News & Recent Articles

Podcast 6 - Delivery Style

2009-11-01T22:29:00.003Z

This is the final of six podcasts in which I interview people whose jobs require them to communicate on a regular basis. For this feature I have turned the spotlight on the contributors themselves and used excerpts from the interviews to demonstrate how sophisticated our conversational skills are, and how best we can bring these skills to bear when making a presentation.

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Interviewees:

John O’Sullivan, Eirgrid, was the manager of the single electric market project in Ireland, during which he was required to present at large stakeholder meetings on a monthly basis

Neil O’Gorman is owner and manager of Bespoke PR Agency. In Neil’s own words, ‘Everything we do is communication’.

Bob King is head of Operational Excellence with Premier Foods in the UK. He is often invited to make presentations at international management conferences.

Jacintha Griffin is a senior director with Wyeth Medica in Newbridge and is required to communicate, not just internally with the people in her division, but also externally with senior management from other companies.

Elaine K is a television producer based in New York. She specialises in factual programming using interviews with real people.

John Dunne is co-founder of Intune Networks. Since 2000, the company has grown from 2 employees to over 80, largely on the back of the presentations John has made to telecoms companies world-wide.

Leagues O’Toole is a music writer and promoter. In managing events, he often has to negotiate with different interest groups.

Seán McCallion is a senior manager with P Elliot, one of the few developers to actively engage with the public during the planning process. In this role, Seán is often faced with the intimidating task of presenting to hostile audiences.

Ronan Roberts has run a successful architecture practice in Dublin for over fifteen years. He is required to tread the fine communication line between the aspirations of clients and the practicalities of engineers.

Podcast 5 - Examples & Stories

2009-10-26T23:15:00.001Z

This is the fifth of six podcasts in which I interview people whose jobs require them to communicate on a regular basis. Here, the contributors explain how specific examples can be used to explain general concepts, and how stories can hook the memory of the audience while also breathing life into the presenter.

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Interviewees:

John O’Sullivan, Eirgrid, was the manager of the single electric market project in Ireland, during which he was required to present at large stakeholder meetings on a monthly basis

Neil O’Gorman is owner and manager of Bespoke PR Agency. In Neil’s own words, ‘Everything we do is communication’.

Bob King is head of Operational Excellence with Premier Foods in the UK. He is often invited to make presentations at international management conferences.

Jacintha Griffin is a senior director with Wyeth Medica in Newbridge and is required to communicate, not just internally with the people in her division, but also externally with senior management from other companies.

Elaine K is a television producer based in New York. She specialises in factual programming using interviews with real people.

John Dunne is co-founder of Intune Networks. Since 2000, the company has grown from 2 employees to over 80, largely on the back of the presentations John has made to telecoms companies world-wide.

Leagues O’Toole is a music writer and promoter. In managing events, he often has to negotiate with different interest groups.

Seán McCallion is a senior manager with P Elliot, one of the few developers to actively engage with the public during the planning process. In this role, Seán is often faced with the intimidating task of presenting to hostile audiences.

Ronan Roberts has run a successful architecture practice in Dublin for over fifteen years. He is required to tread the fine communication line between the aspirations of clients and the practicalities of engineers.

Podcast 4 - Visual Aids

2009-10-18T13:16:00.003+01:00

This is the fourth of six podcasts in which I interview people whose jobs require them to communicate on a regular basis. The poorly understood art of matching the visual and verbal arguments is discussed as well as the hazards of graphs and and in particular text-laden PowerPoint slides.

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Interviewees:

John O’Sullivan, Eirgrid, was the manager of the single electric market project in Ireland, during which he was required to present at large stakeholder meetings on a monthly basis

Neil O’Gorman is owner and manager of Bespoke PR Agency. In Neil’s own words, ‘Everything we do is communication’.

Bob King is head of Operational Excellence with Premier Foods in the UK. He is often invited to make presentations at international management conferences.

Jacintha Griffin is a senior director with Wyeth Medica in Newbridge and is required to communicate, not just internally with the people in her division, but also externally with senior management from other companies.

Elaine K is a television producer based in New York. She specialises in factual programming using interviews with real people.

John Dunne is co-founder of Intune Networks. Since 2000, the company has grown from 2 employees to over 80, largely on the back of the presentations John has made to telecoms companies world-wide.

Leagues O’Toole is a music writer and promoter. In managing events, he often has to negotiate with different interest groups.

Seán McCallion is a senior manager with P Elliot, one of the few developers to actively engage with the public during the planning process. In this role, Seán is often faced with the intimidating task of presenting to hostile audiences.

Ronan Roberts has run a successful architecture practice in Dublin for over fifteen years. He is required to tread the fine communication line between the aspirations of clients and the practicalities of engineers.

Podcast 3 - Enthusiasm

2009-10-11T22:52:00.005+01:00

This is the third of six podcasts in which I interview people whose jobs require them to communicate on a regular basis. Here, the contributors agree that the vital ingredient in any presentation is enthusiasm, which is not an overbearing zeal but a much simpler conviction, honesty and belief in what you are saying.

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Interviewees:

John O’Sullivan, Eirgrid, was the manager of the single electric market project in Ireland, during which he was required to present at large stakeholder meetings on a monthly basis

Neil O’Gorman is owner and manager of Bespoke PR Agency. In Neil’s own words, ‘Everything we do is communication’.

Bob King is head of Operational Excellence with Premier Foods in the UK. He is often invited to make presentations at international management conferences.

Jacintha Griffin is a senior director with Wyeth Medica in Newbridge and is required to communicate, not just internally with the people in her division, but also externally with senior management from other companies.

Elaine K is a television producer based in New York. She specialises in factual programming using interviews with real people.

John Dunne is co-founder of Intune Networks. Since 2000, the company has grown from 2 employees to over 80, largely on the back of the presentations John has made to telecoms companies world-wide.

Leagues O’Toole is a music writer and promoter. In managing events, he often has to negotiate with different interest groups.

Seán McCallion is a senior manager with P Elliot, one of the few developers to actively engage with the public during the planning process. In this role, Seán is often faced with the intimidating task of presenting to hostile audiences.

