When Slides Just Aren’t Right…

This from Ed Harycki, CEO of Swift Financial:

We give lots of presentations for small groups (a few of us and a few of them). Our primary audiences are financial institutions where our product would be a good fit for their customers base, and we are trying to convince them to partner with us to offer our products.

In these meetings, we might be able to offer handouts, but not likely to be able to access a screen to have a “live” show. Sometimes, it is challenging to even crack open the deck as the audience members just don’t want it. Do we try to force it or just go with the flow?

_______________

Never, ever force a slide deck upon someone. The members of your audience are reluctant enough to sit through them on their own volition. The implicit formality of projected material makes it less than ideal for small meetings which tend to be more like conversations. While it is possible to create a scenario in which it is comfortable to show slides in that environment, it would require a willing partner. If the partner is not willing, it is never going to feel right.

Presenters in small gatherings should ALWAYS be prepared, ready, and able to speak off the cuff, off script, and without aids. From there, they could introduce them gradually, starting with one or two printed sheets, working up to a handout or leave behind. And maybe, in the course of conversation about a deep topic, you could flip open your notebook to show a visual that would help illuminate the topic.

But trying to get to the slide deck misses the real objective. In small meetings, eye contact is the promised land. You don’t want anything to take away from that while you are trying to engage and connect.

___________________________

Follow up from Ed:

In a small group, if you feel you need to hand something out to get the conversation going, would you hand out a two- or three-page summary for conversation, and then leave a more detailed presentation behind?

_______________

I would not hand anything out to “get the conversation going” — I would try to make that happen myself. Remember, you are the presentation. And in small groups, your eyes are everything.

Once going, then yes, I would be ready with a short summary, preferably by directing them to the summary section of the handout. I am unconvinced as to the wisdom of having two separate leave behinds, given the likelihood that one of them would be misplaced. My instincts would be toward a single handout with an executive summary in place.

Top Ten Reasons to Attend the Presentation Summit

With apologies to David Letterman, here is the Top Ten List of reasons to attend the 2010 Presentation Summit, the preeminent conference for presentation professionals, to be held Oct 17-20 in beautiful and sunny San Diego.

1. INCREDIBLE LEARNAGE: You can’t possibly imagine how much you’ll learn at this conference, with dedicated tracks of seminars for PowerPoint technique, presentation design and delivery, and our Special Delivery track, focusing on all forms of presentation delivery. Check out the schedule of seminars.

2. UNPARALLELED EXPERTISE: It’s one thing to know PowerPoint; lots of people know that. It’s another thing to know about creating a compelling presentation; far fewer people know that. And it’s yet an altogether different thing to be able to teach these concepts; only a select few know how to do that. How few? Let’s see…Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, Rick Altman, Julie Terberg, Carmen Taran…what a coincidence, they’re all on the conference team…

3. AWESOME HELP: The conference’s Help Center is quite simply the finest opportunity for support with presentation software and technology anywhere on the planet. It’s free, it’s drop-in, it’s all hands-on, and it’s open from morning ‘til night. Some come to the conference just for the Help Center.

4. BECOME PART OF A COMMUNITY: At the Presentation Summit, you do more than learn; you develop contacts within the presentation community that you’ll keep for the rest of your career. When you put 200 passionate people together under one roof, the bonds created go way beyond that of a webinar, a discussion forum, or a faceless trade show. People who have met at our conferences have gone into business together, hired one another, visited each other during trips, and have even married.

5. MEET THE DEVELOPERS: Microsoft’s PowerPoint development team never misses this event. They take copious notes, they schedule late-night schmooze sessions, and they attend all of the seminars. They know the value of having so many earnest users of their product together at once and they place extraordinary value on your input.

6. THE EXPO: You’ll be the kid in the candy store when you visit the Summit Expo on Tuesday of conference week. Over a dozen vendors, all of them offering goods and services dedicated to the presentation marketplace. Lots of show specials, lots of giveaways, lots of opportunity to meet the people who make the products that make your life easier as a presentation professional.

7. SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: This is not a huge, faceless trade show — nobody enjoys attending those. The Summit limits enrollment to 225 so everyone is assured of receiving personal attention. Conference organizers are experts at hosting events of this size — they know exactly the type of programming and scheduling that fits.

