I’m not talking about picking a fight here, I’m talking about making a presentation.
I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve read well intentioned advice to would-be presenters, online, saying that you should face the audience, not your screen. Â There’s an example here of really good advice about how to do that just , for example (which is what inspired me to write this post.) from Presentation Advizors. Â Other tipslists I’ve read recently have even gone so far as to suggest rigging the room with mirrors so you can see the screen behind you while looking at the audience, though I’m not sure I’d recommend that!
Thing is, like other lists of tips, I’m not sure such advice, no matter how good it is, can work.
The reason it can’t work, I suspect, is because many presenters don’t want it to work. Â Stay with me here, while I explain my thinking.
Firstly, lists of tips always say “practice” and most people don’t want to do that because it’s hard work. Â Often they say that they’re too busy (and some of them are right, but not many). Because making presentations is known to be difficult and/or frightening they then feel they have an excuse to go out there and waste everyone’s time by making an under-rehearsed presentation. Â In other words, people ignore such lists because it’s in their own interest to do so, timewise. Â Even if they don’t do the practice tip, the other tips often take time an effort to get sorted out!
Secondly… and I’m thinking in particular about the idea of not facing the screen here… it’s because most people who “write presentations” (always a mistake in my mind – I say you should design them!) don’t want to be doing the presentation and are therefore – without thinking about it – designing their slides for themselves. That’s the crunch issue. Â Slides should be designed for the audience. Â If the presenter is designing them for him/herself, perhaps as a prompt or a crutch, no wonder they face the slides all the time!
It seems to me this is the critical issue, because without the shift in mindset, nothing can change. Â Not just won’t change, but can’t change.
Thirdly – I’m far from convinced that the kind of people who need to read these lists of hints and tips are the kind of people who actually do. Â My wife’s a teacher and her comment about Parents’ Evenings is that typically the parents who turn up are the parents of the well-behaved kids who aren’t a problem, don’t worry the teacher and who therefore don’t need to have their parents come along. Â The parents of the problem kids don’t turn up.
Maybe I’m just a grumpy old man… anyone with me?
Okay, I know this is just one side of things – and that a lot of people genuinely are scared of looking the audience in the eyes (and trainers like me can help with that) and I know that there are some people who look at the screen for the right reasons… but….
Thanks for the post Simon. I recently started giving presentations about my company’s products and services. I have had to think long and hard about the advice I received about 20 years ago while at university. It is all quite new to me.
I have read my share of blogs offering tips and have tried to incorporate some of them in my presentations.
What I really found interesting in your post was how you suggested that a presentation should be designed and not written. I have always written my speeches out in full, practiced them a few hundred times and then used bullet point notes on the actual day of the speech.
I would like to read more about your presentation design concept. Perhaps that is a good topic for your next blog post. I will be following your blogs in future.
Cheers Dan – I’ll make a point of explaining what I mean in a future blog, but for now, in VERY shorthand, what I mean is that if you write your presentation it will have a particular ‘voice’: typically not the ‘voice’ you speak with. When you try and present it, it often sounds artificial.
The other issue, of course, is that when one’s writing one tends to think in a certain way, about what you want to say, rather than about what the audience needs to hear. By all means write if that works for you, but only *after* you’ve done the designing.
Sorry that’s brief (and probably too brief to explain properly) – I’ll find time soon to write something better.
Look forward to it! Thanks for your reply.
You raise fair points and the analogy with parents is spot on. But at some level, if people don’t want to practice their presentations, they are going to be awful and they deserve to be. Someone who never went to English class and never studied grammar or spelling is going to be a poor writer too.
The importance of eye-contact can never be emphasized too much. Maintaining a healthy balance between looking at slides and audience is very crucial, I believe. What do you think about a 30:70 ratio of time split between slide-reference and audience? I’m a management student, trying to improve my presentation skills and I would like to know what you think about the balance one should strive to achieve regarding eye contact.
I’d say 30:70 is a useful starting point but like every other rule it should be disregarded at any point when it gets in the way! ;)
I’d say it was a useful guideline for inexperienced presenters and a possible straight-jacket to very experienced ones. Each presenter (no, each presentation!) is different and such things can only be taken as approximate guidelines – but as guideline it’s one of the more sensible ones! ;)
Thanks for your reply.
,:; that seems to be a great topic, i really love it ‘`,