Ronan Roberts has run a successful architecture practice in Dublin for over fifteen years. He is required to tread the fine communication line between the aspirations of clients and the practicalities of engineers.

Podcast 2 - Aim & Feedback

2009-10-02T13:37:00.003+01:00

This is the second of six podcasts in which I interview people whose jobs require them to communicate on a regular basis. In this feature the importance of setting a clear and realistic aim is discussed, as well as the tricky business of finding out if you have achieved what you set out to achieve.

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Summary of contributors:

John O’Sullivan, Eirgrid, was the manager of the single electric market project in Ireland, during which he was required to present at large stakeholder meetings on a monthly basis

Neil O’Gorman is owner and manager of Bespoke PR Agency. In Neil’s own words, ‘Everything we do is communication’.

Bob King is head of Operational Excellence with Premier Foods in the UK. He is often invited to make presentations at international management conferences.

Jacintha Griffin is a senior director with Wyeth Medica in Newbridge and is required to communicate, not just internally with the people in her division, but also externally with senior management from other companies.

Elaine K is a television producer based in New York. She specialises in factual programming using interviews with real people.

John Dunne is co-founder of Intune Networks. Since 2000, the company has grown from 2 employees to over 80, largely on the back of the presentations John has made to telecoms companies world-wide.

Leagues O’Toole is a music writer and promoter. In managing events, he often has to negotiate with different interest groups.

Seán McCallion is a senior manager with P Elliot, one of the few developers to actively engage with the public during the planning process. In this role, Seán is often faced with the intimidating task of presenting to hostile audiences.

Ronan Roberts has run a successful architecture practice in Dublin for over fifteen years. He is required to tread the fine communication line between the aspirations of clients and the practicalities of engineers.

Podcast 1 - Audience

2009-09-18T11:48:00.010+01:00

This is the first of six podcasts in which I interview people whose jobs - among them an entrepreneur, an industrialist, a music promoter, and a television producer - require them to communicate at the highest level on a regular basis. In this feature the focus is on bypassing your own preoccupations as presenter and placing the emphasis where it is most needed, on the audience.

Click here to subscribe to these podcasts

Summary of contributors:

John O’Sullivan, Eirgrid, was the manager of the single electric market project in Ireland, during which he was required to present at large stakeholder meetings on a monthly basis

Neil O’Gorman is owner and manager of Bespoke PR Agency. In Neil’s own words, ‘Everything we do is communication’.

Bob King is head of Operational Excellence with Premier Foods in the UK. He is often invited to make presentations at international management conferences.

Jacintha Griffin is a senior director with Wyeth Medica in Newbridge and is required to communicate, not just internally with the people in her division, but also externally with senior management from other companies.

Elaine K is a television producer based in New York. She specialises in factual programming using interviews with real people.

John Dunne is co-founder of Intune Networks. Since 2000, the company has grown from 2 employees to over 80, largely on the back of the presentations John has made to telecoms companies world-wide.

Leagues O’Toole is a music writer and promoter. In managing events, he often has to negotiate with different interest groups.

Seán McCallion is a senior manager with P Elliot, one of the few developers to actively engage with the public during the planning process. In this role, Seán is often faced with the intimidating task of presenting to hostile audiences.

Ronan Roberts has run a successful architecture practice in Dublin for over fifteen years. He is required to tread the fine communication line between the aspirations of clients and the practicalities of engineers.

Wedding Presentations

2008-02-11T11:30:00.000Z

I was recently told about a wedding speech that was delivered in the form of a PowerPoint slideshow and which, apparently, went down a bomb. But this made me think: PowerPoint? Going down a bomb? In my ongoing study of presentations, it is a surprising finding, and like Alexander Fleming spotting a curious mould on his Petri dish, it demands further scrutiny.

The first thing I wondered was what was on the slides? I put this question to the groom’s sister who had brought the example to my attention. She had also helped to put the presentation together and she sent the PowerPoint file on to me. Of course, the presentation was mainly pictures, and pictures, in fairness, is what PowerPoint does well.

There were 25 photographs in all, spread over 22 slides. In all but a few cases, there was a single picture per slide, which is a design principle not often heeded in business presentations. Frequently slides are more like posters than slides, with several thumbnail pictures competing for space with bullet points, titles, company logos and coloured templates. Not so in this wedding presentation, which was mainly large pictures on clear backgrounds.

So what about the bullet-points? You can’t have PowerPoint slides without bullet points, can you? I decided to count the number of words used throughout the presentation (interestingly there is no word-count tool in PowerPoint, despite the verbiage often present), and there were 77 words in total. If you do the sums, this works out at an average of 3.5 words per slide.

To put this into context, I examined five random presentations that I happened to have on my hard-drive, including one of my own from some years back. The average word-per-slide counts for these presentations came out at 20, 21, 25, 39 and 62. These figures are all a lot higher than 3.5.

Of course, that’s not to say that words have no place in presentations, but where possible, I’ve adopted the principle that the presenters should take care of the verbal, and the slides should take care of the visual, and by ‘visual’ I mean pictures, graphs, diagrams and animations, not words.

Indeed, there is a further point that should be remembered regarding the punctuation of verbals and visuals. You should never show a slide until you need to, and you should remove it when you are done with it. Most people have PowerPoint projecting onto a large screen for the entire duration of their presentations.

There is a PowerPoint-first attitude in mnay presentations, but it is preferable to introduce slides only when necessary, to compliment what you are saying. Apparently this is how it was done in the wedding speech which was a series of stories, with the pictures in most cases acting as the punchlines. Obviously in most business presentations precise (comic) timing of this sort is not important, but it does illustrate the as-and-when-you-need-them principle when using visual aids.

Length is another important factor in a presentation, and again, there were lessons to be drawn from the wedding speech. Accurate figures are available here (the groom’s sister was among many taking bets) and after a sincere 5 minute preamble, the PowerPoint part of the speech lasted for about twenty minutes.

