{"id":2864,"date":"2015-01-19T08:16:26","date_gmt":"2015-01-19T08:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=2864"},"modified":"2015-01-19T08:56:37","modified_gmt":"2015-01-19T08:56:37","slug":"presentation-success-why-we-cant-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/presentation-success-why-we-cant-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Presentation success – why we can’t win!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Stupid<\/a>

Stupid thumbs up score<\/p><\/div>\n

How do you know when you\u2019ve made a good presentation? \u00a0When it gets you a standing ovation? When nothing goes wrong? When people tell you that you\u2019ve \u201cdone well\u201d?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s how most people do it, but it\u2019s a dumb approach. \u00a0It\u2019s dumb because what it measures is the process<\/strong>, not the outcome.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Think of it like this – you might know you\u2019ve driven well, with good observation and anticipation, indicating well and using the mirror\u2026 not speeding and so on\u2026 perfect! But if it\u2019s not got you to the right place it\u2019s 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\u2019s safe and so on, but you get the idea.)<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Or you might cook perfectly, but if the food isn\u2019t eaten, it\u2019s a waste of time – a failure.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

So why do we judge presentations by the process not the product?<\/b><\/h2>\n
I must admit I’m in two minds about this. \u00a0My head and my heart tell me different things.<\/div>\n

What my head tells me is<\/h4>\n
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\u00a0go 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.<\/div>\n

What my heart tells me is<\/h4>\n
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? \u00a0(Well, okay, yes, you migh… but that is<\/strong> your ego talking!)<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
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. \u00a0 If I don’t make a fuss about my birthday in September I don’t get as many presents in October!<\/div>\n
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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. \u00a0(Personally I think this also explains a great deal of the fuss around wasps, but that’s just me…)<\/div>\n
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What my experience\u00a0tells me is<\/h4>\n
that\u00a0most people could, if pushed, list a set of criteria for when a presentation is bad. But if you ask them for a list of criterial to judge a presentation as ‘good’ or ‘a success’ they’d struggle. That’s because we never bother to decide what presentations are for, what they’re intended to do. We still think of presentations we ‘do’, not something that are ‘for’ anything. Unless and until we know what any given presentation is for<\/strong>, we can’t measure\u00a0it’s success.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Why is it a bad thing<\/b><\/h2>\n
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.<\/div>\n

What can you do about it?<\/b><\/h2>\n
Ah… well that’s the six million dollar question, isn’t it! :)<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
First things first, I’d suggest that just by realising what’s going on (that is, reading this esteemed blog!) things will\u00a0start to fall into place.<\/div>\n
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More specifically however, I think it’s about deciding what the presentation is intended to achieve.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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?” \u00a0That should give you a strong indication of what success would look like. \u00a0If 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.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
It’s not rocket science, honestly, once you get the idea that the presentation is to do<\/strong>\/achieve something rather than be<\/strong> something.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
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. \u00a0If it does that, you’ve won.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
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.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Time to think the same way about presentations.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
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PS: I’m obviously talking about live presentations. There are some handy metrics for online presentations and so on here:\u00a0http:\/\/www.sliderocket.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/sliderocket-tip-4-ways-to-measure-presentation-success\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How do you know when you\u2019ve made a good presentation? \u00a0When it gets you a standing ovation? When nothing goes wrong? When people tell you that you\u2019ve \u201cdone well\u201d? That\u2019s how most people do it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-key-posts","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2864"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2906,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2864\/revisions\/2906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}