Murphy's Law states: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." This is especially true and especially painful when there is an audience involved.
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 1) You weren’t particularly careful about your pre-presentation meal choices. Washing down the street vendor’s Khlav Kalash with Crab Juice might not have been the best idea you’ve had recently.
2) Your time is too valuable to fly in the night before your presentation. “Leaving early in the morning will be fine. Two hours is plenty of time to get from the airport to the hotel.”
3) “I’m too tired to figure out the alarm clock. I’ll just call down to the front desk for a wake up call.”
4) “I burned my presentation to a CD, I’ll just hand it off to the AV guys as I head for the stage. Yeah, I use (pick one):
- a Mac.
- unusual fonts.
- something other than PowerPoint.
Why would that be a problem?”
5) “Backup copies? If I lose the CD, the office can always email me a copy of the file. There will be plenty of time and all the hotels have good wireless internet access now.”
 ©iStockphoto.com/TommL 6) “I’m flying out right after the meeting so I only need one change of clothes. I like to travel light and what’s the worst that can happen?”
7) “I’m sure the hotel will give us exactly the AV equipment we asked for. Of course it will work perfectly.”
Subjective: The Artful Life: If I Turn This Off Now We Will Go Into Darkness — Snarky description of a presentation that went very wrong (in more ways than one). “Enter PSU IT guy (well, enter his speaking role anyway, as he’d been poking about at the podium for a few minutes at this point). Oh higher educated IT guy, explain to us simple art enthusiasts why things have gone so wrong: ‘Well, the old projector had this button you could push that fixed this problem and this new projector doesn’t have the same buttons.'”
 ©iStockphoto.com/hammondovi Life in the Corporate Theater: International Shows — “On Thursday I am headed for Prague, so I started pulling out supplies that I will need for working in Europe.” Great ideas for preparing to work overseas including several items you may never have thought of.
Craig Strachan: A lesson in being prepared — “Last night, I spoke at a function in Cape Town, and I was almost in big trouble.”
If you travel a lot, you might also want to check out One Bag: The Art and Science of Traveling Light.
Signal vs. Noise: Going in Unprepared — “This year I’ve spoken at about a dozen or so conferences and another dozen or so meetings or classes or gatherings. What I’ve started to notice is that I’m better unprepared.”
Blue Room technical forum: Macs, The pick of the current crop is…? — “After a day of trauma with several visiting speakers turning up with presentations prepared on Macs, and them only sort of working on PCs, I’m thinking that the best fix may be to get a Mac myself. Never having used one in anger for this sort of stuff, I thought I’d ask here as well as my friendly Geek forum.”
Great Public Speaking: Keystone Effect — “When a projector is not exactly on a level plain with a projection screen the projected image is not symmetrical.”
The Next Meeting: Making every second count at virtual meetings — “The key to achieving a successful virtual meeting is being prepared for both the expected and the unexpected. That means you must take your personal knowledge of your own virtual team and all the virtual office jobs concerned and use them to anticipate all the things that you might encounter when holding meetings.”
 ©iStockphoto.com/katsgraphicslv As a male, morning sickness is one potential presentation problem I never had to deal with on a personal level (unless you count being vicariously acquainted with it in the way only the father of three can be). As far as I know, none of the speakers I worked with were contending with it while presenting.
It must be a concern for someone out there. My referral logs showed a recent visitor made it to Breaking Murphy’s Law by searching for “giving presentations with morning sickness.” In fact, a BML post from last August is the top result for this search even though pregnancy-related nausea isn’t actually the topic of the post. I checked out the other results for this search and tried a few searches of my own.
There were several pleas to a higher power that went something like this:
Dear Lord – I have to do a presentation for our board tomorrow. Please don’t let me puke during this presentation. Please let T forget to wear her noxious perfume that will instantly make me puke if I smell it.
I also found these cute designer vomit bags. I know I would feel a whole lot better about losing my brunch in front of the board if I could pull one of these out of my briefcase.
 ©iStockphoto.com/gioadventures There was lots of general advice on how to lessen morning sickness symptoms, but nothing on what to do when you need to be behind the lectern at the same time you really need to be on your way to eloquently addressing a porcelain bowl.
Does anyone have a story they are willing to share about a time when the need to be a presenter came into direct, hormonal, bacon-odor-fueled conflict with early pregnancy? Any advice? Please use the comment section and help the mothers-to-be out there googling for experience-based information.
