Episode #206: Where Do Presentations Go Off The Rails?

You see it. The presenter publicly self-immolates. They might butcher the start, get lost in the weeds of their content or be put to the sword at the end in the Q&A. They can’t engage with their audience, are incoherent and quivering the whole time. It is a train wreck on display. Reputations and credibility are flayed alive. Here is the irony – they chose it to be like this. They made a series of poor decisions about this presentation and then reaped the whirlwind of total humiliation.

Rehearsing the presentation takes time. Time which could be devoted to adding massive content, multiple fonts and gaudy colours to the slides. This is why failures fail. They ignore logic and decide that practicing on their audience is much more efficient. It is not terribly effective though. The long term damage from short term decisions is substantial when you thrust yourself into the public eye. If you don’t have big brackets of time available, then just work on pieces at a time, over time. That means start early, so there is no mad rush at the end.

I made a genius decision once to prepare my presentation on the flight from Osaka to Sydney. No sleep and subsequently plenty of irritability upon landing made for a combustible cocktail. When someone in my audience had the temerity, the audacity, the gall to challenge my assertions in the presentation, it didn’t go well. I vowed NEVER to try that exercise in efficiency ever again.

Turning up just before kick off, to find there is some technical issue with your slides or the laptop or the audio is a life shortening experience. Always make the time to go early. I was giving a presentation to the Japan Market Expansion Competition and dutifully brought along my USB to plug into their laptop. Their Microsoft environment didn’t like my Mac presentation layout, so it changed the whole thing. I arrived early and found myself sweating like a maniac, as I tried to fix every single slide before the start. I finished with one minute to go, but I was a nervous wreck. If I am not using my own laptop, I go even earlier now.

First impressions start from the moment the organisers advertise the event and include elements of your bio. People are forming biases and opinions about you, which they are going to size up against what they see in front of them. Get there early, check the tech and then gracefully mingle with the punters. Do your best to be charming. Being an introvert, that is no easy task for me. Do your best to schmooze people in the crowd before you start and build supporters in the room.

Don’t eat too much at the lunch or dinner prior to your talk. Try instead to engage your table colleagues, again building rapport. You can always eat later if you are starving. When they call your name stride confidently and effortlessly to the stage. Have zero interaction with the laptop – don’t even touch it. Instead get straight into your opening. You don’t need any slides to begin with, so concentrate of creating a powerful and positive first impression. Once you have done that, then you can look down at your laptop and start the slide deck rolling. By the way, many balding presenters proffer a brilliant view of their sparse, patchy pate, as they lean forward over the laptop, fiddling with the machine. Don’t be one of them.

Start off with a power opening to grab attention. Remember, we are all self-focused and supremely interested in what happened to us this morning, what we need to do after the talk and what is coming up for us tomorrow. The speaker is competing with all of these high value items in the minds of the audience. We need to supplant all of that inner-focus with our ideas, views, suggestions and recommendations. Make sure to raise your voice tone from the get go, to set the energy level at the right point to carry through to the rest of the proceedings. It is very hard to start soft, then work your way up, so start strong then vary the tone from there.

Keep your eyes on the crowd the whole time. Read their faces. Are they buying what you are saying, are they bored, are they surreptitiously or furtively looking at their phones under the table, are they nodding in agreement? This is why, if some helpful venue flunkey turns the lights down, so that you are dominated by the screen, you should stop speaking immediately and ask for the lights to be brought back up. In my experience, the moment those lights go down, a big proportion of a Japanese audience is lost, because they are sleeping. It seems to be a bit like the rhythmic rocking of the trains here, that induces slumber. Lights go down and off they go Pavlovian like, to the land of Nod. I have seen that scenario play out a number of times here. I find stopping speaking for about ten seconds interrupts the pattern and then resuming with a powerful burst of energy and voice volume wakes them right up again.

Keep the main body to around three major points in a thirty minute talk. Pile on the evidence though, because we are always speaking to a room full of sceptics recently force fed a diet of “fake news”. Save the heavy detail for the Q& A, if you need it. Keep the points clear and accessible, pitched at the level of expertise of your audience. Forego all the acronyms and jargon which appeal to the cognoscenti, if the audience are mere mortal ordinary punters.

Don’t get into arguments in the Q&A. There may be hot questions hurled forth by provocateurs, self-aggrandising show offs, flouting their knowledge in front of the great unwashed. Answer them to the best of your ability and then say sweetly, “let’s continue this discussion after the talk. Who has the next question” and move on, giving them no more eye contact or recognition for the rest of the talk.

Always prepare a second close after the Q&A, so that you dominate the last item to linger in the memory banks of your audience. The conversation triggered by a final question can be completely tangential or even totally unrelated to what you were there to talk about. Don’t let someone hijack your purpose. Seize back control of the point of this presentation, by unfurling your final close. Thank the audience and then elegantly descend from the stage to mingle with the masses. Leave everything on the podium and pack the gear up at the very end.