This story, from Ian Whitworth’s blog, Can You Hear Me Up the Back?, ping-pongs back and forth from one to the other so often I lost track and ended up laughing at the same time I was cringing. Usually, when sharing a story that’s already been published online, I post the standard excerpt/link combination. In the case of this particular story, so many things went wrong in so many funny and cringe-worthy ways I had trouble choosing which excerpts to use. Luckily, Ian was kind enough to give me permission to publish it in its entirety. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The Worst Presentation of My Life

Someone showed me another Steve Ballmer stage moment, in which the big guy cavorts in the sweatiest shirt since Elvis played Hawaii.

Watching it gave me terrible flashbacks to an incident long ago, and prompts the question: what’s the worst presentation you’ve ever done?

We’ve all had them. The speeches where you just want to flee the stage, run to the car park, drive until you’re deep in the forest, and stay there for the rest of your life, living off beetles and wood fungus, safe in the knowledge you’ll never run into anyone who was in the audience that day.

Mine was a speech at an interstate product launch. The day started with preparations for a pre-dawn flight. Stumbling around in the dark I forgot, for the very first time in my business life, to put on deodorant.

Sitting on the plane, I thought: hey, how bad can this be? Maybe deodorant isn’t really necessary, just one of those things that the international hygiene marketing conspiracy has thrust upon us in the last hundred years. After all, the term ‘B.O’ was coined by an ad writer just like me, creating a problem that hadn’t previously existed, to sell more Lifebuoy soap.

Mister Overconfidence Comes To Town

I got to my destination – hmm, warm weather here – and went to the venue for a rehearsal. I’d had a run of good presentations in the previous month, and was full of misplaced, up-and-coming-executive overconfidence. I figured I’d be able to wing it with the new material.

Show time. I stepped up to the lectern with my written notes. The house lights went down to black, for this was the era of weak projectors, and the lectern spotlights arced up. The reading lamp on the lectern? Not there. I couldn’t read a bloody thing.

The armpits went into peak flow. Twin tsunamis of clammy sweat fanned out across my nicely pressed shirt. My mouth filled with some sort of internally-generated tongue anaesthetic. I stared at the audience. They stared at me.

Quick, tell them a story, I thought. I launched into an anecdote. A tried and true, ‘break glass in case of emergency’ story that had never failed to get things off to a good start in other cities.

But I wasn’t in those cities, was I?

You’re Not From Round Here, Are You Boy?

Since then, years of experience has taught me that this is the town where humor goes to die. They hate any attempts at levity. You know the Chinese entombed soldiers that tour the museums of the world? That’s what the audience felt like. Neat rows as far as the eye could see, still, cold, stony. All eyes fixed on a point somewhere on the wall behind you.

Solid gold, guaranteed audience pleasing stories sailed past them untouched and went ‘splat’ against the back wall. I soldiered on, knowing that at least I had a big video finale. A pre-shot interactive thing where I appeared on the screen looking down at the lectern, so I could have a conversation with a less-sweaty version of myself. That would pull the whole show together.

Too Tricky For My Own Good

Or would have, had the under-rehearsed AV guy not started the tape in completely the wrong place, leaving me delivering lines that made no sense whatsoever, like some piece of abstract performance art.

Did I mention that this was a presentation on how to do better presentations?

Any questions? No, just a deep-space vacuum silence.  They’d moved from indifference to outright hatred.

Following me was a presenter from a competitor company, a local guy. He made a few unsubtle jibes about out-of-towners coming in and thinking they could teach the locals a thing or two. Let me assure you, the audience lapped that up.

Internal and External Drowning of Sorrows

Drinking the pain away at a nearby restaurant before the flight home, I heard the sound of sliding shoe leather and ominous clinking. I turned to face the stumbling waitress as she tipped a full tray of beers all over me.

People on the flight home quietly asked to be moved to another seat, rather than sit near the crazy-looking man in the window seat, his suit reeking of BO and beer.

“Mummy, does that man have a mental illness?”

Lessons From All This

1. You need a major presentation trauma every so often to remind you to be better prepared.
2. Deodorant is not a consumerism conspiracy, it is a miracle product and we should give thanks for its existence.
3. No one died. Even when your worst fears become reality, it’ll all blow over and nobody will remember it except you.

Ian’s story is a great illustration of the first two Principles:

1. If you can’t do without it, make sure you won’t have to. (This usually applies to things like projectors and PowerPoint files, not personal hygiene products.)
2. Any rational response to “What’s the worse that can happen?” is most likely wrong.

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Categories: Guest Spots, Post-presentation, Pre-presentation, Problems with Content, Problems with Equipment, Problems with Light, Problems with People, Problems with Software, Problems with Sound, Problems with Staging, Problems with Time, Problems with Transportation, Problems with Venue, Problems with Wardrobe
Tags: conspiracy, dawn flight, deodorant, hygiene, Ian Whitworth, laughter, Nervousness, overconfidence, steve ballmer

"Ian Whitworth: The Worst Presentation of My Life" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on September 25, 2009. Copyright 2009 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

]]> http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/2009/09/25/ian-whitworth-the-worst-presentation-of-my-life/feed/ 1 http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/2008/10/31/the-seven-principles-of-presentation-disaster-avoidance-version-01-beta/ http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/2008/10/31/the-seven-principles-of-presentation-disaster-avoidance-version-01-beta/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:34:17 +0000 Lee Potts http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/?p=544

[UPDATE: "The Principles" is going to be a living document and will be updated and added to on a regular basis. This post is where it all started and the rationale for the project can be found at the end.

