Professionally Speaking...

The Don't Miss This List, Edition 5

These lazy, languid, dog days of late summer provide the perfect opportunity to catch up on valuable presentation advice from some of my favorite bloggers. Read on for insights into better PowerPoint, better speaking and better preparation.

• Angela DeFinis has written a great post on The Seven Deadly Sins of PowerPoint Design, where she outlines the problems with PowerPoint slides and how to fix them. It fascinates me that in spite of the volume that has been written about bad PowerPoint and all the great suggestions for improvement, so, so many business presenters still refuse to change. An interesting comment on human behavior! Here are some of my suggestions for jump starting better PowerPoint practices.
  
  
• One thing that causes many presenters anxiety is worrying they won't be able to effectively handle audience questions and interruptions, particularly ones that are confrontational or argumentative. Ian Griffin, in How To Deal with a Hostile Audience tells us not to rely solely on logic, but to be conscious of the emotional concerns underlying a question.
  
  
• As only Seth (Godin) could explain: How To Make Graphs That Work. Advice that is simple, easy-to-use, provocative...and right on the money.
  
  
• Learn from the TV newscasters how to handle slips of the tongue in Lisa Braithwaite's Stumbles, Fumbles and Mumbles.
  
  
• You've often heard me extol the benefits of practicing and being prepared in this blog, so I'm happy to pass along a very critical checklist from Nick Morgan: 10 Points To Check Before You Speak.

PREVIOUS "DON'T MISS THIS" LISTS:

The Don't Miss This List, Edition 4

The Don't Miss This List, Edition 3

The Don't Miss This List, Edition 2

The Don't Miss This List, Edition 1

Rehearse More Effectively

I am a huge advocate of rehearsing a presentation multiple times before giving it (even though I hate rehearsing as much as the next person). Rehearsal has a multitude of benefits:

• It helps you internalize content, making it less likely you'll forget what to say.
• It makes your delivery sound more polished and confident.
• It helps minimize nervousness because you know you're prepared.

One of the key methods I recommend is rehearsing out loud so you can hear what you sound like. But recently a wise colleague challenged me when I recommended this approach in one of my bi-weekly Presentation Tips communiques, saying, "...you are making an unvoiced assumption of competence."

He went on to say, "If I don't know how to hit a golf ball correctly, practicing hitting one before I play a round of golf serves to erode my confidence. Tiger Woods, on the other hand, benefits a great deal by practicing before a round as he knows how to correct any swing flaws that surface during the practice."

It's an excellent point. The crux of the issue is whether or not the person rehearsing knows: how to do the activity correctly AND how to assess or evaluate the result.

HOW TO DO THE ACTIVITY CORRECTLY

With presentation skills, the trial and error method is a possibility, but it has potentially serious consequences. If you repeatedly employ poor presentation techniques, because of lack of knowledge or lack of awareness, you will get a reputation as a poor presenter and audiences will punish you with lack of attention and lack of response.

Learning the best practices of presentation skills through formal training, coaching or reading books is certainly the most effective way to improve.

HOW TO EVALUATE THE RESULT

Once you have acquired knowledge about what's effective and what's not effective in a presentation, then your rehearsal takes on a different face. Now, like Tiger Woods in the earlier example, you are better equipped to assess when you are deviating from what's effective. Moreover, you have a better idea of how to correct it.

At this point, you will get value from rehearsing out loud. Here are some other ways to help you evaluate your performance and effectiveness:

• Videotape yourself. When you can see as well as hear yourself, you get a fuller picture of your likely impact on an audience.
• Better yet, rehearse in front of colleagues who can give you feedback on how you come across.
• Even better, rehearse in front of a professional who can not only assess your skills but also provide coaching on how to correct or enhance aspects of your presentation.

PowerPoint: It Depends On Where You Stand (or Sit)

There is a striking dichotomy between what people say and what people do regarding PowerPoint.

When I ask participants in my presentation skills classes what bothers them the most as they sit in the audience listening to a presenter, they invariably say, "...too many words/bullet points/text on the slides." When I probe to uncover why that behavior is so annoying, I get responses like:

• It makes it more likely that the presenter will read most of his slides.
• It's too distracting to have that much information visible...I can't concentrate on what the speaker is saying and read at the same time.
• The type is so small I can't read it. 
• The presenter isn't adding any value to what's on the slide...why didn't she just send me the PowerPoint deck?

Yet the puzzling part is that when these same participants start working on their own presentations, they typically have way too many words on the slides.

So why the disconnect between audience attitude and speaker behavior?

I think the big reason is that overloaded PowerPoint slides are so ubiquitous and standard operating procedure, many people are afraid to deviate from the method that everyone else uses...even though they know, from the perspective of audience member, this method is not effective. [Read about more reasons in Olivia Mitchell's excellent analysis].

I also think that most presenters care about having an impact, care about engaging their audience and are looking for opportunities to improve. But they may not be prepared to go totally "Garr Reynolds" with simple, elegant graphics, numerous pictures and minimal text.

So I suggest the following steps to course participants as a way to test the waters:

• In preparing the presentation and slides, put your audience hat on and think about how you would respond to those text heavy slides.
• Try changing just a couple of slides to start with. Perhaps pick a complex point in your presentation or an aspect that always generates a lot of questions; develop another way besides text to display this information, like a chart, graph or image that symbolizes your meaning.
• Then assess how the audience responds to the information in this format. Do they understand better? Do they have fewer questions or are the questions different? Do they seem more engaged?
• Solicit feedback from audience members to validate what you observed.

What kinds of experiences have you had using a PowerPoint format markedly different from the norm?