Episode #326: How To Recover From A Presentation Opening Disaster

We all know that first impressions are critical, but what happens if you blow it? There are a couple of typical ways we can hurt our credibility at the start. Trying a joke that bombs is a very common credibility and personal and professional brand destroyer. You think you are funny, when you aren’t. Or you think the joke is funny, but you are a crowd of one in agreement on that point. Think back to how many talks you have attended, where the speaker told a joke that made you laugh, rather than cringe? I doubt there will be many and probably you just observed the joke, laughed and then moved on, rather than analysing why that humour worked. This means you gained no insight into joke telling, but here you are the amateur comedian trying out your own untested material on this business audience.

What do you do when it bombs? You can just ignore the groans and move on or you can attempt a recovery. If it is obvious that joke wasn’t funny, you can say, “Too bad - that joke seemed to work much better in rehearsal with my subordinates”, or “that joke clearly indicates my intended career switch to comedy needs a re-evaluation”, or “Oh well, that joke seemed like a good idea at the time”, which will get people laughing, as you make fun of yourself. The key is to let it die a natural death and not keep referencing it after the initial recovery. You are hopefully going to provide things in your talk which will grab the audience’s interest and they will forget that as a comedian you are pretty ordinary.

Once upon a time, I was the MC for an event involving Paul Keating, then Australian Prime Minister. He was in the green room upstairs in the Hotel and the plan was as he entered the event hall, I would say in a deep baritone announcer voice, “please join me in welcoming the Prime Minister of Australia Paul Keating”. Pretty simple really except the logistics had a few flaws as we discovered. The timing had to be as he entered, I would start the welcome. He would come from the elevator and enter the room and this would require a signal to me on the dais, that he was about to enter the room. It was a relay system. One of the Japanese team was posted near the elevator to signal another colleague near the doorway, who would then signal me to get started.

The problem is that Prime Ministers travel with a large body officials and press entourage and the Japanese colleague near the elevator saw a bunch of Aussies coming out of the elevator and set off the smoke signal. I enthusiastically launched into my introduction, to rapidly discover no Prime Minister, as it was a false flag. It was pretty embarrassing and lonely up there on the dais. Somehow, I managed to eek out, “thank you everyone for the rehearsal, the Prime Minister will be here shortly” and covered the error with some humour. Unfortunately, my colleagues managed to send another false signal and the second time I had no witty comeback, just deep embarrassment. Third time lucky we got it right. My point is you can sometimes cover a mishap with some humour. I certainly wasn’t expecting that slip up and had not prepared for it, but after that event experience I vowed I would be ready if ever there was a next time.

Another common opening problem is the tech. Everything was working like a charm when you got there early and checked the equipment, but of course as soon as you start, the slides won’t come up or the computer stops working. An audience doesn’t like it when they have to sit there and watch you trying to reboot the computer or do some deep diagnostic dive to get things working properly. They feel their valuable time is being fritted away by you. Often audience members will shout out useful advice on what you need to be doing which makes it even worse, because you look even more incompetent. What do you do?

There are a couple of choices. If you have someone handy who can work on it to fix the issues in the background then certainly get them involved and you get straight into your talk, sans tech for a little while. This presumes you are prepared enough to give the talk without any slides and we should all be ready to give our talks without any visuals. This is a vital part of the planning stage and shouldn’t be overlooked, because according to Murphy’s Law, if something can go wrong it will and we need to be ready. Once the colleague or staff have resurrected the slide deck, you can just pick it up from there. Don’t go back and start again – you have already started, so keep moving forward.

The other alternative is to give up on slides altogether and use storytelling or word pictures to draw out the detail you want to communicate. You should be using both devices anyway, but you may need to ramp these up more than usual. When I was training to become a Dale Carnegie instructor my senior instructor played a trick on me, seconds before we were due to start the first tandem class together. He suddenly announced the slide deck wasn’t working and we would have to run the class without any visuals to test my reaction. I was well prepared and had given a lot of talks without slides, so I said “no problem”, I was ready to go anyway, which wasn’t what he was expecting. The point is, we should always be ready to go without slides every time.

Planning for a disaster is 99% of the solution. Our usual problem is we are taken by surprise and have no back up alternatives. There are only a limited number of things which will rob us of our acing the first impression, so let’s work up a Plan B for those occasions. They will certainly happen and usually at the worst possible time, so let’s be ready for them.