It may be pop-psychology, but it is generally accepted that people’s attention wanders after about fifteen or twenty minutes (lecturers take note). Again, the wedding presentation was, it seems, spot on.

Of course one of the main reasons why the wedding presentation probably went down so well was due to the way it played on a well known format with a novel twist. This is the staple of nearly all TV comedy sketch shows: set up a familiar, everyday scenario (a date, a job interview, a church service), portray it in minute detail, and then subvert it with something absurd at the last moment.

The wedding-speech-as-business-presentation conceit is funny partly because most people expect business presentations to be dull. This highlights an interesting paradox. As a chance to hear useful insights from, and ask questions of, an expert in something in which you require knowledge, presentations should be riveting. However, tell the average punter to expect an afternoon of presentations, and you’ll probably receive a response along the lines of: ‘Do I have to stay for all of them?’

Obviously most presentations aren’t going to be like wedding speeches, but if one lesson is to be taken from this example, then it is to look at presentations that work, observe the features that make them work, and then try to make them work for you. Even something as oft-maligned as PowerPoint can be used to great effect.

Who Are You Calling a Lecturer?

2007-12-03T11:22:00.000Z

A colleague of mine in the Centre for Teaching & Learning in UCD recently pointed out something interesting regarding the way the college pays part-time teachers. For a lecture, they pay €85.90, but for a tutorial, they only give €31.31. It is worth thinking a little about who gets what for whose money out of this?

The only reason for lectures or tutorials is so that the attendees can learn. If they do learn, the activity has been a success. Simple. But surely implicit in these pay-scales is the belief that you learn 2.75 times as much from attending a lecture, as you would from attending a tutorial.

You’d have to contest this straight away. Tutorials tend to be both active and interactive, whereas lectures tend to be didactic (an academic term for one-sided). By most modern educational ideologies, this would give tutorials the edge.

Usually, however, lecturers lecture and post-graduate students give the tutorials. If tutorials are an important part of the educational process, why are they contracted out in this way, and why with such poor remuneration? But more interesting than the questions about tutorials are the questions about lectures, and the people who give them.

The term "lecturer" is bizarre, is it not. It presupposes the means by which you will try to educate your students regardless of what you are trying to teach them. In effect colleges are saying: ‘We want you to teach these people, but we want you to do it by means of lectures.’ And lecturers tend to think in this way; courses are often described in terms of how many lecture-slots they run for.

Also, within these lecture periods, lecturers tend to take a very active role and most shun the idea of allowing student activity. The argument runs that if you give over time for group-exercises or discussions, then you will fail to cover all of your material. But what on earth does the term "cover" mean?

When a lecturer says that he has "covered" something, all that he is really saying is that he has said something out loud in the company of the students. Whether the students have actually learnt anything is incidental. It reminds me of the question: ‘If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it?’ Similarly, ‘If a topic is "covered" in the woods, is it actually covered?’

To most people the term "lecture" has a negative connotation. If someone said, ‘You’re teaching me things,’ it would sound positive and grateful, but if the same person said, ‘You’re lecturing me,’ it would not. To the statement I once read in a presentation skills book, ‘A presentation shouldn’t be like a lecture,’ I would add, ‘Neither should a lecture.’

The ethos in third level institutions is changing. Lecturers (I feel funny using the term now) are required to write down the "learning outcomes" for the students of everything they teach. This shifts the emphasis from what the lecturer does to what the students do. But lecturers are still being given, and in more or less the same way. It has been accepted that there are now learning outcomes to meet, but most academics are still lecturing their way towards these goals.

The real problem with lectures is that there is no feedback loop. Good, bad or appalling, courses are studied, exams are sat, and students graduate. And asking students what they think of it all, which some departments now do, is not the answer. Not only are these surveys often poorly conceived, but students learning new concepts aren’t really in a position to make a broad assessment of the way they should have been taught. It is not as simple as complaining about bad service in a restaurant.

As I have said many times already, a decent study of the process of higher level communication needs to be carried out. The average lecturer, and the average presenter have a very poor understanding of what the audience will remember and learn from what they say, and how to tailor their material accordingly. Perhaps this study could be conceived as a sort of "cost-benefit analysis", to work out exactly what an auditorium of students get for their €85.90.

Titles & Labels

2007-09-14T12:09:00.000+01:00

The first formal presentation I ever gave was on my Masters project, to an audience of mainly lecturers. I began, logically enough I thought, with the title of my thesis, which was: "Experimental Study of the Effect of Inlet Valve Generated Turbulence on the Rate of Combustion in a 2.5 litre Naturally Aspirated D.I. Diesel Engine". Catchy stuff. In doing so, I had needlessly made the title of my project into the title of a presentation based on that project. There's a difference.

Many people make this mistake, particularly academics, and it reflects a mind that wants to be exact at all times. The title of a presentation, however, is not the place to be splitting hairs. The title should be more of a label than a title. It sets the talk apart from other talks, but doesn't become subsumed in discriminating detail. But labels can hazardous too, particularly in an area as poorly understood as presentations.

Every single word carries baggage, which can prejudice an audience from the off. When choosing a title for my book, for example, I asked as many people as I could for their comments on a list of possibilities. The word 'technical' was rejected straight away. When I speak of a 'technical presentation', I'm referring to any talk with complex domain-specific knowledge, but the word 'technical', it seems, just makes people think of jet engines, Meccano, and silicon chips.

The word 'podium' was also unpopular. To presenters, it suggested fear; to audiences, starched boredom. In fact even the term 'presentation' gives off mixed messages. It is suggestive of a show, or a performance, and reinforces the (wrong) idea that in a presentation you project your words into the auditorium, like someone tossing breadcrumbs to ducks.

When giving courses, I find that the word 'analogy' is one that grates. In a recent conversation with my dad, he said that he didn’t care for analogies. Despite this, he made frequent references to examples of presentations that he had seen at work, and such comparisons are a pure form of analogical reasoning. We use analogies all the time, and because of this, we only notice the more flamboyant, and oftentimes annoying examples of the sort: "This company is a car; the employees are the fuel; the product is the right wheel arch…" etc.

