Critical distance – part three

In the first two parts of this short series (wrapped up here) I looked at the importance of getting distance to give yourself objectivity, so you could figure out what your audience needed in part one and I I got all metaphorical in part two. In this section I’m looking at some specific tools and tactics. They probably won’t make much sense without the first two parts, because they’re just that – tactics – and you need to understand the content in which you use them.

Time

The first and most simple tool is simply to draft your presentation then walk away from it. Give yourself time to undo all the assumptions you’ve made as you created it and come back to it fresh. Even the length of a cup of tea is better than nothing but my personal experience is that two weeks is ideal. By that time you’re completely fresh.

And again, my personal experience is that there’s a lot of re-drafting to be done when you give yourself time.

The practical problem, of course, is that sometimes you don’t get enough notice of a presentation to give yourself two weeks, but everyone gets a cup of tea, right?

Teenagers

Children are great, because they don’t know what you’re talking about. Try your presentation out on some smart teenagers. If they get it, great. If they don’t, you know your presentation made some unhelpful assumptions and you need to fill those gaps.

Obviously you can’t just grab random teenagers off the street – use a bit of common sense here! ;)

And if you can’t find teenagers, find friends who have no idea what you do for a living. Or what about people at work who simply aren’t involved with your project? Or your mastermind group? Or (in desperation!) your life partner…?

It doesn’t who so much as it matters that they don’t know what you do.

Index cards

It doesn’t have to be index cards, of course – I often use postit notes – but the point is that whatever you use to design your presentation should be instantly, immediately and organically editable. It has to be re-arrangable and it has to be discardable… and for a number of reasons, people are less keen (or able) to re-arrange or delete slides in a powerpoint deck than they care index cards on a table or desk.

And I know what a lot of you are thinking, you’re thinking “Not me, I’m in charge of my own technology”.

Riiiiiight… And I know some people who smoke who are convinced that despite smoking 30 cigarettes a day they’re not addicted, because they could give up any time they wanted to, they just don’t want to.

Questions

I’ve written elsewhere about how important it is to know what your presentation is trying to achieve: if you don’t know that it’s hard to have a successful presentation (obviously). Well that kind of ‘outcome orientated’ thinking has another advantage too, in the current context.

By asking yourself precisely and exactly what you’re trying to achieve you can decide more easily what people need to know. If you decide you need to get people from point A to point B, you don’t need them to know how hard it was for you to find point B in the first place. All that does is bolster your ego and make you look winey. Instead, use that time to tell people how important it is that they get to point B and then help them get there.

Over to you

What do you do to make sure you get that essential distance? What could you do and should you do?