Episode #128: Bring Credibility To Your Presentations

When presenting and you can’t back up who you say you are with the goods, credibility declines rapidly and in fact dissipates. Seriously sad really. Our speaker had some excellent points to convey, but due to silly basic errors, killed his organisation’s messages and brand.

The impressive thing was our speaker was delivering the talk in English, when that was not his native language. Actually, the level of English fluency was singularly impressive. He came with a grand resume, part of the elite of the land, a well educated, international, urbane, sophisticated, senior guy. This was game, set and match to be a triumph of positive messaging and salesmanship. It was a fizzer.

I approached him after it was all over. I thought our speaker would benefit from a bit of friendly, helpful, positive feedback on how he could help his organisation to do better. He wasn’t buying any of that and asked me for one example. I asked for the first slide to be brought back up. A confusing coat of many, many colours, seriously impenetrable, dense with data, totally impervious to easy understanding – a roiling florid mess in other words. They were all like this. Data was simply killing the key messages.

The other issue was the delivery. Mysteriously, our speaker chose to stand right in front of the monitor and read to us what was on the screen, while having his back to the audience for most of the presentation. He allowed the slide deck to become the centerpiece of the presentation, instead of making his messages the key. Here lies a mighty lesson for all of us. We should all carefully cull our ideas and distill the talk down to only the most powerful and important elements. We should present only one idea per slide, restrict the colour palette to two colours for contrast and try to keep it zen-like simple. Here is Dr. Story’s iron rule for slides - if our audience cannot grasp the key point of any slide within two seconds, then it needs more paring back.

Graphs are great visual prompts and the temptation is to use them as unassailable evidence. This usually means trying to pack the graph slide with as much information as possible, showing long periods of comparison and multiple data points for edification, usually anointed with microscopic fonts. Instead think of them like screen wallpaper. They form a visual background. We can then go to another slide showing a turning point in splendid isolation for clarity or we can have an overlay pop up, with a key number, emphasised in very large font.

We also need to learn some very basic logistics about presenting. Try to stand on the audience left of the screen. We read from left to right, so we want them to look at our face first and then read the screen. We want to face our audience and if anyone drops the lights so that your screen is easier to see, stop everything right there and ask for the lights to be brought back up. We need the lights on in order that we can see our audience’s faces. We can then gauge if they are with us or resisting our messages.

Changing the slides and the delivery would have made the speaker’s messages clearer and more attractive. None of the things I have suggested to him are complex or difficult. Why then are we still assailed with unprofessional presentations from smart people?

People will judge us on what they see. In the event notice they will note our grand resume, they will hear the MC’s complimentary introduction, but they will make up their minds based on what we present and the way we present it. Let’s get it right everytime.