Why do presentations by experts suck so often?

I’m working at one of the country’s big, leading universities teaching some PhD students how to make presentations for academic conferences. (Believe me, I have more experience of sitting through bad academic presentations than any one should be made to suffer!).  “Presentations” I told them “aren’t about telling people what you know”.

Stunned silence

“They’re about telling people what they need to know in the way they need to know it.”

An even louder silence (and yes, you know what I mean – silence can be loud!).

Then the penny dropped – I was asking them to make their presentations intelligible, to make them understandable, to make them ‘simple’, so that other people could understand them!

After all, the whole point of an oral presentation at an academic conference is to allow your peers to look at what you’re working on with a view to spotting flaws and improving it.  That’s how science progresses…

Academics, being humans, don’t like this.

Who would?

Being told – in a room full of your peers – that you’ve made a mistake isn’t nice… but surely it’s better than the alternative… of not being told you’ve made a mistake!

I have a set of questions I suggest to my clients before they begin to design their presentation – to help make the presentation accessible to their audeinces. The first of these presentations is “What does my audience already know?”.

I know it’s a shockingly simple question, but you’d be stunned at how many presenters fail to ask it of themselves. (Or maybe you wouldn’t if you’ve sat through bad presentations!). If you don’t ask yourself what your audience already knows you’re just asking for trouble.

Things that can go wrong include a million subtle problems but also some serious crass presentation-killers such as

• under-estimating your audience’s background knowledge and therefore boring/patronising them
• over-estimating your audience’s background knowledge and so not explaining things that the need to have explained
• using acronyms that only you know (perhaps even using acronyms that you even invented!)
• using examples that your audience can’t or won’t ‘get’ from their cultural or demographic background

Stunned Silence

Here’s the big, big problem that academics have – and for that matter anyone who is an expert in what they are presenting about. (And if you’re not an expert on it, why are you presenting about it?!). The more of an expert you are, the harder it is to recognise what your audience won’t know. That’s because it’s likely to be so very, very obvious to you.

That makes it particularly important to ask yourself this question if you’re telling people something that’s new to them but old-hat to you. They are, in all likelihood, going to come at it with a different background, different assumptions, different priorities and different agendas.

If you manage to answer that question well enough, you can go on to ask yourself a few more questions to help you design your presentation – get it wrong and nothing else matters…

By the way…

The second question that follows on from this is just as simple: by the end of the presentation, what do I need my audience to know?  The final question is, obviously, given the answers to the first two questions: what do I need to tell them and how do I need to tell them it?

As yourself those questions, honesty and with integrity and (assuming you’re not daft) you’ve got a much, much better chance of a presentation that doesn’t suck! :)