{"id":3749,"date":"2016-05-29T08:58:05","date_gmt":"2016-05-29T07:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=3749"},"modified":"2016-05-31T10:37:49","modified_gmt":"2016-05-31T09:37:49","slug":"some-days-you-shouldnt-get-out-of-bed-to-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/some-days-you-shouldnt-get-out-of-bed-to-present\/","title":{"rendered":"Some days you shouldn&#8217;t get out of bed to present&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two things have prompted this blog (which some might call a bit of a rant)\u2026 firstly I\u2019m sitting here typing on a laptop running on batteries because there\u2019s no power to the building and hasn\u2019t been all night either, it appears. And secondly, at a big presentation I was giving yesterday the HDMI cable between my laptop and the rather lovely, huge LCD screens on the wall behind me cut out every time I stood on a certain spot on the floor over the wiring.<\/p>\n<p>The former I\u2019m solving by running on batteries for a while (though I may have to go to a cafe at some point when the batteries run out!) and the latter I solved by replacing the HDMI cable with a VGA cable and an a pair of emergency speakers I carried with me. (Sometimes you\u2019re not paranoid &#8211; sometimes the world <strong>is<\/strong> out to get you!)<\/p>\n<p>But the loss of \u2018tech\u2019 on those occasions got me thinking.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_3755\" style=\"width: 234px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3755\" class=\"wp-image-3755 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/michalangelo_pieta-224x300.jpg\" alt=\"michalangelo_pieta\" width=\"224\" height=\"300\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-3755\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Just about my all time favourite statue. Makes me cry sometimes. I see it almost every time I&#8217;m in Italy.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Frankly, I have almost no time for those speakers and presenters who brag \u201c<em>I never use slides!<\/em>\u201d with an evangelical zeal and an assertion &#8211; implicit or explicit &#8211; that \u201cIt\u2019s about the presenter, not the slides\u201d. Behind that is the rather arrogant self-delusion that resorting to slides is somehow inferior. To them I say \u201cIf that works for you and your message that\u2019s good. Remember that you only have one message. Have you considered what you\u2019d do if that message was best communicated by slides? What would you do if your presentation was about some element of fine art? Try and get the audience to imagine Michelangelo\u2019s Pieta without having seen it?\u201d Slides work if slides are needed; no slides work if no-slides are needed. It\u2019s as simple as that.<\/p>\n<p>Similarly I have no sympathy for presenters who mindlessly default to slides without thinking about whether those slides are their for the audience\u2019s benefit of their own.<\/p>\n<p>The hard part is deciding when\/if slides are needed. And that, gentle reader, is the point of this rant. I\u2019m not going to pretend that the reasoning\/list below is comprehensive, or even the finished product, but it\u2019s a reasonable starting point for a checklist, I think.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It\u2019s true that pictures paint a thousand words, so if you\u2019ve got something that can be best summed up visually, do so. You can save time by just showing your audience what you mean rather than spending time describing it. Personally, I find it particularly handy when I\u2019m working with an audience who doesn\u2019t have the same jargon as me. Do you know exactly what I mean by \u2018a nine-eleven with flared arches and a whale fin\u2019? Even if you do, how much more quickly would you have known if I\u2019d shown you what I meant instead?!<\/li>\n<li>If what you\u2019re talking about is inherently visual, it makes sense to present it visually. Far better to show Cadbury Purple than to say \u2018the colour with the RGB mix of XYZ and the hex code of ABC\u2019.<\/li>\n<li>There are plenty of occasions when you need to repeatedly refer back to the same point &#8211; particularly in a process. It\u2019s much easier and quicker to just point to a map of your route, or a decision point in your flow diagram\u2026 or whatever\u2026 than to repeatedly say \u201cthe point in the processes where we sieve for\u2026\u201d. Not only that, it\u2019s less tedious for your audience.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes you just need to shock your audience and a sudden, visual image can do that better and faster than a story. Stories are astonishing at bringing sustained emotion to your audience but how much more powerful is it to show a drowned child than to describe a man walking out of the sea, holding a child\u2019s body?