Another word that people react strongly to is, 'story'. When I encourage individuals to use stories in presentations, I often receive responses like, "Ah, I wouldn’t be much of a story teller." But we are all story-tellers; we think, imagine, converse, remember, and even dream in stories. Because stories are such a part of how we make sense of the world, we don't notice them, and the word 'story' has come to mean the more pronounced examples of the art, the cleverly spun yarns and anecdotes that are beyond the ordinary.

Of course if you're worried about the unfortunate connotations that words might have, you can always make up your own ones. But, apart from the risk of alienating people with terms like 'solutionise' and 'webonar' (web-based-seminar…yes?), there is more poetry in the average word than you might imagine. Recently my niece, who lives in England, baffled me, during a conversation about her school, by telling me about a subject called 'resistant materials'. This title, as it turned out, refers to what you and I would know as 'metalwork & woodwork'. The modern term, by comparison, lacks something.

English is a fantastic language, as are all languages, and good words aren't made but rather evolve over time, with only the strong ones surviving. There are many to choose from when titling your talk, but be aware that they may come to mean different things to different people. You should explain the important words clearly before you start, but even this might not be enough because like wood and metal, the average person's connotation of a word, is a resistant material.

Turning Conversations into Presentations

2007-07-10T14:33:00.000+01:00

The core assumption of my presentation courses is that you already have the skills necessary to present in your palate of conversational skills. The eye contact, facial expressions, body language, stories, examples, analogies and conviction that you use when speaking to a group of friends can be used to just as good effect when making a presentation. It really is that simple. However, most people find the task of giving a presentation very daunting, and it is interesting to reflect on some of the reasons why it is difficult to turn a conversation into presentation. I will look at four.

1. Unbroken Conversations – When conversing, you don’t often speak non-stop for twenty or thirty minutes. Conversations are interactive and iterative, each participant quizzing and directing the other to build meaning. A presentation on the other hand is a single stream from the presenter to the audience. This poses the first major difficulty to the presenter.

The best way to combat the one-sidedness of presentations, is not to make them one-sided. Allow people to ask questions, and even invite them to do so at intervals during the talk, but make sure to factor in the time necessary to do this.

In many cases, the audience may not readily engage in this way, but you can pose rhetorical questions at different stages: ‘You may be wondering…’ ‘One thing you might ask…’ ‘Why would we want to do this…’ and so on. Allowing the audience to feel that they are part of the event, even if they are not actually speaking, is a key component of a good presentation.

Another way you can make the audience feel involved is with eye contact. A presenter who looks at people in the audience is so much more engaging than one who does not. It’s the difference between someone who is ‘connecting’ and someone who is ‘droning on.’ As presenter, it will make you communicate in a more natural way, and will help the audience feel that you are speaking to them, and not talking at them.

Above all else, try to avoid very lengthy presentations in the first place. Listening is hard work, and there is only so much that people can remember. If you allow an audience to become active, they are far more likely to learn than if they are passive, so you should try to use the audience collaboratively in fulfilling your communication goals, whenever possible.

2. Visual Aids – You may be thinking that this is one area where a presentation deviates from a conversation, and usually it is, unless you happen to carry diagrams and charts around with you, like a carpet salesman with a suitcase full of samples. However, if you analyse what happens in a conversation, it provides much guidance on how you should use visual material in a presentation.

When you show someone a photograph or a picture, they will ask questions like, ‘What should I be looking at here?’ or, ‘Which bit is important?’ In other words, they will ask you to explain the reason for the picture, and then to direct them to the feature of interest, if it’s not apparent. And they will do something else. They will take the picture out of your hand, and peer closely at it.

This focusing is very important, because in a presentation, you have to do the focusing for the audience. The sharp region in the human field of vision is very small, and when we look at something, we move this focus-point around the scene in rapid jerky movements, fixing on one discrete detail at a time.

However, many presentation slides are designed like posters, where a thumbnail picture shares the screen with titles, bullet-points, company logos, and even other thumbnail pictures. If you wish to show a picture, then show that picture and that picture alone. Don’t subsume it among other items. The audience cannot take the slide out of your hands and have a closer look.

If the picture or graph is itself quite cluttered, and there is no easy way for you to de-clutter it, then you must direct the audience to where you wish them to look. And pointers – particularly the bumble-bee-like flitting laser pointers – are not the best way to do this. The visual highlighting should be clear and included in the image, and this kind of shading, greying-out, zooming-in, circling, and highlighting of features is one thing at which PowerPoint is extremely adept.

3. Forgetting What it’s Like Not to Know – This was the subject of an earlier article, and is another instance where conversations succeed and presentations fail. There is always a gap in knowledge between the presenter and the audience – it’s this gap that necessitates the presentation in the first place – and presenters often lose sight of this.

A large part of any learning process is involved with linking new concepts to what is already known. Teachers teaching multiplication to young children, for example, will explain it as the repeated addition of numbers. Five multiplied by four is five added four times. The concept of division is then explained, not as repeated subtraction, but rather as reverse multiplication. The point is, anyone reading this article will know instinctively what multiplication and division are, and will not have to think of them as analogous to anything simpler. Once you have ‘got it,’ you quickly forget about the props (multiple addition, reverse multiplication) that you used when you were getting it in the first place.

Presenters use tangible analogies and examples far too infrequently. To them, the material is simple and clear, and there is no reason to approach explaining it in any other way. But think again about what happens in a conversation. People will frequently ask: ‘Is this the same as..?’ or ‘Is this like when..?’ proffering their own examples and analogies to help construct meaning. They may even bluntly say, ‘Can you give me an example of that?’

In a conversation, the explainer will also usually be more generous with another key communication tool: stories. I once sat through over 60 student presentations during which a mere 7 anecdotes were used. And yet, in one-to-one discourse, stories are the information packaging tool of choice: ‘We had difficulties with..’, ‘Yes that reminds me of a time..’, ‘So instead, we decided..’ and so on. If you have any doubt about this, observe the conversation during your next lunch-break. Stories are used so often, we scarcely notice them.

