Presentations are not conversations (bit of a rant!)

There’s stuff all over the ‘net about how a good presentation should be like a conversation with your audience.  By that, the authors are (as far as I can tell) generally trying to get away from the “stand and deliver” style of presenting, where the presenter is more of a talking head than anything, simply reciting a rigidly prepared script.  Fair enough.  I can see (and even train people in) the style of making a presentation as though it was a presentation – but that’s a style thing, not a substance thing.

Too many would be experts bash out articles saying that you should ‘just have a conversation from the stage’.  No, no and no again.  That’s inefficient, ineffective and (frankly!) downright rude.  Your audience deserves better.  I can’t figure out if the writers of these blogs are simply over-simplifying or just don’t know what they’re talking about.  Either way, such posts don’t help the readers.

Okay, there’s an upside to the informal style, but there are downsides, too, of having your presentation like a conversation.

For me, conversations are two way things, with dialogue between equal parties.

I don’t buy that, entirely. Sure, a presenter should always treat his or her audience with respect and treat them as intelligent adults but that’s not the same as treating them as equals! If they were equals (in the subject matter to hand) there’d be no need for a presentation in the first place, as everyone would know pretty much everything everyone else knew.  No presentation should be like that – the presenter is making a presentation because they’re the expert; they are the ones with something to say.  (Okay, some presentations are made just because the presenter feels the need to fill the silence with the sound of their own voice and if that’s the case he or she should be presenting to an empty room before the first two or three minutes of the presentation are over, but I’m not talking about that kind of presentation.)

Someone has to be in charge, someone has to know what’s going on and someone has to set the agenda.

For me, conversations are unstructured, going where they will

If I’m chatting to my friends in the pub, I don’t have an agenda.  If someone brings up football, fine.  If they bring up politics, also fine.  Religion, women and cars….. all fine!  :)

Presentations don’t work like that. It behoves the presenter to know what needs to be said, to say it and then to stop saying anything.  Simple as that.  They should have had all the necessary ‘conversations’ before the presentation, in order to know what the audience knows, what they need to know and (therefore) what the presentation should cover.  Making it up on the fly, going with the flow and just talking about whatever comes to mind is a recipe for a really bad, meandering, unfocussed, pre… what was I talking about, again?

For me, conversations stop when people want to stop talking

A presentation, by contrast, should stop when all’s been said that needs to be said.

For me, conversations don’t need to be rehearsed, unlike a presentation.

In fact, you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) rehearse a conversation!  Telling people to just stand there and talk like it’s a conversation is doing the would-be presenter a massive dis-service, because it belies the effort, expertise and experience that goes into a good presentation.  It’s not something you can ‘just do’ without thinking about it. If it was, we’d all be able to make presentations, wouldn’t we? After all, we can all chat and have conversations!

Okay – rant over…. I’ll get off my high horse now, before I get a nose-bleed!  :)