<\/li>\n<li>A lot of presentations refer to processes or relationships. Both of these are often better and more conveniently illustrated visually than aurally. Take a few minutes to watch Simon Sinek\u2019s famous TEDx talk about how great leaders inspire action: then try and figure out how he\u2019d have done that without the very simple visual aid of concentric rings shown to his audience.<\/li>\n<li>A lot of the time, when you\u2019re relating a story (basically a series of events) it relates to someone else, not you: showing a good image of the \u2018hero\u2019 of that story can help make it more accessible to the audience. For example, if I\u2019m discussing some of Einstein\u2019s ideas about communication, I tend to have a simple pictures of his face on the screen as I talk. The same when I tell a story about Hemingway. My personal opinion is that the fewer of your audience who know who you\u2019re talking about, but feel like they should, the more important this is. Again, that\u2019s just a personal feeling.<\/li>\n<li>Perhaps the final time when you should use slides is when it\u2019s simply so expected of you that your audience will find it hard to access what you\u2019re saying because they\u2019re so taken aback by your style. ;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On the other hand, no-slides are often remarkably powerful. In my public speaking and presenting it\u2019s not unknown for up to a third of my slides to be black, showing nothing at all.<\/p>\n<p>No-slides are more appropriate when:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>you need to tell a story, to let things build relatively slowly. As a personal aside, I find I tend to finish the story with an image, often showing the happy ending, but that\u2019s just me.<\/li>\n<li>you\u2019re using the slides as a prop or a crutch or (God help your audience) as a script. Don\u2019t, just don\u2019t.<\/li>\n<li>when an image wouldn\u2019t add anything to what you\u2019re saying. This is a bit of difficult one to judge because it\u2019s not quite the same as \u2018when an image would distract your audience\u2019. My personal feeling is that we (presenters) should be relatively parsimonious with slides, saving them for when they add something<\/li>\n<li>using them in neutral situations, when they neither add or detract &#8211; makes our audience\u2019s work harder and undermines the effectiveness of slides when we do use them (See below!)<\/li>\n<li>obviously you shouldn\u2019t use slides when they\u2019d actually hinder understanding! (See above!)<\/li>\n<li>oh, and don\u2019t use slides when your slides are bad. Bullet points are a mistake 99% of the time and even adding an image doesn\u2019t change the fact that they\u2019re still bullet points\u2026 just bullet points tarted up with an image! ?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Like I said, I\u2019m sure this isn\u2019t a comprehensive list\u2026 it\u2019s more a case of what cropped up in my mind as I was sitting here without electricity because of a power cut\u2026 ? What&#8217;s your thinking\u2026?<\/p>\n<div class=\"jbox red\" >  <div  class=\"jbox-title red\">A controversial parting shot...<\/div><div  class=\"jbox-content\">This is going to put the cat amongst the pigeons and piss off a lot of people and I don&#8217;t mean it as rudely as it sounds, but it&#8217;s got to be said&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re not using slides, are you sure it&#8217;s not just because you&#8217;re being lazy or arrogant? I&#8217;ve met (and sat through) some very mediocre presentations recently from people who didn&#8217;t need to use them because they were just telling their own, personal story.<\/p>\n<p>And as I suffered, along with the audience, I couldn&#8217;t but feel that even if the slides weren&#8217;t used in the end, the process of structuring the content enough to put it on slides would have been a useful discipline.<\/p>\n<p>As Eisenhower is reputed to have said &#8220;<strong>In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable<\/strong>&#8220;.<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two things have prompted this blog (which some might call a bit of a rant)\u2026 firstly I\u2019m sitting here typing on a laptop running on batteries because there\u2019s no power to the building and hasn\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3755,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-key-posts","category-presentation-tips","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3749","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=3749"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3758,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3749\/revisions\/3758"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}