The most up-to-date version will be maintained at http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/the-principles/.]

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1.
If you can’t do without it,
make sure you won’t have to.

Have backups of your slide files, have backup for your critical equipment, have backups for your people. Have backups.

2.
Any rational response to
“What’s the worse that can happen?”
is most likely wrong.

This is mainly due to the fact that the things that can go wrong are not limited by a requirement to be rational. Just ask Wall Street. And don’t forget that the person asking this question usually doesn’t want to know the real answer, they’re just ready to move on.

3.
If you practice like it’s the real thing,
the real thing will seem like a practice.

That’s why they use live ammo in boot camp.

4.
It’s much easier to destroy something by accident
than it is to create something on purpose.

Be very careful around fragile equipment, electricity, icy roads and, perhaps most importantly, the delete key. Especially while pulling an all-nighter. You also want to aggressively seek ways to eliminate as much of the accidental from your process as possible.

5.
The diagram is not the room.

Whether it a conference room, ballroom, or theater — see the space you will be working in for yourself. The diagram provided by the venue will not reveal everything you need to know — no matter how detailed and accurate it is.

6.
If you’re not early, you’re late.

A simple problem that would ordinarily not require anything more than time to fix can become a fatal error when the time isn’t available.

7.
The ways to get it right are few.
The ways to get it wrong, infinite.

It’s always possible that a string of several very small, seemingly unimportant decisions, can lead to a major failure. Be cautious when it appears a choice can be made casually.

- – - – -

Okay, we’ve all been there. We’ve all been caught up in the heat of the moment at one time or another. It usually happens when you’ve been working far too hard for far too long and it’s getting more and more difficult to decide what needs to be done and how to go about doing it. All you want to do is get through the presentation without anything going wrong but there’s some doubt (and usually several competing opinions) about how to make this happen.

The above principles are an attempt to condense the lessons learned from stories I’ve heard and presentation disasters I’ve witnessed down to a useful handful of easy to remember axioms. Think Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanacs focused on the presentation preparation process (light purse, heavy heart;
hunger never saw bad bread; a penny saved is a penny yadda, yadda, yadda).

Ideally, they will be memorable enough to come to mind when they are most needed and true enough to clarify challenging situations. I think “pithy” is a good word to describe what I’m shooting for. The insights embodied in these principles do not need to be particularly original or surprising, they just need to provide the perspective, guidance and the modicum of common sense that can lead to the appropriate course of action.

I need you to tell me whether or not the principles above, will actually be useful in real life. Do they capture your experience of the presentation process? Did I miss anything? Do they need to be called something else (I suspect the current title is a little clunky)? Please use the comments or the contact form to let me know your thoughts, ideas, additions or criticisms.

I’d also like to hear from you where you think I should go with this project. I assume it will be living document. What would you like it to look like? Where should I “park” it? Maybe a wiki? A shared google doc?

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"The Seven Principles of Presentation Disaster Avoidance (Version 0.1 beta)" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on October 31, 2008. Copyright 2008 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

]]> http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/2008/10/31/the-seven-principles-of-presentation-disaster-avoidance-version-01-beta/feed/ 17 http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/2008/06/20/life-in-the-corporate-theater/ http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/2008/06/20/life-in-the-corporate-theater/#comments Sat, 21 Jun 2008 03:27:25 +0000 Lee Potts http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/?p=47 Steve LaRose is an AV/IT tech in the corporate presentation business. He gets to travel all over the world staying in some really glamorous places doing some rather unglamorous work. If anyone in the world is intimately acquainted with Murphy’s Law and how to go about breaking it, it’s Steve and the army of pros like him who keep all those meetings moving. And he has the stories to prove it. You can read them on his blog – Life in the Corporate Theater. Here are some excerpts:

Rob hadn’t gotten any of the presentations last night. They didn’t do an official slide review. This morning, they came in with a whole bunch of presentations for him to load up.

The agenda showed about 8 presentations, and they handed Rob about 15. He ended up having to string all these slides together, and things still seemed weird. There was a presentation in there that had a thank you slide at the end of it, and then another 15 slides after the thank you. So, things were pretty unsettling this morning. We sorted all those kind of things out, but it is just no fun when you don’t have answers and it is 10 minutes before the show is supposed to start. Our client was really great though. She was running around getting us all the answers to the questions that we had, and it all got sorted out. It just makes you wonder why we came down an hour and a half before the show started. (well… we all know why we come down that early)

—

The setup was going well, right up until we actually tried to power on the projector, and got nothing.

Who needs a working projector anyway?