8. YOU RUN THE PLACE: You pick and choose which seminars to attend; you do not have to commit to any one track ahead of time and you can cross tracks at will. Furthermore, several of the sessions could feature you! Submit work that you are particularly proud of or believe needs work and you could find yourself being showcased or made over. Sign up for the Trivia Contest and you could be part of a team participating in a unique blend of Jeopardy and Family Feud. Sign up early and you could venture out for an exclusive digital photography field trip to a San Diego landmark.

9. YOU WILL BE WELL FED: You’ll get robust continental breakfasts each morning and a fully-catered sit-down lunch on Monday and Tuesday.

10. YOU’LL HAVE AN AMAZING TIME: The Presentation Summit is like summer camp for adults; you would not have thought it possible to have such a good time at an event where you also learn so much. With relaxing meals where you don’t have to scurry out to the restaurant, evening socials, and a fabulous resort hotel perfectly situated on San Diego’s Mission Bay, you will remember the four days that you spend with your colleagues probably for the rest of your life.

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Why the Summit is Different (video)

Official FAQ page

How to convince the boss to let you attend

A Backlash against the Backchannel

My friend and colleague Dave Paradi wrote an incisive and thought-provoking post about the “backchannel” — social media’s contribution to audience interaction during a presentation. Dave makes the strong point that for a majority of presentations, using Twitter or FaceBook to communicate with a larger audience or with the presenter is not realistic. If you are in a boardroom with a dozen people, for instance, it would be implausible (not to mention rude) to be busy tweeting away about the presenter. And with whom would you tweet? What hashtag would you reference? It’s all way too vague.

With a larger audience, the scenario is more realistic, and Dave used last year’s PowerPoint Live as an example. We established #pptlive as the hashtag for use across the four days so patrons at the event and interested community members not attending could stay current.

Even in this environment, backchanneling remains challenging, and this is why I do not share the enthusiasm that some of my colleagues hold for Twitter as a viable vehicle for audience interaction. That said, I want to offer up two scenarios in which it could provide a useful service.

1. In a webinar

While evolving, most webinar plumbing offers deficient means for real-time interaction. Worse, many of the hosting agencies who hire me to give webinars do not allow questions during mid-session, insisting that I wait until the end of a 90-minute webinar before taking them. They tell me that it is too difficult to monitor the questions and selectively unmute phones. When I suggest the onscreen chat module as an alternative, they tell me that for my own protection, they do not enable it, citing too many presenters who have gotten derailed by it.

A Twitter hashtag circumvents all of this foolishness. I can take questions from my audience members and there is not a darn thing that the moderators can do about it…um, I mean I don’t have to trouble my hosts at all. Nobody sees me when I look down at my phone or on my second monitor, I can keep a browser window open for minimal distraction.

2. At a well-staffed conference

Even in a larger venue, using Twitter for audience interaction is problematic. My presenting style is hardly formal; I regularly engage in banter and repartee, even with an audience of over 200. Nonetheless, the few times that I have monitored a backchannel on my handheld, it has taken me out of my rhythm. To say nothing about having to put my damn reading glasses on in order to read a tweat, I find the experience to be more of a barrier before my audience than a bridge to them. And if I feel this, with my loose speaking style, I suspect that a majority of other presenters will not warm to it, either.

The missing puzzle piece is to have savvy room monitors. At the Presentation Summit, we normally ask our room monitors just to greet people as they enter a seminar ballroom, check for badges, and assist the presenter with any various and sundry needs. Not anymore—now we will ask our room monitors to monitor the Twitter tag and report on any questions or comments that they think would add to the fabric of the particular seminar. I think that’s a much better solution than the presenter trying to do it him- or herself.

_______________

I’m not sold on Twitter and FaceBook as a means to reach a presenter in real-time. I might never be, and in that regard, I’m with Dave Paradi on this one. But it deserves the benefit of the doubt, and the above two scenarios are ones in which I am willing to extend it. I’ll keep you posted…

Public speaking: just like American Idol?

Let’s start with full disclosure: our family watches American Idol regularly. I’m not terribly proud to report this; it is one of the more poorly-produced shows on television and many of its stars are self caricatures. But it is an opportunity for a family with two headstrong teenagers to actually engage in an activity together, and as I think about it, not since the Carol Burnett Show has there been good singing on television. And most of the time, the singing is good.

