 seconds well spent.

H/T: Mr Mulley

As you can see from this slide ...

2008-09-01T09:42:00.000+01:00

"Any teacher who can be replaced by a machine ... should be."

Arthur C Clarke

Where does that leave a presenter who insists on reading out a litany of bullet points – or entire paragraphs – from his/her slides?

Recovering from disaster with a party piece

2008-08-07T13:11:00.000+01:00

The comedian Al Franken performs his party piece at a fundraiser. Al can draw the United States of America, state by state, freehand. It's one of those fairly pointless man things – "Hey look what I can do!" – but when you're running for the Senate, it's a slightly more concrete demonstration of how much you are interested in your country than wearing a lapel pin.

Most trainers and skilled presenters have a couple of these schticks that they can pull out at the drop of a hat. It's a very good idea, because you never know when you are going to have to fill some 'dead air' because of a technical hitch or a late arrival.

Steve Jobs illustrated this really well in his January 2007 keynote. His remote clicker stopped working and so did the backup. He paused for a moment, smiled and said, "They're scrambling backstage right now." He got a big laugh and then led off into a riff about himself a Woz building a TV Jammer and messing with people's TVs while they were watching Star Trek and forcing them into contorted positions trying to fix it. Lots of laughs, a story that related to the glitch Steve was experiencing at that moment and, sure enough, the techies fixed the problem and he went back into his flow. [You can see a short YouTube of this incident here]

Franken is able to make his party piece an integral part of his stump speech. If you can do that, well and good, but even so, have a couple of pieces of sure-fire material that are not technology dependent. What would you do to fill the dead air if:

All the lights went out in the room?
Your microphone stopped working?
The PC crashes or the lamp on the projector blows?
Your guest speaker is nowhere to be found?
The markers for the whiteboard were all dry?
Your presenter notes were not visible to you because you are up on stage and, due to the room setup, your laptop is not in your line of sight?
There were intermittent 3-minute bursts of loud construction noise from the street outside?

People always make fun of my fanatical preparations and backups for big presentations, right up to the point where something goes wrong and I am able to continue despite the problem. I was never a boyscout – too much walking – but for presentations, I am Mister 'Be Prepared' guy. What's your party piece? Can you use it in professional settings? And if you have any horrors and catastrophes that you would like to share – whether you overcame them or not – I'd love to hear about them. Do drop me a line or a comment.

Related posts:
Technology failures

Ignite presentation – Hack the technical interview

2008-08-05T16:24:00.000+01:00

I like the Ignite method – 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide for a total of 5 minutes onstage. This is such a great talk from VJ at Ignite Seattle earlier this year – funny, useful and thought-provoking.

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Ask an audience when they realised that they were in for a good time at a presentation and most of them will tell you, "As soon as he walked onstage." Ask most managers who have just made a hire when they knew they had the right person and you will hear some version along the theme of "As soon as he/she sat down." Now, I recognise that this isn't fair, or particularly rational, but you will still hear that response from most people most of the time.

Nota bene:

Human beings use thin slicing whether they want to or not.

Human beings select by mirroring whether they want to or not.

Human being are prone to cold reading and seduction techniques whether they want to be or not.

H/T Lifehacker