Episode #313: The Beauty Of Presentation Practice

The date has been set for our presentation. Naturally, we are pretty busy with work, so we borrow that Toyota production line mantra of “Just In Time:” and leave it all to the last moment to cobble together our presentation. We rifle through our previous presentations, looking for slides we can repurpose for this topic, which of course is an excellent time saver. We just manage to get the deck together in time and off we go to the venue. Here we give the only rendition of this talk to our live audience. This is such a high risk high wire act, threatening both personal and professional brands, you shake your head as to why on earth someone would choose to do it this way.

Toyota makes great cars and they have pioneered many innovations in car production, but they are not the model we need for giving presentations. We need Aesop’s fable here about the hare and the tortoise. The hare is so much faster than the tortoise, but in this fable the hare loses the race, because although the tortoise was slower they were more consistent and steady in making progress.

“We don’t plan to fail, but we fail to plan” is an old saw we have all heard before and which we ignore at our peril in any aspect of life. Regarding presentations, restrain your hand for from firing up the laptop to start searching for slide decks and instead spend some time tortoising. Who is my audience going to be? What level of expertise will they have on this subject? What are their seniority, age and gender splits? What are they most interested in? Can I get enough information from the organisers to enable me to start the planning? Slide deck amalgamation is like firing blindly into the dark, because we don’t know what our target is for this talk.

Once we have decided who we are going to be targeting for this talk, what is the purpose of the exercise? There are generally four purposes from which we can choose: persuade, motivate, inform or entertain. Most public business talks are usually focused on the first three. The entertain one is the classic “filler” role for the speaker. You are the light variety show before or after the main event. It might be the luncheon or dinner spot at the convention or conference. I hate this one. You need serious, real talent to be entertaining, which is why, in a business context, we should leave this to the professionals. If you are a great raconteur, bully for you, but for most of us, this is a step way too far.

Once we know what our purpose is, we can fix on some key messages. These will depend to a great extent on how much time we have been allotted. There are only so many things we can cover in-depth in a thirty or forty minute talk. Having our central thesis determined is fine, but so what? We need to think about the evidence we will marshal to make our point stick and for us to be convincing for the audience. This might include data, statistics, expert testimonials, evidence, examples, storytelling, etc. If we find ourselves making a bold statement, then we need to pause and say the words “fake news” out aloud to ourselves, because that is exactly what the audience will be thinking, unless we can prove what we are saying.

We need a blockbuster opening to break through all the mental clutter immobilising our audience and blocking our messaging from getting through. We need to design two closes, one for at the end of the talk and a second one for after the Q&A. Recency is a powerful thing with human beings, so we have to go with that flow and make sure the last thing they hear is what we want them to hear. Now we are ready to consider what visuals we need to help the audience and ourselves with the navigation of this talk. There will be a burning temptation to load the slide deck to the gunwales with content both on each screen and with too many screens. Go totally Zen here. Be minimalist, stripped down to the bare essentials. We don’t want the slides to upstage us – we must remain the main act and the slides are our servant, not the other way around.

Once we are ready, we start the hard work and that is the practice, the rehearsal of the talk. Doing a full thirty minute talk at full power, over and over again in rehearsal is seriously exhausting, but necessary. We need to know the content, the cadence and whether we can fit it into the time constraints we are facing. By the time we get in front of our audience we are a very polished presenter on this topic, fully tooled up to impress everyone with our professionalism.