{"id":2473,"date":"2013-01-06T08:26:07","date_gmt":"2013-01-06T08:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.curved-vision.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=2473"},"modified":"2013-01-06T08:26:07","modified_gmt":"2013-01-06T08:26:07","slug":"the-emperor-has-no-clothes-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/the-emperor-has-no-clothes-on\/","title":{"rendered":"The emperor has no clothes on"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Not

Not good enough (wikimedia.org)<\/p><\/div>\n

I’ve written (ranted) about how \u00a0mediocre presentations are accepted and even mediocre stuff is praised. Even in meetings of organisations aimed at improving the quality of presentations there can be a fairly serious disconnection between the presentation and the feedback.<\/p>\n

I don’t propose to go over same ground about why that may be (people don’t know better? people are too polite?) \u00a0instead I’d like to lob another hand grenade into the conversation – the Emperor’s New Clothes.<\/p>\n

I’ve recently sat through presentations which made me cringe – some from a professional speaker! – but which received nothing but praise online later.<\/p>\n

Why? Was I the only<\/strong> one in the room squirming in my seat when the presenter couldn’t make his video play? (Side issue: \u00a0I’m prepared to bet he’d not paid for the rights to the music.) Was I just fooling myself into thinking it was shoddy out of jealousy or spite? Perhaps I just have stupidly high standards. Or maybe I just imagined that there were moments of pure shame and everyone else wasn’t having that fantasy.<\/p>\n

Talking to people, I have to say I wasn’t. People were prepared to say critical things but not to the group, not online and not to the presenter. Of course some of that is simple politeness or group politics… After all, saying “That was rubbish!” takes guts!<\/p>\n

But I think the ENC’s was involved too.<\/p>\n

You see, by saying this rather mediocre presentation was ‘good’ or even ‘great’ we subconsciously validate our own presentations – we set the bar low enough so that our own work is above it.<\/p>\n

But that’s rather like saying running a mile in only 20 minutes is good going, so that we don’t feel so slow ourselves when we run a mile in ‘only’ 15 minutes!<\/p>\n

Frankly, it’s pathetic. Or rather, it would be if we were doing it consciously and on purpose. But we’re not – or at least I like to think we’re not. We’re doing it because everyone else is doing it and we’ve become brain-washed into thinking that just standing up and not falling over the podium is good enough. We’ve learned to accept mediocre presentations in the same way that we have learned to accept poor tea and badly made pancakes (okay, that’s a bit personal, but you know what I mean! :) ).<\/p>\n

We’ve learned to accept mediocre presentations in the same way that we think it’s okay to limited at foreign languages or mental arithmetic. Everyone else is bad, so what’s the problem.<\/p>\n

Hey, from my point of view it’s great! As a good speaker I’m laughing, because by comparison to the average I look like a bloody genius, a miracle-worker, a guru of the slides! But it’s also shameful.<\/p>\n

Rise up, take a stand, raise the standard!<\/p>\n

The first step is just making it socially unacceptable to give bad presentations in the same way as it’s now social unacceptable to drive while drunk. It didn’t use to be. And the first stage in that process is simple – it’s just to say something. \u00a0Tell people the truth.<\/p>\n