I have seen many presentations where the speaker says “I have three points to shareâ€, and then about five minutes before the end, he says, “Ok, and now my second point…â€. This inevitably ends up in his presentation going overtime, or on him rushing through the last two points of his presentation.
Professors often use Powerpoint presentations that are completely worthless or simply jarring, that often pose more problems than they’re worth. Video clips in slides never open. Ever. They just bring up a picture of the Quicktime icon and leave the professor struggling to find the program on his or her desktop that is, meanwhile, projected to the whole class, who are all the while scanning it for anything moderately incriminating or embarrassing.
I can think of many times where a corporate executive refused my offer to rehearse their presentation. They figured it was better to be “fresh and spontaneousâ€, but when they got up to the podium and the adrenalin kicked in, the material was not familiar enough and they fumbled and grasped for their words. They lacked confidence and control. The effect on the audience? Out came the Blackberries and the laptops. The presenter failed to engage them.
The room where they meet at the New Milton Community Centre is very long with windows at the back so the speaker is facing a fairly busy town centre road as well as the audience. I was about halfway through my presentation when a couple of teenagers, one male, one female, glanced through the windows as they were passing, noticed someone with a microphone speaking to an audience and stood gormlessly grinning and waving!
Of course the mosquitoes weren’t carrying malaria, but I’m sure quite a few audience members were a bit antsy as the swarm of flying bugs was unleashed. Was this a good idea? In my honest opinion, yes and no.
“That’s a nasty, impolite question,†said Scalia. He was responding to a question from 20-year-old Sarah Jeck, a Florida Atlantic University honors college junior.
JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy has withdrawn her candidacy for Hillary Clinton’s old Senate seat, citing ‘personal reasons’. Helping her decision was a firestorm of media ridicule for a interview in which she said “y’know†139 times. It made the average teenage girl sound like JFK by comparison.
When deciding how to set up a presentation room when you have full control of the logistics, pay close attention to these two major distracters . . . doors and windows.
In the decidedly non-tourist town of Zacapa, Guatemala, exists a bare-bones bedpost called Hotel Torre Fuerte, where we stayed recently. A few, uh, highlights: icy cold water spouting from the shower; a golf-ball-size hole on one wall (leading to lord only knows where!); a thin mattress dressed in thinner sheets. Oh yeah, and free wireless Internet.
Say you create the best PowerPoint presentation, filled with evocative action verbs and the like, and store it on your G Drive. You go to work, launch your browser, only to discover that Google is down, taking your presentation with it. What to do? Why bother burning a CD or DVD, or moving the .ppt file over to a cheap thumb drive, when you can store it in the cloud, accessible all over the world—but only when it works!
Oops! I broke my own rules and did not follow a checklist on my last presentation. It was two minutes until start time and I realized there was no flipchart in the room. Oh oh!. Better think fast. I was not using an overhead projector either, so I could not simply write on a blank transparency.Now one & 1/2 minutes left . . . . I thought, “Never let em see you sweat.”
I didn’t realize what an accomplishment it was to come in third in the whole school at the age of eight. What I heard in that applause was an audience who was glad to see me eliminated! I thought they must be applauding so loudly because they didn’t want me to win. I cried, of course, and had to be comforted by my parents. Somewhere along the way, it was explained to me that I got so much applause because the audience was acknowledging my achievement.
Have you ever misinterpreted your audience’s responses to your presentation? Do you see someone on her Blackberry and assume she’s bored? Do you see someone with crossed arms and a scowl and assume he’s angry? If no one raises hands when you ask a question, do you assume they’re not engaged?
HOW MUCH ARE YOU ON AUTO-PILOT in your preparations and your presentations? It’s pretty easy to reach that state, after you’ve been up in front of others a few times.
Of course, there may be those times when the audience just didn’t seem to get it. Or where you didn’t have all the equipment you were supposed to have. Or — well, there could be all sorts of glitches that somehow come up.
And you muddle through and snap back into auto-pilot the next time a presentation rolls around. In fact, it’s in our nature to fall into this pattern.
Unfortunately, of course, his shadow is a couple of feet away (on the slide) from where Boris thought he was pointing to. Sadly, this lead to confusion on the part of the audience, as you can imagine because from their point of view, Boris was talking about one bullet point but pointing at another.