Demonstrations too (the fourth communication tool mentioned on this website) will also find their way more easily into a conversation than a presentation. If a colleague is explaining something to you, and that something has a tangible form, he or she will quite likely say, ‘Here, let me show you.’ However, demonstrations rarely find their way into presentations, and although it can be due to practical constraints, it is quite often simply that presenter doesn’t think past the 2-D world of the slide presentation.

In the case of all four – demonstrations, anecdotes, examples and analogies – it is not that presenters cannot use these tools, but rather that they simply don’t bother.

4. What is Actually Remembered – This last shortcoming of presentations is actually also a shortcoming of conversations. Simply put, people tend to overestimate how many of their ideas have been understood and remembered. True of conversations; true also of presentations.

By way of experiment, I recently asked a friend to tell me what I do in my job. In his reply, he mentioned the courses that I give as well as the teaching that I do (he couldn’t name the subjects) and mumbled something about a European research project. I have, indeed, worked on a European research project, but this finished up nearly five years ago.

Ask any friend about something you told them. Pick a specific example from a conversation that you had, even recently. This is a fascinating exercise and quite an eye-opener. People always think they have been understood because of the way conversations work. The style of good listener is to nod, agree, and to generally help the other person to make sense. But this can fool the speaker into believing that everything that they have said has been understood exactly as they have meant it to be.

This is even more true in a presentation, where there are many listeners each with different pre-conceptions and background experiences. The solution to this problem should be obvious: know your audience as well as you can, take your time, and if possible, allow them to ask questions.

The conversational skill-set is the only one that you need to draw on when presenting, but you can’t afford to discard any of its components. When a colleague taps you on the shoulder and asks you a question, the style that you use when you turn around to answer them (assuming that you know the answer) is the style that you should use when making your next presentation.

Training - Talking - Teaching - Presenting

2007-02-07T14:46:00.000Z

I went on a Labview computer course in Newbury, England recently, which proved very expensive, necessitated taking three days off work, and involved more train-changing and taxi-hailing than I would have imagined. The reason for this lengthy excursion was to help me overcome a particular set of obstacles confronting our current test programme. When I returned to work, one of my colleagues asked me, reasonably enough, how the course had gone. My reply was: 'I'll tell you at the end of the week.'

Maybe I could have been less enigmatic, but it was a logical answer – the course is only useful to me, and worthy of the effort and the expense, if it enables me to do what I need to do. If it doesn't, then it has been a waste of time. And this same criterion, or something close to it, can be applied to a presentation. A presentation cannot be said to have been good – no matter how classy the presenter appeared to be – unless it enables the audience to do something that they couldn't do before.

But contrast this with a presentation competition I am attending next week. Students from all over the country will be presenting their work in bid to win a substantial cash prize and a prestigious CV-enhancing award from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. When all presentations have been made, the judges will retire for ten minutes to choose a winner. They won't need to wait until the end of the following week to do so, and yet, what will their decision be based on?

Presentation competitions are a bit of an absurdity. Insofar as they encourage young people to think about the process of making a presentation, they are a good thing – and I will be helping the two competitors from this University as much as I can – but they are, in effect, impossible to judge.

Unless the judges have a need that is, or is not, being fulfilled by the presenter, then how can they say that the presentation has been successful. It would be like you sitting in on ten minutes of my Labview course (if you could bear it) and pronouncing that the trainer was speaking too fast, or flailing his arms about too much, or not moving around enough, or relying too much on jargon, or relying too little on Powerpoint. He may have done these things – and all can be detrimental – but in regard to whether the course has been useful or not, surely only I can decide.

The response I gave to my colleague was a bit trite; I don’t really have to wait a week to say if the course has been good or not. There is a set of documented course objectives (of the sort: 'at the end of this course, you will be able to…') and I can simply consider if these have been met. But I can only make an appraisal by examining these goals. Without them, what am I left to appraise?

Many of you may say: 'But surely this is an example of training, not presenting.' True, but this is an unimportant and an unhelpful distinction. The goal should come first, and the method to achieve this goal (or even the label you give to this method: presenting, training, teaching, tutoring, talking) is secondary.

Indeed, it is one of the biggest faults of many lecturers to believe that they should be talking at all times for teaching to be taking place. In fact, learning is the only important outcome of a lecture – an activity of the students, not the lecturer – and this can benefit greatly from bouts of non-teaching and non-presenting, such as: exercises, discussions, group work, dialogue, discourse and debate.

The point here, as I have stated many times before, is that the aim comes first. The presentation is only a means for achieving this aim. It reminds me of the saying, "You learn karate, so that you don’t have to use it." The most important thing to learn about making presentations is when to use them, and when not to. It can detrimental to focus too much on presentation skills. Presentation aim is far more important, and when you have a clear take on this, many of the so-called skills – body language, speaking style, enthusiasm – take care of themselves.

Turn Off All Phones

2006-12-01T12:10:00.000Z

In the last article I issued an instruction: apologise for nothing. It's simple advice, based on simple logic: if something in your talk necessitates an apology, then that something shouldn't be in your talk. It also reflects a point in style: people want you to believe in yourself, they would prefer you to be good. But - as some people who responded asked - does this not border on arrogance, or even aggression, and could it not do more harm than good? I certainly didn't mean it this way, but if taken to that extreme we introduce a new issue, one which was brilliantly exemplified earlier this year by a big-name actor, playing on an Irish stage.

The use of the phrase "don't apologise" is an entreaty to the nervous presenter to just get on with it. I didn't mean it to be totally literal, insofar as if you stand on someone's toe, or forget to give handouts to one half of the room, then a gracious apology is perfectly in order. It is important to speak with conviction, but this does not mean that you cannot also be nice. And you must be nice, to everyone in the audience, which brings me back to the actor that I alluded to, earlier.

Many of you will probably have guessed that I'm referring to Ralph Fiennes, who appeared in the Gate theatre this year in Brian Friel's Faith Healer. During the opening minutes of one performance, the mobile phone of a woman in the audience rang, prompting Fiennes to break out of character and bark at her to "turn that f*****g thing off". Although not the same as a presentation, the incident does highlight a key point - if you attack one member of the audience, everyone will feel it.

