People often try to complain to me that their presentation wasn’t how they planned it.
They forgot a point/story/clever thingy, or something.
If you’re doing it well, it should never be exactly how you planned it.
If a presentation is exactly how you planned it, you’re working from a script and aren’t responding to the people in front of you.
This is the Presentations As Classical Music paradigm: presentations are a piece of Mozart (yuh – you should be so lucky) that need rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing until you remember the whole ‘script’. You can tell someone from this school as they talk about ‘writing a speech’.
I adhere to the Presentations As Jazz school: you learn to play your instrument, you get to know the tune, think through some possibilities, put together a plan, but allow there to be interplay between you and the audience, have the experience be fresh.
Then your listeners are getting something worth listening to, rather than just reading.
Thoughts?
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Well, I’m no jazz musician, but I do like a bit of Miles Davis now and again
Agree all the way with this: you can have a note-perfect presentation, but if it fails to include your audience, then IMO, it fails, period. Imperfection is part of that, because communication isn’t perfect; it’s messy, and out of that mess comes the really good stuff.
As finiteattentionspan noted, effective communication must include the audience.
Thanks for this analogy, Andrew. I might extend it a bit by going so far as to say that a good Jazz performance includes both planned/detailed pieces (these could be your slides, opening, perhaps part of your closing) in addition to the extemporaneous parts that arise in response to the audience and environment.
Andrew,
I go back and forth between two poles. On the one hand, I think a presentation is successful if it accomplishes your purpose — if your listeners do what you want them to do. (That’s what my clients pay me for: to help them get the results they want from their speeches and presentations.) And then again, I think a speech is magical when the unexpected happens.
It’s like telling a story. A story — at least from a speaker’s point of view — needs a moral, a take-away truth. And at the same time a good story has multiple implications and truths, and
storytellers (good ones at least) are willing to let their audience invest their own wisdom in the story and draw their own truth out of it.
Every so often when someone tells me they loved my presentation, I ask what they got out of it. I used to be disappointed by answers that seemed so far afield. And I’d try to tell people what they “should” have heard (i.e. what I wanted them to hear). Now I’m kind of pleased that my words and images stirred something up in people that I alone could not have created.
Thanks for starting the conversation.
Chris
What a great analogy, I hadn’t thought of it that way.
It’s always better in content of any kind when we can loosen up and have a little fun with it!
Good Post!
If you memorize – it will sound like you memorized it.
If you read your talk – it will sound like you are reading it.
KNOW your subject and present your material. You will sound like an expert!
Thanks for such a great post and the review, I am totally impressed! Keep stuff like this coming.
I’ve been following you for awhile now, Andrew. As somebody who does a lot of keynoting and workshop leading, I always find something helpful here and/or a good reminder and reinforcement of things I know (but sometimes forget). After the terrifying experience my partner and I had giving 6 keynotes in 2 days to 120 leaders earlier this week – his hard drive crashed somewhere between presentation 4 & 5 and we had 15 minutes to figure out what to do next! – I really needed to read today’s post. In fact, it inspired me to write over at our blog today about how jazz isn’t just a model for how to give a good presentation – it’s a model for how to do business today – and how to do life. I gave you a big shout out. Would love to hear what you think. http://www.arenewalenterprise.com/2010/07/learn-to-love-being-out-of-control.html
Thanks for the work you’re doing here! It’s making a difference.
When it comes to presenting you are absolutely right. Know your subject well enough then it doesn’t matter if you miss things or change things. I always encourage people to learn the essence of their presentation and worry less about the details. Enthusiasm and knowledge will always provide a better presentation that polished rehearsal.