I have a modest proposal: All large organizations should charge three to five bright, creative, and somewhat eccentric people with the sole task of identifying disasters that may come from or afflict any area, department, and aspect of the organization’s operations.
The last speaker of the program said, “I have just a little more. I don’t think anyone will mind if I go over time.†His little was about 30 minutes.
Probably the worst use of animation I have seen was on a slide from a salesperson. They were showing the prospect the inside sales team that would be supporting the prospect after the sale. The slide had the four people in the group, with their picture, name and areas of expertise. To build the slide, the salesperson had each of the head shot pictures bounce in to place. It made the staff look totally unprofessional! I asked the salesperson if they had ever shown those four people how he presented them to prospective clients. After a long pause, he changed the subject.
Take your time walking. The more time you take walking, the more status your audience will subconsciously give you. Let the audience’s clapping carry you to the stage as if you were gliding on a magic carpet. Remember to watch where you are walking. There could be cords and wires on the ground or chair legs in your path. Any one of these obstacles could cause you to have a nice trip. If something awkward should happen on your way to the lectern, remain calm and use humor. Using humor connects people and is more effective than using self-deprecating remarks. Let your audience know that there’s nothing to worry about, you’re okay, and the show will go on.
I remember seeing Robert Allen, famous author and millionaire, fall off the stage moments after he arrived. Instantly, he jumped back up on stage and poked fun at the hotel stage lighting, which had caused his fall. Allen’s humor set the audience at ease, and they roared with laughter at his quick wit.
Mr. Perlman said the recording, which was made Sunday at the Marine Barracks in Washington, was used as a last resort. “It would have been a disaster if we had done it any other way,†he said Thursday in a telephone interview. “This occasion’s got to be perfect. You can’t have any slip-ups.â€
Then I came across the above quote from Dale Carnegie, one of the grandfathers of modern day public speaking. I think he is absolutely right; you are potentially courting disaster because you might find yourself forgetting sections of your talk which will throw you completely.
But when it’s used poorly, PowerPoint turns into Teflon. Audience attention slides right off into confusion, frustration, and apathy. Blackberrys appear. Work comes out of briefcases. Mentally, your audience has walked out on you. The ones in the back are actually out the door.
This is actually a pretty typical scenario. We just spent two or more days setting up for the General Session. On Day 3 we come in and from 7am-8am we run the equipment and troubleshoot any and all issues. We tape down cables and get it all cleaned up. We were also scheduled to have rehearsals from 8am-11am. At 10:30am we are told to stand-by for Rehearsals. Woohoo. Thanks for waiting until the last 30 minutes of the scheduled rehearsal time.
The show begins at 3pm so we have time to knock out rehearsal and go to lunch and be ready and fresh for the main speakers. 11 and then 11:30 comes an goes. Finally at 1pm the second of three presenters comes in. Then it begins.
Slide 1 is good to go. Slide 2, can we change what that says. No, not like that…yeah, like that. Slide 3 gets changed. And so on and so forth. Our rehearsal is more of a PowerPoint editing session. After that, the TelePrompTer gets edited to fit the new content. We have two more presenters to go including the Main or first speaker.
And the entire crew is sitting there talking about food. Wondering if we are going to get a chance to eat. Wondering why no one seems to ever think about the fact that actual human beings sit behind that equipment and they have needs too. We can’t cut anyone to go and get food. Everyone has a vital function to fulfill. We can’t order in because most delivery drivers have no concept of where to bring such a delivery inside of a hotel. We are stuck. And hungry. And we need to go to the bathroom. Gripe, gripe, gripe.
We finish up rehearsal (such as it was) about 10 minutes before doors. In that time we have to go to the bathroom, get something to drink if we can, and the smokers have to go fulfill their need. Yes, we do make some big bucks to do what we do, but we sure wouldn’t mind if it were remembered that we need sustenance also.
A couple things grab my attention in this story:
If you are in a leadership role guiding a team through the presentation preparation process, first make sure everyone has a clear understanding of the differences between a slide review and a rehearsal, then don’t let time that should be devoted to rehearsal become a slide review. A real rehearsal this late in the process has the potential to actually make the presentation better. Doing a last-minute slide review and tweaking session might make the slides better, but it’s not likely to do the presentation any good. (See Principle 9)
For God’s sake, take care of your people. And yes, even if they are contractors, the AV crew is “your people”. You depend on them to perform at the absolute best of their ability. They can’t do that if they are hungry, thirsty and/or exhausted. It’s perfectly acceptable to expect them to go to heroic lengths in an emergency situation but it’s best to avoid operating in hero mode unless absolutely necessary.
