Presentation success – why we can’t win!

How do you know when you’ve made a good presentation?  When it gets you a standing ovation? When nothing goes wrong? When people tell you that you’ve “done well”?

That’s how most people do it, but it’s a dumb approach.  It’s dumb because what it measures is the process, not the outcome.

Think of it like this – you might know you’ve driven well, with good observation and anticipation, indicating well and using the mirror… not speeding and so on… perfect! But if it’s not got you to the right place it’s a failure. The point is that we judge the driving by whether it gets you there or not. (Of course there are other measures too, such as whether it’s safe and so on, but you get the idea.)

Or you might cook perfectly, but if the food isn’t eaten, it’s a waste of time – a failure.

I must admit I’m in two minds about this.  My head and my heart tell me different things.

that people just the presentation because it’s such a rare event in the lives of most people, and is regarded as hard, so that it takes on a life of its own, becoming a self-contained project. I now go to the gym relatively frequently (though not as much as I should, obviously!) and I regard each session as a step towards being fitter and faster: but when I first started out I hated it so much, and found it such hard work that I had to psych myself up for it, dreading it and (if I could) avoiding it. So it is with presentations, I suspect.

that a lot of people have a lot of ego invested in their presentation being ‘good’. Let’s face it, everyone likes to be praised for their projects. But why should I be more emotionally invested in a presentation than a report? (Okay, from the emotional point of view, sure – see my point above) but when you look at it from the point of view of your job they’re just two different ways of doing something similar. You’d not want a standing ovation for a good report, would you?  (Well, okay, yes, you migh… but that is your ego talking!)

No one gets as much praise as they deserve if they just quietly, efficiently and without any fuss, just get on with doing their job and doing it well.   If I don’t make a fuss about my birthday in September I don’t get as many presents in October!

What’s more, I suspect that people make a fuss because they see other people making a fuss. It becomes a self-perpetuating thing; a self-fulfilling prophesy.  (Personally I think this also explains a great deal of the fuss around wasps, but that’s just me…)

What my experience tells me is

It’s a bad thing because it takes up energy that should be better spent on other things – productive things. It also makes people unhappy. Neither of those are good things.

Ah… well that’s the six million dollar question, isn’t it! :)

First things first, I’d suggest that just by realising what’s going on (that is, reading this esteemed blog!) things will start to fall into place.

Okay, so if your main definition of success is “not screw up in front of the boss” then the presentation has to be measured in those terms, but back in the real world the key question is to say to yourself “What do I want to happen at the end of this presentation that wouldn’t happen if I didn’t give it?”  That should give you a strong indication of what success would look like.  If the aim of your presentation is, for example, for people to start using the new version of a policy or protocol at your work, then success would be measured in terms of how many people changed to the new system (over a certain period of time) compared to how many would have changed if you’d not made the presentation.

It’s not rocket science, honestly, once you get the idea that the presentation is to do/achieve something rather than be something.

You can’t decide if something is a success unless you know what success looks like. Let’s face it, we know what a bad presentation looks like so we can judge our presentation against those things; but without knowing what a success looks like we’re screwed. The answer is simple. Define what you need your presentation to do. Not want, need.  If it does that, you’ve won.

It doesn’t matter how badly the ‘presentation went’ if you get the right outcome from it. Again, it’s just like a report… the fewer spelling mistakes it has in it the more likely it is to be effective but, and here’s the important part, you don’t judge the report by the spelling mistakes, you judge it by whether or not it changes your organisation’s policy.

Time to think the same way about presentations.