 ©iStockphoto.com/casaalmare Breaking Murphy’s Law was the recipient of a decent flurry of linkage in the last few days. Thought I might return the favor:
Thanks folks, I appreciate it. Glad you like what we’re doing here.
 ©iStockphoto.com/kozmoat98 Life in the Corporate Theater: Does anything work in Miami? –“So, beyond all the jackhammering that we are hearing through the walls during the meeting, the Internet connection that the hotel is providing is very sketchy.” Things get off to a rough start for Steve in Another day in Miami but seem to improve as the day goes on.
EffectiveMeetings.com: Presentation Disaster Preparation — Lots of great advice including “The Key to a Glitch-free Presentation: Arrive Early. I’ll never forget a major address I gave at a convention many years ago. The program was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. The committee, good hosts that they were, insisted on taking me out for dinner. Naively, I went along. They promised to get me to the auditorium in plenty of time. Needless to say, we arrived just at the stroke of 8 and I was on. Never again! ”
oboeinsight: That’s The Night When The Lights Went Out In Georgia Sydney — “I’ve been at two performances when the lights have gone out. Once, with San Jose Symphony, Richard Stoltzman played —in the dark and by memory!— Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo, while my husband, who was stage manager at the time, quickly set up stand lights so we could continue the full concert. (I guess we had a generator that provided enough power for stand lights.)”
 ©iStockphoto.com/LeggNet Recognized Expert: Dealing with a Difficult Participant — “Three minutes into your talk someone takes a cell phone call and carries on a conversation as though they were in the room alone. They’re loud and disturbing. What do you do?”
Stagecraft Journal: ‘Da Rules: Meant for Stagehands and shop crews but there’s a lot here of interest to anyone working at any atge of the presentation process.
Speaking About Presenting: 5 strategies to defuse the audience — “Sometimes your audience needs defusing. You may know ahead of time that the audience is likely to be hostile to your ideas, or there may be a big issue looming over them which distracts them from listening to your presentation. Or they may simply not be that interested in listening to you.”
TJ Walker: What do I do if I make a mistake or forget what I am about to say? — “Let’s say you are in the middle of making a point and suddenly your brain freezes and you can’t remember what to say next. The average presenter will have a look of horror shoot across his face, turn bright red, grimace, apologize to the audience…” and If my allotted time is cut, what should I eliminate from my presentation? — Good advice with this fantastic close — “The foolproof presenter realizes there is never an ideal environment for speaking. There will always be distractions in the form of noise from next door, poor lighting, or noisy people in the back of the room. The foolproof presenter simply sizes up the opportunity given what is available in terms of time and resources and then makes the best of it—every time.”
The Accidental Communicator: 5 Ways To Deliver A Disastrous Presentation — “What me worry? Why bother to practice – you know this stuff inside and out, you’ll just go up there and wing it and the crowd will love you because it will seem more natural and less rehearsed than all the other presenters. Yeah right.”
Control Booth: Risk Assessment Sample — “here is an anonymised version of the latest risk assessment done by the theatre technicians.”
Indezine: PowerPoint Version Hell — “All these issues can be placed under a common umbrella that I’ll call Version Hell – and while it’s no fun being under this umbrella, life can be much more uncomplicated if you are aware of these problems, and ready to look at workarounds and best practices. You might have noticed that I never promised any solutions – that’s because very few of them exist – most of the time, you’ll have to look at workarounds for existing content, and plan with best practices for any new slides you create. As goes the famous saying: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Fans Of Reality TV: Quick Fixes For Wardrobe Malfunctions.
 Flying into Atlanta Tuesday brought it all back. It’s been a long, long time since I traveled anywhere other than North Jersey or Montgomery County, Maryland while on the job. In a previous professional life, I worked these these huge sales training meetings that required flying a team of ten or twenty people into places slightly more glamorous. Places people might consider giving a body part to go to.
As much as I miss the venues, I miss the camaraderie more. AV and graphic techs, meeting planners, project managers, manager-managers, trainer-trainers. We were like an invading army, piling off planes and into vans, setting up camp in the on-site office and taking over the meeting rooms, unpacking box after box of supplies, subduing vast expanses of carpeted, air conditioned ballroom territory and making it serve our purposes. Putting in killer hours and putting out countless fires.
What I don’t miss are the things we needed to do back then to make sure everything went well. Things that technology has since made unnecessary.