Compare yourself with your peers in InfoComm International’s annual Presentation Professional survey. This year it’s shorter, easier and faster to complete. Whether you’re one of many in a corporate setting, or a one-person shop wearing all the hats, see how you compare in the skills you have and the challenges you face.
To thank you for sharing your opinions and experiences, you will receive a free survey report by e-mail.
It’s not like I was out there searching or anything but I found a quote that could be the official motto for Breaking Murphy’s Law:
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
~Eleanor Roosevelt
Pretty good, isn’t it. I came across it on Bob Sutton’s blog Work Matters. The post it’s from contrasts the philosophy that informs Eleanor’s quote with the idea that your own failures are the best teachers. Your failures are the teachers that smack your knuckles really hard with the ruler. Your failures are the teachers that firmly believe in corporal punishment.
I agree that personal failures are very good at teaching important lessons in a way that makes them difficult to forget. The only problem is there’s usually only one person in the classroom.
Learn from your mistakes, but also be generous and share them so others can learn from what you went through.
I know, I know, easier said than done. Just try to remember you could be saving someone else from geting their knuckles rapped.
Last night I attended an open speaking event, that wasn’t Toastmasters, where speakers were tasked to give an interesting 5 minute presentation. One of the presentations was a fabulous demonstration of drawing the audience in with an interesting story, making good use of PowerPoint to reinforce spoken points, and dressing to fit the speaker’s speaking style. However, the presentation was ruined when I got home, Googled the speech topic, and found out that the presenter lifted the major points of his speech from a British business writer without citing the source.
4. Insist that the lectern has a lip or a rest at the base to sit your presentation on so it doesn’t slip off.
5. Ask ! Is there a lectern ?
6. Be a prima donna. Insist on enough time in the room, with the lighting set to how it will be on the day. ( So you can tell if you can see your notes or the audience if that’s important. )
7. Make changes to the lighting if you need to. It’s your presentation ! Better still, insist you speak with the event organiser prior to the event and tell them what you want. If they can’t supply or organise it, you can adapt your presentation to suit the circumstances.
8. Have a pristine copy of the presentation that you are going to read from. It’s a nightmare when you pull the pages from pocket or bag to find them crumpled so they won’t sit on the lectern.
BBC Three news presenter Tasmin Lucia Khan left viewers gasping for more after reading a bulletin hopelessly out of breath.
The show in which Tasmin gives a minute-long current affairs update from around the world in ’60 Seconds’ was terminated on Thursday after just 30-seconds due to the mishap.
During the embarrassing episode, she was not seen on-screen but was audible only. Seconds into the bulletin, she was heard gasping between words before giving up after the first item.
A friend recently described to me how his 12-year old son did his homework and I admit I was a little shocked by how much times have changed. The boy would type frantically on his computer with his I-Pod in his ears blaring hip hop, constantly shooting IMs to his friends, while periodically being interrupted by beeping text messages from his cell phone. Apparently the youngster actually got his work done, but I have no idea how. When I was a kid, we had TV, the stereo and the (one) family telephone, and we certainly didn’t talk on the phone with one I-Pod earpiece in the other ear while typing on our MySpace pages at the same time.
The preposition switch may not be evidence of parapraxis, but the fact remains that Roberts did mess up the oath. Poor guy! He’s earned himself forever the distinction of being the first justice to to stumble over the 35-word oath in the course of sixty-four years and eleven Presidents.
I’ll make one last recommendation. If you choose to do a live demo, have a hot backup of everything ready to switch over during your session. Log in as a presenter on a second computer (preferrably on a separate network) and have the demo software fired up. If something goes wrong on machine number one, abandon it and carry on from machine number two. Audiences are sometimes bemused, but almost never assuaged by watching presenters try to fix things that are going wrong in their demos.
Jay Raskolnikov — half hillbilly, Demi-Culture — Some Thoughts
She was fine, but managed to unplug a cable leading to a special which was the only light on an actor later in the show. Got that fixed for the next scene. Show went pretty well other wise.
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 don’t have to refer to your prompt screens that often, and certainly not that obviously.
In the event that you start a speech with a thank you and everyone in the audience comes up to you afterwards and says you lost them at the onset, please let me know as I’d love to know which planet your audience was from.
