Fieldnotes for people who value honest and intelligent communication
photo via EqqmanSomeone on our Sunday class asked about how I decide to include things in presentations, where to put stories, and so on. Getting ready to speak at a conference this week, I was watching my process.
Here’s what I noticed. Continue reading ‘Marinading the big lump of clay – getting presentation material together’
The Sunday before last, 12 intrepid people honoured me by giving up their afternoon to explore the topic of story in business presentations.
I’d been marinating in research about storytelling for a few weeks, so on Sunday morning I put on my at-home glasses, sat on the sofa next to the cat and started gathering my thoughts.
In ten minutes I had this:
Story telling in business turns out to be more complex than I thought…
Expect some posts from me as I explore why it is that story makes people interesting, and also why we, at times, resist it.
My aim is to come up with some solid advice that means you can use story and anecdote without sounding like a vicar, ‘Something interesting happened to me on the way here this morning…’ or coming up with stretched metaphors, ‘And the spokes on the wheels of the bus are…’
Please don’t expect textbook advice. I’m more excited about putting some stuff out there that makes you share your thoughts, and together we can discover how this works.
Sound good?
In the meantime, here are some related posts on story:
~ Resources on story in business presentations
~ The president of East Timor is a great speaker
~ Learning storytelling from movies
Our monthly presentation focus class this Sunday is on using story in business presentations.
Seems to be a hot topic this week.
Here’s a short article about anecdotal evidence potentially trumping statistics.
Scientific American published a longer article on the effect of story on human psychology.
And, for those really, really interested in how stories are structured, here’s an article that lists some books, plus a LOT more in the comments section.
Just in the spirit of sharing…
Useful?
The lesson for all of us from this talk is how the speaker takes something complex and often boring, and gives us filters to make it approachable, and maybe even a bit exciting.
Anyone else got a complex, boring topic they want to make approachable?
Anyone?
Rather than do this analysis in one-hit, like this one and this one I’m going to spread it out over a couple of posts. For this one, you’re just watching two minutes of the session (from 1:24 – 3:18).
Ok, we’re getting down to really nitty-gritty with this one, but when you’ve fed as many presentations into your internal database as I have, you start to notice patterns that no one else does.
This pattern bugs the hell out of your listeners, you don’t even notice it, and it’s so easily fixed. And it’s particularly pertinent to technical presentations.
You’ve been working with your product for months or years. You’ve maybe got an abbreviation, a TLA, a pet-name for it. But you know that you can’t just flip out that private in-house term, so in a presentation you say the product’s full name. It’s probably got too many syllables, so what do you do?
You say it fast.
And if you watch your listeners, you’ll see us squint at you, and tighten our lips to say ‘Wha…?’
Continue reading ‘Why you should taste your names and numbers in technical presentations’
My selection from the public speaking blogosphere today is Nicholas Bate’s wide-ranging and funny blog about business life.
Here’s:
~ 9 Things Not to Say in your Presentation
(my favourites are number 2 and number 4)
and
~ Presenting 101 – Nicholas’ list of 101 rules of presenting.
Whilst I don’t agree with every item in the list (can you guess which ones?), it’s an entertaining read.
~ The 106 public speaking blogs and why you don’t have to read them (unless you really want to)
~ How to avoid using Stupid Generic Photographs in your PowerPoint slides
Following on from this post about making numbers relevant to the people you’re communicating with, here’s a video that makes the numbers about the Iraq war tangible (I make no comments about its politics, just watch it for how it translates the numbers).
The rule of thumb with statistics and numbers is to bring them into units that make sense to people. In the brilliant The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot start with a chapter called ‘Is That A Big Number?’ They recommend that whenever we hear a statistic, especially in national politics, we should ask ourselves exactly that. Because often millions of pounds or billions of dollars turn out to be not much money when shared out over the spread of a country’s population.
In the same way, the big numbers that we want people to get often don’t seem big to the people we’re talking to. Or the numbers that seem big to others actually aren’t when put into context. How do we get people to relate to a Terabyte? How much is 570 staff hours in the context of the whole project’s resource allocation? What does 98.9% uptime mean?
Here’s a website that might help you get thinking.
SensibleUnits will allow you to type in pretty much any measurement and make it sensible. Kind of. Continue reading ‘Making statistics and numbers make sense in presentations’
When I first started seeing if other people were blogging about presentation skills and public speaking, I came across a site by Andrew Dlugan that had gathered a list of twenty-seven sites together. Twenty-seven!
By the timeI had gotten around to getting an RSS reader, the list had grown rather a lot.
I track every one of the (currently) 106 blogs on public speaking. There are a lot of people out there who are writing very pertinent stuff about presentations and public speaking.
My specialism is authentic, spontaneous, conscious presentation skills for specialists. The thing I pay particularly close attention to is feeding your patternmaker, your internal database, with what works in presentations – that’s what the Presentation Analysis work is all about.
My specialism is not PowerPoint, information display, business storytelling, speechwriting, sales presentations or media training. Or even, really, hints and tips about giving presentations.
There are other people who spend their lives blogging about those topics
I presume that, as a specialist, you are pretty involved in keeping up-to-date with your own area of expertise. Becoming a presentation specialist too (unless you already are!) is one thing too many. Also these blogs are aimed at all sorts of different groups of people.
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