As I watch the contestants perform in front of live audiences and large television audiences, I cannot help but try to draw parallels to my chosen profession. But when I really think about it, few exist. American Idol might be a fast track to fame for a chosen few, but the rest have to play by rules that few others have to. Idol contestants are typically victimized by three things:

1. They are amateurs. Most of those who make it deep into the competition have had no experience before large audiences and do not know how to engage them. In many cases, even simple performance skills—such as how to hold a microphone or how to move on stage—elude them. This is not meant as a criticism; the rules require that they be amateurs. Simon Cowell conveniently forgets that fact, a few of the younger girls cry, everyone boos him, and it all makes for good television.
2. The standard is impossibly high. This too makes for good television and these kids certainly learn about poise in the face of pressure and strength of character in the face of criticism. But here is my pet peeve: all you regular viewers out there, what is the most common criticism leveled against the contestants (after being “pitchy,” a word I had never heard pre-Idol, despite growing up around accomplished musicians)? Bad song choice, right? They are constantly being harangued for not choosing the right songs. Yet of all of the teen and young-20s pop stars in the top 100 at any one time, less than  50% of them write their own songs or choose which ones to cover. They have producers and studio executives that do that for them. Why are these amateur singers being asked to do that which most of today’s professionals do not even attempt?
3. The scrutiny is extreme. I need look no further than our family’s debate du jour. One of my favorite singers this season is Crystal Bowersox, an unpretentious and wickedly talented young woman. She is everything that is good about Idol—an unassuming mom from a town in Ohio that would probably never have been discovered were it not for Idol. My wife, Becky, however, does not think as highly of her as I do. While she likes Crystal’s voice just fine, she describes her as “too earthy.” That might be a completely legitimate point of view. Bowersox is not glamorous, does not dress particularly well, and puts on no airs whatsoever.  Becky’s right, she is earthy. But I have to wonder: Of all of the artists in Becky’s iPod, in how many cases does she know what the singers look like? In most cases, we like our singers because they sing well—we have no idea about anything else. For all she knows, maybe half of Becky’s favorite artists are earthy. One of my new favorite bands is called Porcupine Tree and I don’t know the first thing about them. Maybe they look like porcupines. On Idol, if you look like a porcupine, you’re not going to win.

The profession of public speaking is different, and thank goodness! Of course your appearance makes up part of a first impression; this is America, after all, where actors can be elected Governor and President and Sarah Palin can, um, be Sarah Palin. But in most cases, audiences care more about whether you can deliver the goods. In a land where “Death by PowerPoint” is in everyone’s lexicon, business presenters don’t have to do a whole lot to distinguish themselves from others. It is not nearly as important what you look like or whether you know how to hold the microphone properly. If you know how to craft an engaging message, if you can speak with passion, and if you can get out from under their slides, you are going to do well.

I don’t mean to suggest that these are easy things. Getting an audience to feel the weight of your message can be very difficult (especially if you get buried by overladen text slides). But they are much purer challenges than the ones with which Idol and other reality shows saddle their contestants.

All of this said, there is one aspect of American Idol that has made its way to our discipline as presenters. As the legions of Twitterers continue to gain traction, your audience can vote on your presentation as if it were a performance. Imagine, your very own Simon Cowell, telling you that your presentation was self-indulgent and horrific.

What Has Happened to Spontaneity?

I had mixed emotions while watching Tiger Woods’ mea culpa moment two weeks ago. Same with the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. And a recent presentation that a client gave. All of these events shared a common thread.

Several dozen politicians could have learned from Tiger on how to issue a public apology, and the Canada’s Olympic Committee crafted a breathtaking show. So did my client.

This is unfair to the Olympics, it’s only sin being the timing of all of this. The carefully-crafted performance came around the same time as so many others that I either watched or was in the room for. It got me thinking…

Does everything have to be staged these days?
What would happen if public figures went without a script?

The Woods spectacle was so tightly controlled, the Golf Writers Association of America chose to boycott the event. If they couldn’t ask questions, they argued, it was not a true news event and not worthy of their participation.

And then there’s my client. So focused was he on the performance aspect of his presentation, he had it timed to the second, and one of his slides had 13 builds on it. The slide was scheduled to be displayed for roughly 20 seconds. And it was just a quarterly update to a management team!