We grabbed the back up projector and that one powered up no problem, but no image. After about 45 minutes of checking cables, connections, and then replacing breakout cables, we finally got image. There were about 4 breakout cables that were bad.

So, we got the image up, and then called Rick to let him know that the projector was not working. Rick hopped in his car and drove all the way down from Maplewood about two hours away with a replacement projector.

Problem solved!

—

And from a meeting he did in Russia:

The madness started out in the General Session when Eric turned on the first microphone and found that the simultaneous interpretation vendor was taking the feed from the PA and sending it so hot into the earphones that the 120 earphones were louder than the PA system.

The lighting instrument that we were using to project a gobo was most likely right out of the box, and it started smelling up the room with a burnt paint smell.

Then the stage right projector decided to just overheat and turn itself off.

Then the stage Left projector crapped out. We called for a back up and a brand new back up lamp. George ripped apart the machine and worked on it for a bit… to no avail.

It took hours… like 5 hours to get them to bring us the new gear.

Then towards the end of the day, we lost the front couple of rows of microphones so I had to become mic runner boy.

Everyone needed a drink last night… that is for sure.

This is the sort of work I used to do before I joined the corporate world and became “the client.” I have to admit that I still miss it sometimes.

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"Life in the Corporate Theater" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on June 20, 2008. Copyright 2008 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

]]> http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/2008/06/20/life-in-the-corporate-theater/feed/ 0 http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/2008/05/29/powerpoint-thats-right-powerpoint-to-the-rescue/ http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/2008/05/29/powerpoint-thats-right-powerpoint-to-the-rescue/#comments Thu, 29 May 2008 16:11:49 +0000 Lee Potts http://www.breakingmurphyslaw.com/?p=34 Lisa Lindgren, a fellow member of the InfoComm Presentations Council was kind enough to share a story about how PowerPoint 2007 recently foiled Murphy’s Law. Lisa reminds us of some important best practices and I have an observation or two of my own (surprise, surprise).

We all know that we should test our slides and equipment in the actual setting prior to when the audience arrives and therefore, before it is too late to correct any problems. Sometimes that isn’t practical, but when you do make the extra effort, it can really be worth it.

I recently participated in a conference and was slated as the final speaker at lunch on the second day of the three-day event. The only time that I would be able to test anything in that room, was the day before after a general session. The timing would be tight before I had to be in another session, and I almost decided against forcing the issue. But I had used animations and some of the theme features from PowerPoint 2007, and the computer I would have to use for my presentation was running a different software version. My fear was that something wouldn’t translate correctly and my carefully timed effects wouldn’t work.

Well it turned out that the animations worked just fine. But what I hadn’t anticipated was that the room that would be used for lunch was very bright. I had chosen a dark background, which was striking on my laptop screen, and would have been effective in a dark room. But all that light simply washed out my visuals and you could barely see the photos or read the captions.

Not only was I able to change the background and save my presentation, I have to say that PowerPoint 2007 made this easier than I had ever expected. I simply chose a different theme from those provided in the standard package. Instantaneously the background was light and the text and accent colors reverted to being a contrasting dark color. . .all literally at the click of a key. In fact, the theme I chose subtly reinforced my message in style and I ended up with a stronger visual presentation than I had before.

So the lesson that I learned was that it really, truly is important to check your presentation on the actual computer in the actual room because unexpected things can and will go wrong. And I have a new appreciation for the positive aspects of the new themes in PowerPoint 2007.

PowerPoint has taken so much abuse the last couple years, isn’t it kind of refreshing when someone has something positive to say about it?

I’d like to stress a couple points made in Lisa’s story. First, if you’re going to present, get there early. Lisa put herself in a position to effectively deal with any problems that might have arisen with her presentation, or the venue, by making it a priority to test things out well in advance of the time her presentation was due to start. I understand that not every speaking opportunity is going to give you a chance to check things out an entire day ahead of time, but the more time you have to confirm everything is the way it needs to be (and to recover if it’s not) the better. Remember, if you’re not early, you’re late.

Second, it’s crucial that, like Lisa, you understand all the capabilities of the software you are using. A lot PowerPoint users only take time to learn the bare minimum necessary to do the typical tasks that come up on a day-to-day basis. This is a mistake. You not going to be able to use the PowerPoint function or feature that’s going to save you butt in an emergency situation if you don’t know it’s there. Take a class. Buy a book. At least take an hour or so on a slow Friday afternoon and methodically go through each item on each menu and find out what it does and how it does it. After all, no one thinks much of a carpenter who doesn’t know that a hammer can also be used to remove nails.

Your turn:

What’s your favorite little known PowerPoint function or feature that you love showing to people? Please feel free to share it with us in a comment to this post.

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Tags: Early, hammer, InfoComm Presentations Council, Lisa Lindgren, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, PowerPoint themes, PresentationXpert, software, Time, tools

"PowerPoint (that’s right, PowerPoint) to the Rescue" was originally posted on Breaking Murphy's Law on May 29, 2008. Copyright 2008 Lee Potts and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

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