 ©iStockphoto.com/ohdub For instance, we were still using 35mm slides. They needed to be in fragile glass mounts (plastic mounts tend to warp and jam the projector) and hand numbered with a sharpie. There was no putting a quick backup copy of your slide files on a thumb drive and tossing it into a your bag. You needed to hand-carry two complete sets of slides to the meeting, preferably using different people on different flights.
Why?
All of this was done in observance of the most important of the Ten Commandments of Doing Everything Possible to Avoid Screwing Up a Presentation: If you can’t do without it, make sure you don’t have to.
It’s sort of like this: if you need to have Pepsi, and you’re headed for Atlanta, be sure to bring your own. The hard part is knowing that you’ll need to do so.
Your Turn:
Technology might have made it unnecessary to do things like carrying two brick-like sets of 35mm slides to every meeting but unfortunately, it has made other, new precautions necessary. Which of these new, technology-driven precautions are driving you absolutely crazy. You can use the comment area to vent about it if you need to.
Maniactive: Top 6 Touchy-Feely Presentation Rehearsal Tips — “2. Wear Your Shoes. Oh, they don’t call it “dress” rehearsal for nothing! Don’t rehearse in your pajamas — unless you intend to give your presentation in your jammies ! Instead, rehearse in the actual clothes you’ll be wearing during your presentation — right down to your shoes. You’ll be amazed at how much better your performance will be just by understanding how your entire body feels in full ‘costume and makeup.'”
 ©iStockphoto.com/DaydreamsGirl Work•Play•Experience: How not to close a presentation… (A true story) — “I experienced this live and in terrifying Stampede-o-rama last week, exactly as described above. As soon as the word “buffet” was out, jackets were being grabbed, chairs were scraping and conversation had started. What followed was not just drowned out, it was ignored by 100 lizard brains who could already smell the steaming flesh.”
Great Public Speaking: Check Local References — “On the international speaking tour I just returned from I could have made a serious flaw had I not checked out material with the locals after I got in the country. Apparently one country hates a certain kind of animal to the point where some natives actually try to run over the animal when driving on the road. A nearby country loves the same animal.”
Speak Schmeak: Another reason to avoid the lectern — “Did you see how high John McCain had to raise his arms for his gestures to be seen over the top of his lectern? He seemed uncomfortable having to use exaggerated arm movements (which were reenacted in the SNL skit the following night).” and Don’t go on a juice fast before a big appearance — “Don’t try anything new right before a presentation. It might throw you off, just a little.”
SpeakerSue Says: How to pick yourself up after you fall — “I was so bad, so awful, that I couldn’t make eye contact with anyone as I left the stage. (This wasn’t that big a deal really because no one was making eye contact with me either.) We all wanted me to exit the room as quickly as possible.”
The Humble Nailbanger: Life in the dark — “Never before, however, have I done what I did the other day, which was make it all the way to work and halfway through the day before realizing that I was wearing a button-down shirt inside out. The collar was up the way it should have been, but the buttons were on the inside, tags hanging out, the whole gigantic embarassing bit.”
The Charleston Gazette: Behind the curtain with stagehand Joey Ansel — “Stagecraft is taught in colleges, but Ansel says he learned his trade on the job. None of what he does, he says, is extremely complicated. ‘It’s a lot of little things.’ It’s important to be organized and able to remain calm. He says it helps to be open to change. Each show has its own set of concerns and issues. He can’t rely on everything working the way it’s always worked or even people behaving the way they did last time.”
Encore Design Group: Podium or Lectern? — “The word ‘podium’ is one of the most misused terms in the public assembly world. It is common to hear this word misused in church, government, auditoria, and schools. The proper use of terms is one way of separating the professionals from the rest.”
 ©iStockphoto.com/doulos Seriously, I’m not just trying to cash in on VP debate buzz. This would be a terrific article no matter what the specific context. In it, Nick Morgan makes a point that should be one of the Ten Commandments of Doing Everything Possible to Avoid Screwing Up a Presentation:
Second, rehearse under conditions as close to reality as possible. If you can get into the hall, rehearse there. If not, approximate it. The reason is that surprises at the event itself will throw you, and more than 3 surprises will flummox you. And that will show up in your body language. If the lights are brighter, or the sound is more echo-y, or the stage is bigger than you anticipated, that takes mental energy to deal with – mental energy that you won’t be putting into a sparkling performance.