I don’t get it. Have we forgotten how to engage an audience without a stage director? Have we lost sight of why people attend a presentation? Do we think that audience members walk into a room just dying to see our slides?

Perhaps Carmen Taran said it best at last year’s PowerPoint Live (now the Presentation Summit), when she spoke of the importance of, to use her words, “presenting naked.” This speaks to the value of being genuine and having no barriers between presenter and audience. While I acknowledge the value of theater (and again, the Olympic festivities were phenomenal), I wouldn’t want to see the message lost in the medium, and all too often, my clients are ready to do just that.

We need less staging and more speaking. Less theater, more engagement.

Living with Bullet Points

This from one of our readers, Melanie Bozzelli of Twinsburg OH:

I hope you can help settle a friendly debate we are having over the use of bullet points. In your book, you argue that bullet points should be displayed all at once on the slide, and then the presenter will discuss them with the audience.

We prepare many presentations for an online audience and our research and testing have shown that if the slide loads all at once, then the user may go off and look at other things online, and not pay attention to the presentation. They typically scan the bullets, realize they have a few minutes to wander off while the narrator is speaking, and then check in to see if the presentation has advanced to the next slide.

If the bullets load one at a time and are “spoon-fed” to audience members, they stay engaged with the online presentation.

Since our presentations are often created with multiple contexts in mind (live audience,on-demand online, etc), I wonder if there may be a solution to accommodate each audience, without losing or insulting them.

Melanie brings rise to a very interesting point: how the webinar culture influences conventional thinking. A lot of this comes down to your take on protocol during webinars; here is mine: I don’t try to fight the impulse that webinar audience members have to multitask; I consider it to be a fact of life.

This has been a liberating conclusion for me. Instead of fighting it, I try to cater to it. If my audience members are going to multitask anyway—and if they can’t, they might choose to tune out altogether—I feel as if I can make it easier on them by doing an all-at-once slide build. If I try to string them along, they might resent it. If I give them the download all at once, they can then keep one ear on me while they are checking their email or hanging out on FaceBook. Then when I change topics, they are in a position to tune back in.

I’m not sure this is a majority viewpoint; I’m sure there are some who tilt at this windmill and hope/expect to garner 100% attention from their webinar audience members. I just don’t think that’s realistic.

Better to swim with this tide than against it, I say. Should you adopt that point of view, your life is made easier by not having to create multiple decks for multiple audiences.

Other principles of presentation design still prevail, I must add. This is not permission to overload your slides with superfluous verbiage. Keep those on-screen points short, sweet, and pithy!

The Lunacy of the Leave Behind

I am a pragmatic being. At my core, I understand the values of efficiency and expedience. I embrace the art of compromise and understand that life often gets in the way of ideals and theories. Reality is often harsh and not adjusting to it often harsher.

Yet there is one principle relevant to our community on which I do not yield. One ideal to which I hold stubbornly. At this windmill, I gladly tilt: it is the notion that a presentation content creator can create one set of slides that will function ably for the projected content and for the printed material.

This is an impossible notion. Everything else in life might be possible if you work hard, but not this one thing. In my 15+ years as a presentation consultant, I have not once seen it done successfully.

Not once!

When you set forth to create content for a presentation, you work with two forces that are fundamentally at odds with one another. You want to create projected content that is compelling and you want to provide information that is useful. The pragmatic being in you usually prevails, and in the interest of time, you look for a happy medium.

Unfortunately, that twain shall not meet. Nary.

As discomfiting as it may be for content creators, a properly-prepared set of visuals for a presentation will fail as leave-behind collateral. Your slides are supposed to be incomplete; they are supposed to be no more than the tease for the words that you will speak. If they say too much, they inhibit your ability to tell the story.

My colleague and friend Dave Paradi (www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com) conducts an annual survey of the most annoying qualities of a PowerPoint presentation. The current survey lists the following as its top three:

• Speaker reads the slides to the audience
• Speaker creates full sentences instead of bullet points
• Text is too small to read

All three of these annoyances are inevitable when content creators attempt to have their slides double as printouts. In other words, this one issue might be responsible for ALL THREE of the sins that have been voted most egregious.

