Episode #99: Bland Is Bad

Smart, capable people amaze me when I see them presenting. This recent speaker was someone I had met in business a few times previously and this was my first time to see him present. In our earlier conversations, he was knowledgeable, intelligent and professional. He was an experienced person in his industry and had substantial international work exposure. He was tall, broad shouldered, square jawed, handsome and personally well presented. His presentation itself was a dud. He had great information, probably some of the best available. He had good perspective to put that data in context. The delivery though was lifeless and it was killing the quality of the content.

This is a big mistake we can easily make. We add too many slides because we think the audience will really benefit from this additional information. Now we are rushing to get through it all in the allotted time and this detracts from our professionalism as presenters. Or we want to put too much comparative information on the one slide. The two or three graphs we are showing are complex and because at a reduced scale to fit on the slide, they are hard to read, so we lose our audience. We might really go crazy and start putting up whole spreadsheets of figures on the slide and just wipe our audience out completely.

Another problem with delivery can be too much jargon, which forces large swaths of the audience to drop out and go searching for their internet connection on their phone. They want to spend their time doing something more useful, like checking Facebook or Instagram, rather than listening to us. We may be speaking at a rapid rate of knots, because our nerves and corresponding adrenalin release are driving up the speaking speed. We are like the surf, with each successive wave wiping out the one before it. In this metaphor, the content of the previous wave is usurped by the next wave, such that the audience cannot retain the previous point we made. They soon lose touch with the direction of the talk.

In our speaker’s case, his voice loudness was such that with the microphone, we could clearly hear him in the room. His speaking speed was actually, if anything, a little on the slow side. The real killer though was his speaking intensity. What do I mean by intensity? It was very, very low key. This can often be the deep pit that technical speakers fall into. They are numbers, rather than words, people and so they deliver their talk with a detached, “I am not really here” presence. If this was a paper they had written and they weren’t there then this is fine. The problem is as if it were an academic or technical paper and the difference between us reading it for ourselves and them giving the presentation is abysmally tiny.

Intensity comes from within and from our mental attitude to the talk. Are we there to be supremely grey and just inform the audience of the content? If this is the idea then this presenter was totally successful. Is this enough though. In this modern, fast paced, highly competitive world how can we choose to come in last? If we get a chance to showcase our organisation and ourselves we have to make every post a winner. We need to better understand the full potential of the situation. If we can present information in a way that really makes the audience sit up and take notice, then they will think highly of our firm and of us.

He was grey, bland, forgettable, uninteresting, uninspiring, nice but boring – a speaker wall flower type, disappearing into the background, while standing in the foreground of the venue stage.

There was no tonal variation in his delivery. He didn’t punch out key words to drive home their importance. His face was wooden and rather neutral, deadpan looking throughout, rather than excited and passionate about his subject. He had no crescendos and just settled for lulls all the way throughout the 40 minutes of audience torture. His body language and gestures had been put away for storage, waiting for a rainy day perhaps, because he didn’t bring them to the hall. Now when you are a big guy like him, being dynamic is relatively easy, because you have mass and when put in motion, it can have a strong impact on your audience.

He also chose to follow the arrangements by the event staff, none of whom have ever given a public presentation in their entire life and who are completely ignorant of professional presentation requirements. Following their direction, he stood behind the podium obscuring his body language potential, had the lights dimmed to accommodate the screen and what was being displayed. He was already grey in delivery terms but his stage positioning and lighting had him almost disappear from plain sight.

He is a great teacher of presentations. In the Japanese language there is an expression called “hanmen kyoshi” or teacher by negative example. This is the role he played superbly on this occasion. We can learn a lot by doing the opposite of what he was doing. It also makes us realize that being tall, broad and handsome doesn’t mean much, if you don’t know what you are doing as a presenter. Having great data and information will not retain the attention of our increasingly attention deficit modern audiences, because we cannot keep them riveted to us and off their mobile phones. The minimum requirement is a clear understanding of the importance of solid delivery skills, on top of which we pour on our unsurpassed content. Not only do we have to understand these points, we have to deliver the delivery!