If you’re a presenter, or if you’re responsible in any way for the success of a major presentation, you need to do everything you can to make sure that this policy is put into effect. And the more important the presentation, the more exacting you need to be in the replication of the actual presenting environment. Things like podium/screen placement, confidence monitor size/positioning and they type of remote control used for advancing slide are all good examples of things a speaker needs to feel familiar and comfortable with. It will also be helpful, if you’ll be providing AV support during a presentation, to have a chance to set up and put the actual system that will be used through it’s paces. Believe me, as someone who has been there, the best time to find out you need a longer VGA cable or that the projectors time-out function hasn’t been disabled is in rehearsal, not just before the speaker is about to go on.
Remember: If you rehearse like it’s the real thing, the real thing will seem like a rehearsal.
Blue Room technical forum: Wifi interfering with Radio mics, Strange goings on — “The strange problem we are having is that at some venues we seem to have a conflict between the radio mics and wifi, whilst at other venues there is none. When there is conflict, the signal stength on the Sure recievers is all over the place (normally rock solid in this size venue) and the signal drop out is very high, this occurs over all frequencies in the group. With all radio mic transmitters off, there is no sign of a signal being picked up from the wifi on the Sure recievers. Looking at the frequencies used by the mics and the wifi there should not be a conflict, but there most definately is at times.”
Speak Schmeak: What not to do at the end of a presentation — “We plan a lot for what to do before and during a presentation, but not much for what to do at the end — or what not to do.”
The Codebelay Blog: How Do You Avoid Presentation Disaster? — “But the code used for my presentation didn’t work because the machine it was working on wasn’t configured correctly. There might have been an issue with someone overwriting my code, too.”
Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog: Presenting when you are not allowed to use a handout — “A participant in one of my workshops recently presented me with a new challenge. In his position as a sales professional, he has now encountered two large organizations who have stated that when he presents to them, he is forbidden from bringing handouts for the audience.”
Lynn Espinoza: When YOU should NOT be the spokesperson! — “You’ve been tapped to be the speaker at an industry event. There is a nagging feeling deep inside your gut that you are being set up for failure. The content for the speech is not your own, and in fact this is not your area of expertise. You feel like you’re over your head. Guess what? You are.”
Mary Hanna: A day for nitpickers — “The room was full of professional speakers, both beginning and accomplished. The presenter, a well-known marketing expert, was talking about achieving credibility as a speaker. A bullet on his PowerPoint slide, which I was following on the handout, said ‘Always site your sources.’ As I always do, I corrected the handout, crossing out ‘site’ and writing ‘cite.’ I turned to my friend and pointed it out. She acknowledged it with a nod. ‘It affects his credibility,’ I whispered.”
TJ Walker: Should I rehearse and for how long? — “Yes, you should rehearse. From a presentation coach’s perspective, the following 25 words are the dumbest phrase in the English language: ‘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.’ Ugh!!!”
CNET News: ‘Google Moderator’ tool takes on lecture-hall chaos — “There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn’t clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked,” Heath wrote in a blog post. “And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate.”
blogcampaigning: Public Speaking Tips — The last one is best.
Brad Montgomery: What to do when your humor fails? — “When I coach others about how to be funny, I teach saver lines. Basically, these are jokes that you tell after a joke goes bad to “save†the situation. Johnny Carson was the king of savers. I just found this video….check out the master.”
KNOWHR: Writer’s Remorse — “Here’s what else I know: Those last-second edits rarely add anything to the quality of the communication.”
Great Speaking Coach: Avoid the Deadly Quotations Trap — “Why not? Because what could be a living, memorable moment when delivered by you with vocal variety and gestures becomes a flat, two-dimensional inert set of words.”
The Power of Reflection: Do You Make This Mistake When Ending Your Presentations? — “Gord’s terrible ending damages his career. He looks weak and indecisive. His presentation fails to generate any enthusiasm for his cause.”
It seems to be a really hot topic. One of my first posts from way back in April, Jedi Knights With Frickin’ Laser Pointers, is still generating new comments. Just about everyone agreed that laser pointer use should be kept to a minimum, but I really like the way Jeff Bailey of MostToast summed up his remarks:
“My current presentation remote has a laser pointer built-in. I find it useful for checking to see if the batteries are dead but that is about all I use it for.”
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