And I’ll go one step further: overladen slides that try to tell too much turn otherwise smart people into blithering idiots. Can PowerPoint make you stupid? When there is too much blather being projected, the answer is most decidedly yes.

It is practically a litmus test that we all must take. How are your visuals? Would they make really lousy printouts? Yes? Great, you’re all set to go!

We live in a world of compromises, but this is one place where you cannot succumb to the expedient route. You must think of your projected content and your printed content as two distinct projects. Otherwise, they both might fail, and you will fail.

A perfect example of this dynamic came to us recently during our ongoing invitation to see work from the presentation community. One organization created a short slide deck on the all-important topic of tire safety. There is probably a lot that you do not know about tire maintenance; I learned several things from surveying a few slides in this deck. Any soccer mom or softball dad would be heavily emotionally invested in this topic. Here was the first slide in the deck:

When this first figure arrives on screen, is it going to have an impact? Of course not. And when the well-intentioned presenter begins to speak, it will be almost impossible to avoid reciting the slide. And before you know it…instant Death by PowerPoint.

Set aside the dubious design motif used here—the real crime committed was when the creator tried to have it both ways and create a presentation deck that could double as printouts.

Here we see the continued decline in what could have been a noble effort: educating an audience about the different qualities of tires and how understanding them would make your car safer.

All of these words make it impossible for a presenter to get to where he or she really needs to be: appealing to the emotional side of a story and getting the audience to feel its weight. Very few audience members are moved to action by what their brains tell them; there must be an emotional component to the story. Tire safety is low-hanging fruit to any parent of a young child who needs to be driven hither and yon to this playdate and that gymnastics class.

My makeover of this deck attempts to make the emotional case, while allowing the presenter to inform the audience on the important specifications of tires.

If these slides were printed and delivered, they would not be very helpful. They require more complete leave-behind information.

Here are a few ideas and techniques to help you deal with the unavoidable fact that you will need to prepare your material twice—once for the presentation and once for printouts.

1. Acknowledge it early

The best time to prepare the detail for handouts is before you go anywhere near PowerPoint. Taking notes…composing your thoughts…fleshing out your ideas…these are all great things to do long before you think about how you might engage your audience on multiple levels. When you prepare the meat of your presentation first, you are more likely to pick a better tool for the printouts, like a publishing application or a word processor with a good design template. And having poured over the details to this degree, you are in a better position to then choose more compelling visuals to help you tell the story to your audience.

2. Use Notes View

If you or your boss committed the popular sin of writing out an entire speech on the slides themselves, you are just one cut-and-paste maneuver away from salvation. That verbiage belongs in the Notes view, but this is not to suggest that it be there for the speaker to refer to. Having complete sentences in your notes is just as dangerous as displaying them on screen—it could turn you into a drone either way.

The idea here is that your Notes pages become your printouts, to be delivered to your audience members during or after the presentation. Notes view has its own master and can be customized far beyond what most users realize.

Here you see the degree to which Notes view can be designed for optimized leave-behind material. The text here is a direct splice from the original slide.

3. Use Version 2007 Slide Masters

The current version of PowerPoint—still foreign and unfamiliar to many—has several compelling features that merit your taking a closer look. One of them is the flexible layouts that are now part of the slide mastering creation process.

In this scenario, you would either keep hidden the slides that are part of the printouts, or create two custom shows, one for display and one for print.

The value of these strategies, using Notes view or V2007’s slide masters, is your ability to keep the printout material in the presentation file itself, instead of having to deal with two separate files.

But that’s the only free lunch you get here. If you try to cut a corner with leave-behind content, you are guaranteed to fail. If you just suck it up and accept the fact that you need to go the extra mile, your audience will love you for it, and your presentations will be much, much better as a result.

Thriving with Animation

Thanking God

Like many sports enthusiasts, I sat with rapt attention last weekend watching 59-year-old Tom Watson defy father time and all matter of plausibility by coming within one putting stroke of winning the British Open. His grace and poise impressed all of us; however, the eventual winner Stewart Cink impressed me even more, for two reasons:

1) He knew that 99% of the gallery and worldwide television audience was rooting against him in the four-hole playoff he waged with Watson, and there was absolutely nothing that he could do about it.

2) During his victory speech, he invoked his faith in an unusual and refreshing way.