It won’t replace my Keyspan (the Keynote Remote app does not have a black-out-screen function and the iPhone is a bit bulky in the hand compared to a tiny, plastic remote), but if I ever forget my remote control, my iPhone will do the trick just fine.
There’s been a fantastic response to my invitation to write about PowerPoint Design in 2009.
40 contributions. That’s a wealth of material to guide you in making presentations in 2009. They include strong opinions, the odd rant, and many perceptive “hit the nail†comments.
I’ve created three pages where you can follow links and read the e-mail contributions.
I remember the first time I was videotaped giving a presentation. It was about 12 years ago and it was a Toastmasters speech. When I had built up the courage I watched the tape and I was horrified! I was rocking back and forth from side to side. It looked like I was on a boat in choppy waters! What the heck was going on here? And, why the heck didn’t anyone tell me this! I looked like an absolute idiot!
I did a charity gig a couple of years back and the organiser was pleased when I said that I worked clean because she had taken a group to a comedy club recently and was upset when they went “off messageâ€. In a situation like that I think it’s difficult to expect a comedian not to go off message when you’re on their turf. A comedy club is a comedian’s home-ground, where they have that freedom.
Angelle’s assistants did get the PowerPoint running, but we detected a sense of quiet relief in the audience that listeners would not be subjected to the entire thing.
You’re giving your presentation but the audience just isn’t reacting. They’re distracted and not showing any emotion at all. Was it something you did? While it’s very possible that you may have put your audience to sleep, this happens only on rare occasions as most audience members are professional enough to at least pretend to be interested. If the audience is completely comatose, chances are that you’re not the reason.
She had brought in a financial expert to do a presentation to her staff about their 401k benefit, as this can be fairly complicated topic. When the presenter finished and asked if there were any questions, no one raised their hand. My friend was a bit surprised, but when the presentation was over, she went back to her office.
Actual system unable to be accessed if uploaded into the web server, due to security settings. For this meeting, we are showing in on our notebook, which acts as the local host. Mr Prem remindered that this is suppose to be a web application project. He expects it to be up in the server next week.
Some speakers would not know that. Instead, they would try to “wake them up” by talking louder or jumping around the stage. But this speaker knew his audience. He appreciated the respect shown by these visiting Japanese executives. In return, he paid them the respect of continuing his presentation without any loud antics.
This study does not show (at least from what was published) that presenters giving oral business presentations rate themselves better than their audiences do. But it does indicate that presenters and audiences seem to evaluate what is going on differently.
Your presentation really begins the moment you get out of your car in the parking lot: you are “on†… and you are in your Zone. Think of your Zone as your suit of armor. No matter how you feel, no matter how fast your heart is racing, or how much sweat has dripped into your socks, your Zone will protect you.
Only 20% said they would miss seeing speakers in person. That may say more about the sorrowful state of most on-stage presenters and presentations than it does about the audience!
Control your Media-PC or a boardroom presentation from across the room with this handy Pocket Wireless Touchpad with Media Controls. It gives you a portable laptop-style touchpad in the palm of your hand with full media controls and a built in laser pointer. The built-in rechargeable battery gives you 4 hours of play time and you can charge up via USB or docking in a standard PCMCIA slot. Secure 2.4Ghz Bluetooth connection means no one can muscle in on your mousing action.
This is the one hundred and first post on BML. Noticing this milestone gave me an opportunity to take a look back and review what’s happened so far. One thing I noticed is a tendency to focus on the disaster and the aftermath. Makes sense. These posts are usually entertaining to both read and write (as long as whatever happened didn’t happen to me).
Moving into the next one hundred posts, I’m going to try to dig a little deep and deal more with how planning and preparation helped when the fecal matter met the fan blades. In other words, a little less debrief, a little more anticipation.
To start off, I would like to offer this thought-provoking quote (as well as some thoughts the quote provoked).
“There is little peace or comfort in life if we are always anxious as to future events. He that worries himself with the dread of possible contingencies will never be at rest.”
~Samuel Johnson
That sounds about right for day-to-day living, but does it make sense for a speaker or the person responsible for making sure that a meeting or presentation is successful?
Since when are we supposed to be peaceful, comfortable or at rest? We get paid in part to think long and hard about those future events and possible contingencies he’s talking about.