It was only one line, but it sent ripples, not just through the audience, but through the whole country. It was mentioned in newspaper articles, and discussed on national radio. Normally if a phone went off in a situation like that, the audience would direct their hostilities on the hapless perpetrator. But when the person is then vilified by the host on stage, the sympathies of the audience will change, as they feel the injury to one of their own. The same thing happens in presentations. If you are rude, brusque, arrogant or cruel to a member of your audience - however irritating you might be finding them - you will harm your relationship with the whole audience. There is a "them and us" complex established, even for the brief duration of the presentation, which you must respect.

I experienced this, memorably, when I was a student. Someone was chatting quietly enough in a lecture, when suddenly the lecturer rounded on him, and fairly aggressively instructed him to desist. He further warned that he wasn't in the business of tolerating such behaviour in his lectures. It may have been that this lecturer had endured troublesome students in the past, but this rebuke seemed to come totally out of the blue. It had a very damaging effect on the fragile lecturer-student trust in the class, and the fact that I remember this incident - clearly, and alone among the many hours of this rather dry subject - all these years later, is telling. And I wasn't giving presentation skills courses at the time; in fact had never even made a presentation by this early stage in my career.

Heavy handed audience control is never a good thing. Making an example of an individual is a form of bullying, which, although effective, is very harmful. I'm sure most of you assume that you never do this, but in a subtle way, many of you do. It can happen, without your conscious awareness, when you are taking questions. Presenters greatly fear questions, and this can lead them to be slightly hostile or short with the questioner. Try very hard not to be. Be nice to your interrogator - the Q&A session is often the best part of the whole presentation. Remember: the person asking the question is speaking in front of the group too - without the authority or expertise that you have - and they will almost always be more nervous than you are.

Respect for the audience is the overall message here. By not apologising for things that shouldn't need to be apologised for, you are showing that you have prepared well, and that you respect the needs of the audience. And by being nice to the audience, you are showing another form of respect. If you deny one audience member this courtesy, you'll be denying all of them.

Apologise for Nothing

2006-10-12T23:46:00.000+01:00

I recently bought a CD of late piano works by Liszt, and I was reading the sleeve notes - rarely an edifying experience - when I came on the following line: 'These works were considered suitable for reading, not for performance'. At the time, I was really getting into the music...that is, until I read this. Suddenly I wondered if it was really all that good, and I also wondered - if the music was unfit for human ears - why had the record label recorded it, and why had the record shop charged me 15.99 to purchase it. The experience exactly mirrored something I often say when giving courses, namely: never apologise.

Some presenters apologise all the time. They apologise for slides that can't be seen from the back of the room; they apologise for things they forgot to bring; they apologise for not being able to explain themselves very well; they apologise for not knowing as much as some of the people in the audience; they apologise for not being able to get the computer to work; they apologise before their presentation to those who will have heard their material before; they apologise after their presentation for going over time.

Apologies are, of course, a noble and necessary thing in life, but not in presentations. Simply put, if there is something in your presentation that necessitates an apology, then it shouldn't be in your presentation. If your graphs cannot be seen properly from the back of the room, re-draw them so that they can be seen. If the room is too big for everyone to be able to hear you, organise to have a microphone so that they can hear you. If you are worried about having too much material, rehearse the presentation to ensure that you don't have too much material. It's a bit like the Liszt CD: 'We probably shouldn't have bothered recording this and selling it to you, but we did. Sorry.'

The main reason people apologise in this way, is of course nerves. The thinking seems to be: 'I don't really want to be up here, so please excuse me if any of this is shoddy or sub-standard.' It's a way of leveling with the audience, but it is totally counter-productive. Frequently a nervous presenter will think of his or her audience as the enemy, but you should remember that those people come to hear you speak, because they have a need, that only you, the expert, can satisfy. They want you to deliver, not mess around making excuses for not delivering. They are very much on your side. Like all conversations, a presentation is a collaborative process, two parties trying to work together to get to a shared goal. People in the audience are rarely there to shoot you down or to pick holes in your argument. They are there to learn something with your help. They are rooting for you.

Apologies indicate a lack of belief in what you are saying and this is crippling for a presentation. If you don't have a strong reason to speak, then the audience won't have a strong reason to listen. Enthusiasm is a key ingredient in any communication, and this doesn't mean that you have to be like a TV evangelist, it simply means that you should have a motivation - based on the needs of your audience - for doing what you are doing. Apologies have no place in this.

So, stand up and deliver your talk emphatically. Believe in what you say and say it without apology. Don't second-guess yourself. In the end, the audience may decide that your presentation was not effective, but you are not obliged to lead them to this conclusion yourself.

I hope this article was of some use to you. If not, that's unfortunate, but I apologise for nothing!

"If I've done anything I'm sorry for, I'm willing to be forgiven."
- Edward N. Westcott

Remembering What it Was Like Not to Know

2006-08-14T11:28:00.000+01:00

Before a recent appointment with a physiotherapist, I picked up the July edition of that staple of waiting rooms and coffee tables, the National Geographic, and started leafing through it. I came across an article under the subject heading of "Science" on ways to slow down the human metabolism, which might, in the future, allow people to be put into suspended animation for space flight, or keep accident victims alive longer while awaiting transport to hospital. Although reasonably interested in the concepts described in the article, I was more interested in the tools used to communicate these concepts.

Analogies were drawn between the human body and an engine, and between oxygen and rocket fuel. Examples of squirrels hibernating and sharks surviving out of water were also cited, and one of the experiments done in the area was described with a large smattering of anecdotal detail – person, place, time etc. In all, I counted ten examples, two anecdotes and six analogies, in a piece that was 430 words long. This is equivalent to just over one page of a normally sized novel - in other words, a very short piece.

