Episode #295: The Presenter's Dilemma

The request has been made to give a talk on a certain subject. The date and time are fixed and now the work begins on the preparation. Here is how not to do it! Start with plundering previous slide decks for re-usable content and create new original content for this particular presentation. Fuss mightily over which slides go in and which go out. Discover even after that Herculean effort to pare down the beast, that it still needs bits to be lopped off. Does this sound tremendously familiar to you when getting ready to give a presentation? Well if this is what not to do, then exactly what are we supposed to be doing?

The warm embrace of an existing tried and true slide deck and the excitement of grabbing new materials and wrangling it into a slide, can be intoxicating I know, however we have to consider what is the point here. A collage of slides is not a central message and there lies the problem. Before we even think of any cool visuals, we need to plumb the depths of our brain for what it is we want our audience to know and believe. We need to boil all the possibilities down to a single, crystal clear and pungent message.

This is harder than it seems, because there are a number of attractive messages we could be focusing on. So which is the right one? This is where we discover we have to take one step back and understand better, who is going to be in our audience. The topic will give us a hint of prospective acolytes, we can urge to join our cause. The organisers will have a good idea of who normally turns out for this topic. As they get the registrations, we can know precisely who will be our listeners, presuming the hosts will share that information. Even if they don’t pony up the info, they will usually tell us which companies are going to be attending. Once we get some indication of who will be our audience, we can start to think about which message is most likely to hit the bullseye the best.

Having done this part of the preparation, the temptation is to now plunge into the slides and start arranging them accordingly, simultaneously working out which new slides are needed. We have to switch the mindset from slide equals important to story equals important. The dilemma with data and information is that it is raw and inert. When we can wrap that information up in a story, we are really starting to motor along. The reason is simple. Data by itself lacks context and colour. Also a lot of data is hard to visualise or comprehend. Rattling off some statistics may have our audience’s eyes glazing over. If we convert those numbers into something they can understand, then it has potency. A classic example is numbers of football fields to represent the area’s size. If we can tie that data to a person and what it meant for them, then we bring the whole point alive.

It is almost impossible to relate to measurements, but we can easily relate to someone else’s experiences. Hopefully, it is no longer the case, but beer has been an arbiter of distance in Australia. I remember meeting a fellow student at University and when he told me his home town, I asked him how far away it was from Brisbane. His answer was a classic. In true laconic fashion, he casually replied, “about six stubbies”, meaning the time it would take you to drink six small bottles of beer, while driving the distance. Jail time today, but this was back in the day.

The beauty of telling stories is it forces the focus to be on us, the speaker, rather than the screen. Today’s video meetings make this even more pressing. I was coaching a senior executive regarding a talk she had to make to senior management. In the process, it became obvious to me that she should either scrap the slides altogether or just use a very small number. Her objective was to have impact, to propel her personal brand forward and position herself for a major global position. If she used a lot of slides in the limited time she had for their attention, on video, she would be captured in a tiny little box on the top right of the screen monitor, while the slides monopolised most of the screen real estate. By dispensing with or paring back the screen “share” function, she would have the chance to look straight into the green dot, where the camera is, on the top of her laptop and be seen by the viewers in full and seen looking straight at them.

Without visuals she now has to paint a picture for the audience. She can tell a story about when this incident took place. For example, she can create the temporal indications by referring to the season, “it was three years ago and heavy snow fell in New York that day”. Now we know when it was, where it was and have a mental image of snowy New York streets. Next, we need some people in this story, preferably people the audience will know.

“I bumped into Warren Buffett who was wearing a thick coat and a long scarf, as he was leaving the Rockefeller Center and I asked him….”

Most people know of the Rockefeller Center and Warren Buffett, so they can imagine the snowy scene in their minds. Do we need a slide with a photograph of a snowy New York street or one with Warren Buffett in it? Probably not, if we are telling the story well and it keeps all the attention on us and not letting it leach out to our tough competitor - the slide deck.

Slides have their place. I do Iike photographs with no words on the slide and then I tell the story, explaining the symbolism of the image. Unlike text, detailed spreadsheets, graphs or tables of numbers up on screen, the slide with a photo takes about one second to process and then the listeners are open to my story. We don’t have to make or recycle slides, if we change our mindset to storytelling and then plan the talk from there rather than the other way around. When it is your personal and professional brand out there on display, these choices make a big difference.