Real. Smart. Now.

Want to stand out beyond the mediocre-at-best presentation crowd?

Let’s establish some fundamentals which straight away are going to raise you above 90% of business presenters.

I went and saw a guy this morning, a management-consultant-type guy, give a presentation. A smart guy, who knew his stuff, but who hid it by the way he presented, which is the tragedy I spend my life helping people avoid.

Here is my advice to him.

1.  Have the intent to communicate and know how to do it without your slides

I suspected something might be amiss when he said, ‘I’ll be taking you through some slides this morning that blah blah…’ Let me tell you once and for all:

It is not your job to talk us through the slides; it’s your job to make us able and motivated to take a particular action.

If we’re not careful, giving a talk becomes the outcome, rather than the method. A presentation is a method of inspiring action.

My singing teacher told me this week that the intent to communicate is what frees people’s voices. Just going ‘La la la’ up the scales, or even singing the words to a song, doesn’t provoke enough of a reaction in our physiology to get to our true voice.

In a similar way, if you  ‘give a talk’ without the intention to really get a message through to us, it’s not going to lead us to do anything.

Maybe we need to do away with ‘presentation’ and call it ‘a provocation’ or maybe, ambitiously, an ‘inspiration’. ‘Presentation’ is a little passive.

2. Tell real-life stories, not generalised fables

Any story that starts, ‘This guy…’, ‘There was this man who…’, ‘It reminds me of the old story about…’ is doomed to bore us (unless very short). There isn’t enough of you in it. Tell us stories from your life, or at least from someone close to you. A friend of a friend just doesn’t interest us.

3. Make interaction easy

If you want us to interact with you, get us to practice it. Asking for a show of hands once feels like lip-service, and a bit patronising. Also, make sure the question you’re asking us is clear-cut and easy to understand. Prepare for less of a reaction or a different one than you’re looking for.

4. Express your advice in words of action

‘Focus on what matters’ is not an action.

5. E.A.A.A.A. (Explain All Abbreviations And Acronyms)

If I don’t understand your acronyms I feel like one of us is stupid and out of touch. Is that what you want?

6. Make sure your slides follow basic visual logic

There was a slide that had the fastest-adopted changes on the right of the slide, and the later-adopted ones on the left. Huh? Basic visual logic says the past is on the left and the future on the right. I mentioned this and other things in this post. I understood it, but I had to squeeze my brain together. Don’t make me do the work, not in that way, anyway. The same slide lead me to:

7. Use ordinary language

A scale at the bottom of the slide (above) had ‘Relative ease – Low to High’. HUH? How about ‘Easy – Difficult’? Sheesh.

8. Make the most important point crystal clear

In the Q&A…

Someone: ‘What’s the most important important piece of advice you could give us as people managing businesses in the current climate?

Speaker: ”Don’t wait for the crisis – act now.’

Could you be more crystal clear than that? And it wasn’t like he hadn’t mentioned that point earlier, but in the onslaught of information, it was hidden.

9. Three points is plenty

Plenty. Three points helps you remember how precious our attention is, and how you need to budget your words.

***

What else needs adding to the list? What do you see presenters do all the time that would be super-easy for them to correct and make their audience love them more for doing so?

***

Comments from  the last post (Creating Slides for Technical Presentations) include:

Simon Raybould from Curved Vision offered us his article on Presentations vs Public Speaking,  and invited a little online interaction on the topic. Invitation accepted (see below…)

In a later comment, he says:

‘Statistics are designed to illustrate trends and patterns. If you think of those ideas as ’stories’ in the data you’ve got your presentation sussed.’

MJ Plebon raises the point that ‘Often only one or two key pieces of data are relevant to the message however the slide contains reams of information. The challenge is to direct your audience’s attention on the key data and prevent them from scanning the irrelevant information.’

The Lightheart PowerPoint rule was quoted too in this article by Chris Witt, who seems to be a man after my own heart.

Chris and Simon also added thoughtful comments to this article. Thanks guys.

***

In other news:

There are two people  I sms good morning to, and one of them is leaving Singapore to return to sunny Brooklyn.  Bon voyage, Shannon! I’ll miss ya.

Having my mind blown and ass kicked by Michael Port’s coaching programme. Particularly this week finding that I do what I do to help people speak from the freedom of truth, rather than being bullied by fear. Huh!

Spent some time researching and setting up a wiki on creating slides for technical presentations. More very soon…

Books:

Being informed, but finding myself rather plodding through, Wikinomics. Underlining lots, so I’m not complaining – more to do with my reading style, than these guys’ writing style.

Half-way through Back of the Napkin. Greatly admiring both the content, structure and easy-reading style. Learning lots at different levels.

Movies/TV:

New in Town was a fun, but straightforward rom-com.

Doubt was good, but I’m not sure how much I liked Meryl’s I-must-win-every-scene performance, full of ticks and strange rhythms.

Gavin and Stacey is sublime and made me bark with laughter.

Seeing Stuart as a baddie in the Singapore children’s tv show GX5 was a riot. Final episode this Sunday 11.30 on channel 8. And there’s a game too…

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Links to books are often to Amazon for convenience and aren’t affiliate links (i.e. I don’t make any money from them). I’d much rather you ordered from an independent bookseller. If you’re in the UK, phone Kirsty the friendly bookseller at Westbourne Books on +44 1202 768626 – nine times out of ten she’ll get the book in the post to you within 24 hours. Tell her I referred you – it’ll make her laugh. (again – I’m not on commission – she’s just my best book enabler…)