While this was not a hostile audience, Cink knew that he was in a delicate situation, going up against an overwhelming sentimental favorite (the Scotland gallery was rooting for Watson even over the British golfers in the field). He handled this situation the way that I would counsel a client who was about to give a presentation before a potentially disagreeable audience: with respect, earnestness, and grace. Cink did not take the partisanship personally, he respected and appreciated the gallery's biases, he competed earnestly and without fear, and won with grace and class.

Even more noteworthy was how he credited his faith for helping him win without being obnoxious or polarizing. This is a touchy subject, I know — I probably shouldn't even be blogging about it. I abhor when athletes with strong religious backgrounds remark how "God was on my side today," or solemly state that "God just didn't want me to win today."

Please.

There are few things more ridiculous, and more off-putting, than the notion that God cares who wins one of our recreational pastimes. I think our supreme being has better things to do than take a rooting interest in us. But Cink phrased it differently:

"I lift this [trophy] up to God for giving me the ability to withstand the pressures and obstacles I face on the golf course."

To my ear, this is a completely different message. Cink knows that winning or losing is a function of his performance and that he is solely responsible for how well he performs. In order to perform well, everyone needs to find his or her inner strength and Cink has found his through his faith.

His was not an in-your-face expression of his religious beliefs. It was not intended to be divisive or evangelical, and I don't believe anyone took it that way. I think that religion finds its highest form when it gives people the strength to do great things, and that was what Cink represented with his eloquence.

As a presentations coach, I often spend many hours helping people find that inner strength — sometimes in vain. As a pramatist, I don't much care where it comes from. Some people find it through a confidence they were born with, some from a passion for their work. Some get it from the love of people close to them, and others from their faith.

But the presenters/performers who generally have difficulty tapping into this reservoir are the ones who describe their primary emotion as fear of failure. They become far too conscious of external matters and rarely channel their inner being, the one that usually knows innately how to accomplish the task at hand.

If God is the ingredient that can get them to turn inward and find the strength of character to perform at their best, that is a happy ending, in my book.

Your mileage may vary; we're talking religion, after all. Do you agree that Stewart Cink allowed his faith to bring out the best in him and his was a simple acknowledgment of that? Or do you nonetheless feel that his remarks were over the top and inappropriate? If so, let me have it…

What we can learn from Michael Jackson

The passing of legend Michael Jackson has been felt in every part of society's fabric, so it should come as no surprise that the community of presentation professionals can reflect on his life and take something from his experiences.

As I separate the bizarre from the pathetic, I try to disregard the surgeries, skin-bleaching, bed-sharing, and bone-scavenging. Instead, I focus on the loneliness and extreme isolation which led to his confusing two important emotions — a confusion that could befall anyone who performs in public.

Michael Jackson confused attention with adoration and adoration with love. He wanted people to love him and thought that he could get there through his fame. That became a dreadful, perhaps fatal, cycle. As Jackson said to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the unofficial rabbi to the stars in Los Angeles, "I want people to love me…because I never really felt loved. Maybe if I sharpen my craft, people will love me more."

This is an all-too-easy trap for anyone in the public eye, including presenters who might place inordinate value in earning applause from an audience. If that is the closest personal connection they feel to other people, they are bound to become lonely.

I have experienced a related dynamic myself. In the course of four compressed days at PowerPoint Live, we develop tight bonds with people whom we have just met and it is easy to regard these types of friendships as more than they are. Not to suggest for even a moment that there is anything artificial in the affinity that we all feel for one another, because the congeniality and the vibe that we create at the conference is one of its most important qualities. Come Thursday morning, however, the day after the conference closes, we all realize that our newfound BFFs cannot replace the closeness of life-long relationships that have been forged over decades.

Many of the veteran alumni who see each other year upon year have created lasting relationships, and that is the point — they take time and earnest effort.

If we presenters are not careful, we could find ourselves seeking the quick fix that Jackson did — adoration instead of love. When you have just nailed a presentation and 200 people are all standing and applauding, it's tempting to want to have the Sally Field moment. We can bring meaning to Michael Jackson's passing if we remember the importance of cultivating genuine and healthy relationships, instead of fooling ourselves into believing that a grateful audience can magically turn into a room full of best friends.

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