These tools are frequently used in National Geographic and on the Discovery channel, and they relate concepts to mental representations that are already familiar to the audience. The physiotherapist that I eventually got to see, compared the tendon in my upper thigh to a piece of rope and the muscle to which it was attached, to a spring. She also cited skiers and swimmers to exemplify the points made, and even related an anecdote about another patient who had come to her with a similar injury. In the same way as in the National Geographic, she was explaining abstract biological concepts by referring to things that were familiar to me.

Indeed, I have done the same thing myself in this article, when I said that 430 words was equivalent to just over one page of a novel. Even though the bare fact (430 words) was accurate, it wasn't meaningful to a normal reader, and the analogical transfer made it more so. But this introduces an interesting point about why writers and presenters often fail when they are communicating science. If I were writing this for a publisher, I would not have to explain what 430 words meant. Nor would I have to point out that 75,000 words is about the size of a short (250 page) novel. Because when you become familiar with material, then numbers, definitions, jargon and mathematical equations take on an implicit meaning in their own right, and no longer need to be related to anything else. In the same way, you would know if something was expensive simply by looking at the price tag, whereas this judgement wasn't so easy to make - without some kind of analogical mental translation - when the Euro first came into use, and the quantities didn't have an implicit meaning for you.

Presenters who are familiar with their own material, forget to make these connections, because everything they say is invested with meaning based on their experience. The analogies that acted as a kind of scaffolding when they first approached the subject, have long been dispensed with in a process that can best be paraphrased as: "forgetting what it was like not to know". It's not that the presenter can't make these connections, but rather that they don't see the need to. This is, I believe, the main reason why technical presentations fail.

The Myth of Body Language

2005-11-23T11:51:00.000Z

One of the biggest red herrings when it comes to presentation skills is body language. Whole books are written on body language but in my opinion it is largely a non-issue for presenters. People have been led to believe, over years of pedalling these ideas, that there is some subtle "wink & elbow" code of the body which will make you utterly believable and fascinating to any audience. This is almost all rubbish.

Am I saying that body language is not part of how the presenter communicates? No. Am I suggesting that the way you say something (your tone of voice as well as your physical manner) is not as important or even much more important than the words you use? No I am not. Certainly these things are important; in fact they are very important but that is not to say that focusing explicitly on body language is the route to successful delivery.

I heard a question on a quiz once that went: "What is the cause of all human death?" The answer was: "lack of oxygen to the brain." The logic behind this answer is that death is pronounced when the brain is dead, and this happens when there is no longer enough oxygen delivered to this vital organ to sustain its function. So, if you have a heart attack, the heart stops pumping blood around the body, the blood brings oxygen to the brain, so the brain stops functioning, and you die. Therefore, would it not be logical to conclude that if we wish to prevent death on the roads, or due to war or famine, the solution is simple.. invent a device that keeps brains oxygenated so that they don't die.

This is of course absurd, but a similar argument is used in regard to body language. The signs that our bodies give off tell an audience that we are knowledgeable, confident, enthusiastic, honest; so if we learn enough about these signs we can have our audiences believe that we are any of these things. This is all very well, but have you ever tried to feign enthusiasm and confidence? Have you ever tried to control your own body language as you are speaking? This is a akin to keeping your brain oxygenated at all times. It's looking at the immediate causes rather than the more deep-rooted ones. Body language results naturally from how you feel about what you are doing. If you want to look honest then BE honest. If you want to look knowledgeable then BE knowledgeable.

Our bodies speak all of the time and usually without our conscious intervention. Trying to control these movements directly, and choreographing them into some dance that expresses a certain style is both extremely difficult and utterly unnecessary. Even the greatest actors would not attempt to control their body language directly. Rather they "get into character". They imagine the moods and emotions of the person they are playing and allow their bodies to move, as naturally as they can, with these emotions. There have been several famous, extreme examples of this including Robert de Niro piling on over fifty pounds in weight to play washed up boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull and Dustin Hoffman going for days without sleep to perfect the frazzled look for his role in Marathon Man.

There are a few things that you can learn about stance and hand gestures and there may also be a some bad habits that you will have to train yourself to eliminate, but these will all be at a very general level. And although your demeanour is a symphony of subtle gestures and nuances, it is not one that it is very easy or wise to try and control directly. It is far easier to simply believe in what you are saying and deliver this with conviction.

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Some Comments on PowerPoint

2005-09-21T19:00:00.000+01:00

It often makes me laugh to see how officiously books on presentation skills tip-toe around the issue of visual aids, and in particular the use of “electronic media”. They talk of "new presentation methodologies" and "sophisticated computerised approaches". These are embodied by "complex presentation software" that enable presenters to produce "computer-generated electronic aids". They are, of course, talking about PowerPoint.

Maybe they don't wish to mention the "P" word directly (all of the above terms are quoted from books on my desk by the way), and I think many of them are genuinely intimidated by the new technology, but we are all too familiar with PowerPoint not to know what they are talking about. I thought it might be useful to clear some of the fog and state as concisely as I can the case for and against this "computer-based display" software.

The Downside - The ubiquitous PowerPoint bullet presentation fails in two ways: it distracts the audience and it distracts the speaker.

The audience cannot read and listen at the same time. And if there is an engaging speaker talking with interest about something that is of use to the them, then why would they want to read at all. Written material has its strengths and its uses (it is permanent and can be very detailed) but these are not harnessed by fleeting bullet points. The audience gets next to nothing out of this and it breaks the essential contact between speaker and listener.

Worse, however, is the distraction is becomes to the speaker. And I am not just talking about the frequent looking at the screen or having to keep clicking the show forward. More damaging is the way it destroys the structure of the presentation. Rather than being an engaging story with three or four key ideas, each one fleshed out with examples, graphs, stories, demonstrations or analogies; it becomes, instead, an endless procession of propositions, one after another, and the presenter's delivery becomes flat and tedious.

Apart from anything else, there is no justification for this kind of delivery. A presentation is a verbal communication between an individual and a group. The set of speaking skills we have been perfecting for years can thus be employed, with a bit of practice, to great effect. Why this should play second fiddle to the same words, plainly written in point form, on the screen is beyond me. There is no logic behind this. Showing pictures, diagrams and occasionally lists and headings: yes, but paraphrasing everything you say in bullet points? Why? Why on earth?

