Your presentations suck. Here are the top three most likely reasons

Please… no more!

Bit of a controversial headline, I know. :)  And your presentations might not suck. I’d like to think that mine don’t. But now that I’ve got your attention, here goes… my top three reasons. I’ve been pretty high-end without going into detail, which means it’s up to you to see how these ideas apply: of course, they might not, but wouldn’t it be awful if they did apply and you were the only one in the room who didn’t knw it…?

1. You don’t have an endgame A lot of people make a presentation because they have to. They do it because they either need to ‘talk about X’ or ‘have to talk about X’. And there-in lies the problem. About isn’t a good reason for fro a presentation. No one listens to a presentation if it’s just ‘about’ something. They’re all listening with the question in their heads of “what’s in it for me?” And that means that your presentations should be to do something – preferably change. Sure, you might get lucky and talk ‘about’ things and hit a nerve in a member of your audience so that they change something, but how much more effectively could you do it if that was what you were intending to do?!
   Deal with that by asking what you’re trying to achieve, before you start designing your presentation.
2. You don’t have the right medium Most of us default to PowerPoint (or Keynote, or Prezi or HaituDeck). That’s because we don’t know any better, because that’s what we see everyone else doing and because it’s a handy mental crutch. But what if it’s not the right medium for the message (or the right medium for your audience)? Facts and figures are best passed on in written form, for example, no numbers on a screen. Chunks of spoken word should be delivered exactly like that – as spoken word – not as chunks of written text that your audience reads (far faster, by the way than you read them aloud to them – which is why they think you’re boring).
   Deal with it by asking yourself what the best medium is for your aim (see question one, above!) and use that.
3. You don’t know when to stop People can only concentrate for a remarkably (depressingly) short time. You’ll read lots of tosh online about how short it is (and claims that it’s getting shorter) but the truth is we don’t know enough about it to make bold, generalised claims yet. (Well, scientists don’t but that doesn’t stop the pretend scientists! :( ) But one thing is clear, as an expert in your topic you know far, far more than your audience and, sadly, they reach saturation far more quickly than you run out of steam to tell them things. What’s more, they don’t care about how you discovered YourMiracleCure2Everything: they just want to know (a) what it is and (b) how they can use it. From your audience’s perspective, everything else is just either padding, your ego, irrelevant or a combination of all three.
   Deal with this by being very, very clear about what you need to achieve in your presentation and do only that. Every word you say over and above that dilutes your message.

So there you go – I can’t claim there’s research behind this, just observations based on ten years as a presentation skills trainer (and victim of thousands of presentations!).

What’s your experience of presentations?