You need to be able to develop and apply a certain frame of mind to in order to see around corners and be prepared to deal with issues that no one else is even aware of yet. This frame of mind requires a special kind of focused or contained anxiousness.
If you are too nervous or if you are worried about everything, you can become paralyzed and find yourself unable to take the necessary action to prevent an actual crisis. You can also lose credibility with other team members if you become “Chicken Little” and continually to try find new ways to deal with the remote possibility of the sky falling.
On the other hand, there are those who are too optimistic, who are never anxious. They also tend to also be incapable of working up the frame of mind that will allow them to anticipate how things might go wrong and to understand how truly bad things can get.
Is being able to operate in the sweet spot between these two extremes merely a matter of having enough, but not too much, experience? Enough to know what to worry about but not so much that you are jaded or complacent. Is it an innate trait?
Would you rather work with someone who is too anxious or not anxious enough? Which is most like to do to most damage?
…writing’s on the wall” (but make sure there are no bullet points and that you have a big dramatic photo you found on Flickr in the background. Why? I don’t know.).
[Editor’s note: Olivia Mitchell has devised an incredibly interesting and ambitious group blogging project. She asked an army of PowerPoint designers, speaking coaches and other presentation professionals to write posts exploring the theme “What I’d like to see in PowerPoint slide design in 2009.” Although Breaking Murphy’s Law has been careful to refrain from dealing with the disasters that can befall those not careful about their PowerPoint design decisions (there are so many others writing about that so much better than I ever could), I thought I would break with this unofficial policy and contribute the following.]
Superstition involves doing something without knowing why you do it (other than it makes you feel better in some way you can’t quite explain). It seems to me like there is more and more of this kind of thinking going into PowerPoint design. In 2009, I would like to see less.
Things I’ve heard recently:
You should never have any text on your slide with a font size of less that 28 points.
All presentations should have no more than 10 slides, be no longer than 20 minutes and use fonts no smaller than 30 points.
Three bullets per slide and they can’t be sentences.
Bullet points are deadly
Like many superstitious beliefs, design criteria like these usually have a rational, thoughtful beginning. However, over time, they became less and less methods for achieving particular aesthetic or rhetorical goals and end up as thoughtlessly applied dogma.
They might have started as something that someone read in one of the many excellent presentation design books that have come out in recent years. However, what the book suggested became corrupted and misinterpreted as it was passed from person to person, each with less and less understanding of the original research and experience that informed the context the book was working from (kind of like a game of “Whisper Down the Lane”).
They might have grown out of techniques and design decisions that worked once for a particular type of content or audience. Due to that success, they now get blindly applied to each subsequent presentation situation whether they are appropriate or not.
The bottom line is anytime a design “rule” is applied to a slide or a presentation thoughtlessly, without any consideration of the audience or the requirements of the messages being communicated, you have the makings of a massive presentation disaster on par with a projector blowing up.
Through the hard work of many great presentation designers, writers and thinkers (starting with Tufte right on through Reynolds, Abela, Duarte and Atkinson) just about everyone knows that it’s a bad idea to blindly follow the path of least resistance offered by PowerPoint’s design automation. In 2009, let’s work to get out another message that’s just as important:
When you believe in things that you don’t understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition ain’t the way, yeh, yeh.
I have seen many presentations where the speaker says “I have three points to shareâ€, and then about five minutes before the end, he says, “Ok, and now my second point…â€. This inevitably ends up in his presentation going overtime, or on him rushing through the last two points of his presentation.
Pretty good, isn’t it. I came across it on Bob Sutton’s blog 
Last night I attended an open speaking event, that wasn’t Toastmasters, where speakers were tasked to give an interesting 5 minute presentation. One of the presentations was a fabulous demonstration of drawing the audience in with an interesting story, making good use of PowerPoint to reinforce spoken points, and dressing to fit the speaker’s speaking style. However, the presentation was ruined when I got home, Googled the speech topic, and found out that the presenter lifted the major points of his speech from a British business writer without citing the source.
This is the one hundred and first post on BML. Noticing this milestone gave me an opportunity to take a look back and review what’s happened so far. One thing I noticed is a tendency to focus on the disaster and the aftermath. Makes sense. These posts are usually entertaining to both read and write (as long as whatever happened didn’t happen to me).
…writing’s on the wall” (but make sure there are no bullet points and that you have a big dramatic photo you found on Flickr in the background. Why? I don’t know.).