This kind of presentation is usually indicative of bad planning. People start writing out bullets and putting together slides in an effort to summarise a body of material that they wish to talk about. This is wrong. What you should do is:
1. Decide what you want the audience to achieve,
2. Decide what ideas or arguments you wish to put forward to realise this,
3. Decide (imaginatively) how you will make each point.
If you plan it this way, you will find there is little room for the kind of bullet points we have been discussing.

The Advantages - I sometimes hear of trainers who say they have no time for PowerPoint and who suggest not using it at all. This is an over-reaction. PowerPoint is not the problem, it is the wrong-headed use of PowerPoint that is the problem. If you think back twenty years, the only way to show pictures in a presentation was to take photographs, develop them, crop them and then send them to a printer to make into slides. These would then be loaded into a slide projector and the presenter would click the slide carousel forward, explaining each one in turn. Text was a problem; labels and arrows were a problem; diagrams were a problem. And then there were all of the perils of jamming projectors as well as upside down and back to front images, not to mention the almost complete lack of flexibility, a change in order of the slides being about the best you could manage.

Now you can scan the pictures into your computer or load them directly from a digital camera. You can use the computer to alter, add items to, or animate these images. You can also use graphical tools to create images and diagrams of your own. These can all be put together and sequenced in a presentation and, with the aid of a data projector, projected on to a screen for all to see. This, in fairness, is a big plus.

You can tailor material for a particular presentation (although many people don't expend the mental effort necessary to do this properly - planning again) in a very short time. You can build images up in steps and make items appear and disappear so as to achieve good directed focusing for the audience. The presentation material is then portable and easily assimilated into more detailed written documents. Powerpoint makes the rendering of visual material so easy, that it would be foolish not to avail of it when making a presentation.

In summary, PowerPoint, like so many things thrown up by the digital revolution, is a useful tool and I use it myself all the time. However, you must ask the question "what am I trying to achieve?" first. Then, and only then, turn to PowerPoint to help you to do this and only if you actually need to.
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Audience focused presentations and a word about encyclopedias

2005-07-04T16:48:00.000+01:00

One of the key points that I stress when I am giving courses is that a presentation is not a bulletin of information; you are not just talking to the wall. You are in fact talking to people, so you must tailor each presentation to the needs of the people in front of you.

For example, a heart specialist may make presentations to two different audiences: a group of students and a group of GP's. The talk in each case may have the same title, let's say "Using the ECG test for Early Detection of Heart Problems", and the examples, stories, visual aids and case studies used may be almost the same for both. However, the slant in each case will be totally different. To the students, the aim might be to persuade them to visit a travelling clinic to get their heart checked. To the GP's the aim might be to help them to detect the signs of heart disease and recommend an ECG test where applicable. You have to marshal your ideas and your communication tools differently for each different task. You are not a talking Encyclopedia who's job it is to simply issue information.

On holidays this year, I came across something that echoed this point very closely. One night, I happened to be staying in quite an old house and in one very austere room the walls were lined with book cases containing many hundreds of antiquated hard-back books. One of these was the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1959. I looked up the entry on something with which I was familiar, Dublin, the county in Ireland where I was born and live. The following is the first paragraph of the description that I read:

Dublin, a county of Ireland in the province of Leinster, bounded north by county Meath, east by the Irish Sea, south by county Wicklow, and west by counties Wicklow and Meath. The area is 321 square miles and the population (1951) 170,839 apart from Dublin city [area 34 square miles, population 522,183]. Of the population, over 70% are Roman Catholics. The county includes the borough of Dun Laoghaire and, though one of the smallest counties, is among the most populous in Ireland. The central and northern parts of the county are low-lying and composed chiefly of Carboniferous Limestone, with some millstone grit to the north and northwest, and some Silurian and Ordovician rocks behind Balbriggan. The peninsula of Howth, connected by a raised beach with the mainland, is formed of old quartzite's and shale's, crushed and folded , and probably of Cambrian age. The rocks of the county show many signs of ice action.

Does this description of Dublin strike you as strange? Did you know that there were "Silurian rocks" around the town of Balbriggan? Had you spotted the evidence of "ice action"? Did you know that the area of the county was 321 square miles? Is that big or small as counties go? Do you care? I myself have played football in Howth many times, but I never realised that the ground beneath my feet was formed of "old quartzite's and shale's".

Suppose you were from Dublin and you met someone abroad who was due to spend a holiday there and wanted to know more. What would you tell them? Would you tell them about the "millstone grit to the north and northwest"? I doubt it. But that's because you would know who your audience is (a tourist) and you know what they want to achieve (plan of places to visit and possibly instructions on how to get to these places). Now imagine a different audience. Suppose someone told you they were thinking of moving to Dublin to live and they wanted your help in making this decision. What would you talk about in this case? The content of this communication would be very different. Instead of talking about places of historical interest, the weather and good restaurants, you would talk about the price of housing, public transport and job opportunities. Actually, you would probably still talk about the weather. However the key point is that the aim of the presentation, for a particular audience, drives the slant of that presentation.

The problem with the Encyclopedia account of Dublin is that there is no specific audience. The communication is to anyone who cares to read it, so the author has reasoned (rather rigidly in this case) as follows: "Dublin is a chunk of land, whatever else it is, so let’s start by defining that chunk of land in general terms". [Incidentally, the entry on Dublin in the current edition of Britannica is not quite so long and starchy - no mention of millstone grit - but it is similar in style to the passage above.]

This has led me to coin a metaphorical term for presentations, inspired by the above passage, that are not audience focused: "Silurian". When you give a presentation that is a catalogue of facts and information ("let the audience do with this what they will"), chances are it will be very Silurian. When you roll out the same presentation to different audiences without really thinking about the different people in each group, then you are probably being Silurian. When companies have a "standard approved presentation" that they insist on their employees using every time for a particular task, they are definitely being Silurian.

Don't be an Encyclopedia . Remember, a presentation is not facts, it is an interpretation of facts, in the light of a particular audience, who have a particular need.