Pivotal Public Speaking - Wake me when it's over - a guide to no-nap presentations.htm

By Carla Kimball

It’s 9:30 in the morning and you’ve made it to the third presentation of today’s marketing meeting. The presenter is pretty much reading word for word from a deck of 40 slides, which are mostly densely worded, bulleted items with an occasional chart or graph thrown in.

You have no interest in the topic, and to keep from falling asleep during the next 30 minutes, you are taking this opportunity to proofread some documents for a pressing deadline.

You realize you are missing about 75 percent of the material — but you have all the slides on a handout to refer to later if necessary. The meeting feels like a complete waste of time and you have this important deadline?

Okay, rewind: Consider this scenario instead. The presenter has a deck of 10 slides. Three of the slides are charts showing some really interesting relationships of data. Two slides have images that seem to capture the essence of the issue at hand, and the remaining slides have a series of bulleted keywords.

These keywords give you a sense of the overall organization of the presentation, helping you keep track of what has been covered. They also seem to serve as a roadmap that keeps the presenter on track of what to cover next.

In this presentation, the slides aren’t everything. In fact, some really interesting stories capture your imagination and help you understand the material in a very different way. Plus, the presenter is comfortable with the material and speaks quite easily, almost conversationally.

The screen is blank when the topic is not on a slide. The handout, as announced at the beginning, comes at the end of the presentation. Everyone in the meeting seems engaged, and you actually find yourself interested in what’s being discussed.

The PowerPoint presentation is ubiquitous and part of the very fabric of how business is done. But why is this? Why is it that the first thing anyone thinks about when preparing for a presentation is to develop a slide deck? Why is it that, if presenters don’t show up with a deck of slides, they are looked at suspiciously? And why do people keep insisting on showing slides when they know how deadening it feels to sit through a presentation that is entirely slide dependent?

So, imagine asking people to describe the best slide show they’ve ever seen. They either explode with cynical laughter and talk about a time when there was a technical glitch and the presenter had to wing it without slides, or they cite a particularly effective picture, one that captured their imagination and instantly conveyed the message much more powerfully than words ever could.

Speakers use PowerPoint to organize their thinking before a presentation, but the software is actually a very clumsy tool for this purpose. There are far better software tools to help you think through your talk, such as Inspiration (www.inspiration.com), which lets you easily map your thoughts and outline your ideas.

Presenters also fill their slides with way too much information because they don’t want to forget anything. A few select keywords are far more effective at helping you remember what you want to cover, reminding your audience about where you want to go and keeping them on track with your talk.

People often design the slide show to be used as a handout as well, but what is most effective as a handout is often very different from what will support the audience in understanding the message during a talk.

Why not prepare two separate packages? One is a slide show that enhances the messages of your presentation. The other is a document that people take with them.

Don’t misunderstand. There are very powerful and effective ways to support a talk visually through the use of software like PowerPoint. But it should be played like a fine instrument, with subtlety and finesse, rather than used as a club to be applied to every aspect of the presentation.

The next time you are putting together a slide show, ask yourself these questions about each slide.

Is this slide for me or for my audience?

Will it really help them better understand my message or just serve as a distraction?

How can I remember what I’m going to say without putting the entire text on the slide?

What can I do to simplify the slide so that only essential information is displayed?

What do I really need to do at this point in the presentation to engage the audience and enhance my message?

Is a visual the best way to convey the information or could a story do a better job?

Using ideas like this, your talk will be much stronger and your audience will be engaged and awake.

Carla Kimball is president of RiverWays Enterprises, a public speaking training company in Cambridge. She is a public speaking coach specializing in helping people develop a confident and authentic leadership presence and works extensively with business professionals.

Blog: Musings on Speaking with Confidence and Presence:
http://riverways.typepad.com/speaking_presence/
Website: http://riverways.com/

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