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Planning an Effective Presentation, Part 1
You can overcome your fear.
When people are asked about their greatest fears – those things or situations that most terrify them – you would think that black widows, rattlesnakes, scorpions, rats, being struck by lightning, hit by a bus, or being shot in a drive-by might rise to the top of the terror-top-ten. But, no. These things pale in their terrifying aspects when held up against public speaking. 
Isn’t that amazing? Many people would choose famine, pestilence, vermin, or criminals over a podium slot. Now, why do you suppose that’s the case?
For starters, many people don’t want that much attention. People want and need to look good - to be thought of as competent, thoughtful, and productive. Experiences in their lives may have taught them that getting up in front of people just paralyzes them with fear.
When I was in second grade, Mrs. Cook made us all give our first public presentation. I still remember one of my little friends peeing his pants in fear during Show & Tell. He’d brought a piece of petrified wood from a creek on his farm to show everybody. It was about two inches long and nobody could see it. Another boy – he wasn’t afraid of attention at all – cracked wise about my friend’s “pet rock.� That finished him. As the wetness in his crotch bloomed outward, he was struck dumb. Shyness lost once again to derision. It’s an old story.
Make your own luck.
When I made my New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall in 1979, I was terrified. I was backstage on my knees worshipping the porcelain idol. Stage fright gripped every cell in my body. One of the stage technicians – a particularly vile, sadistic, and sneering spawn-of-Satan remarked that Peter G. Davis, a critic from The New York Times was in attendance. He added that “Davis doesn’t like guitar players.�
Yep. That really made me feel better. When I look back on that night, it’s a wonder that I’m not a motel clerk in Hen’s Wattle, North Dakota that’s afraid of strangers and mutters to himself. The truth is, if I hadn’t prepared as well as I did, that’s probably exactly where I’d be. I’m afraid of humiliation, too. If I’d been publicly slammed in reviews, I’m not sure I could have found the character within me to go back and try again.
When I got out on stage finally – after a minute or two of wretched terror – the zillions of hours of practice and preparation kicked in. I lost myself in the music and what I was trying to do with it.
That evening changed my life. Nothing has ever scared me that much since. As a kid from a small town in Wyoming with more ambition than good sense, I learned that preparing well is one of the secrets of success. When you prepare, you make your own luck. It’s as simple as that.
Avoid False Starts
You’ve just been asked by your boss, Sarah, to create a presentation for an all-staff meeting and you’re thrilled. She could have asked somebody senior to you to do the job, but she didn’t. She chose you. Wow. It feels great.
You’ve been waiting to show her and the organization what you can do. You know that you’re ready for more responsibility and a higher profile. Now they’re going to discover this for themselves. It’s an “at last!� moment.
You can’t wait, so you check out the company laptop, skip dinner, sit down with a cup of tea and a stack of biscotti, and launch PowerPoint. As the software launches, you can’t wait to choose the presentation template design you’ll use for your presentation. Should it be the blue background with yellow triangles or the yellow background with blue triangles. You choose blue. Yellow is frivolous in your book.
Sound familiar? If this is how you’re getting started, you’re not alone. That doesn’t mean that you’re not getting ahead of yourself.
If you kept going, what you might have created is a colorful, slick, moderately well-packaged version of an initial brain dump. As you would have set forth your ideas – decorated and punched up with clip art and clever pictures included with software or image-Googled from the Internet – you would have built investment and ownership in your nascent presentation. You would have become attached. Attachment is bad. You’re going to have to hit delete quite a few times with those slides and it’s not going to feel good when you do it.
So, let’s rewind.
First, consider whether a presentation is the best way to achieve your organizational objectives. Do you know what those objectives are?
Ideally, when Sarah asked you to do the presentation, you’d have been ready with some questions. If you had, Sarah would have been impressed because you would have added value to her thinking. Like you, Sarah’s busy and might not have had the chance to really think things through. She might have defaulted to “PowerPoint� without carefully considering other options.
Questions to fuel a productive pre-presentation conversation:
• What do you envision as the most desired outcome?
• What do we want people to know as a result of this presentation?
• Why do we think this is important? What do we know that has led us to these conclusions that, if we share it, might enroll our employees in thinking along the same lines?
• Are there specific actions we want people to take as a result of this information?
• What data do we have that we might want to present? Are there any risks in sharing this data?
• Should some other people be involved in the presentation? Will their participation lend credibility or impact?
• How much employee engagement do we want to encourage? Are we opening a process or just communicating information?
• What’s next? What kind of follow-up is necessary to ensure that the information “sticks"?
Is a presentation the best communications strategy?
Just because you can communicate using a presentation doesn’t mean that you should. A very good presentation can still be the wrong communications channel for some purposes. So, ask yourself, "Is another communications vehicle; e.g. memo, white paper, monograph, newsletter, or report; more effective in achieving your objectives?
Chances are – even if you do create a presentation – if your topic is complex then it should be preceded and followed up with a memo or report of some kind. Copies of presentation slides are not enough, all evidence to the contrary.
Sensitive or nuanced information is not necessarily best shared in a presentation environment. If you are not extremely artful in your choice of words or in your ability to frame controversial issues, proceed with caution. You may be better off using a different medium through which to share information.
Likewise, complexity can sink a presentation as well. Smart people hone their critical thinking skills. Skepticism is a virtue, especially among people who are tasked with vetting evidence or describing reality (marketers, engineers, scientists, etc.).
In a presentation environment, it is very possible to handle complexity. The people who best handle complexity synthesize and distill until they can present complexity in simple terms. Simplicity is hard, but in presentations it is the magic bullet. Mastery walks as simplicity, not as complexity.
Posted on June 9, 2006 09:46 AM | Permalink
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Comments
This is a fantastic post, full of critically important information, but the last sentence is worth the absolute most:
Mastery walks as simplicity, not as complexity.
Well said and inspiring.
Having witnessed your application of these principles a number of times, I can say that you know what you are doing.
Thank you for taking the time to prepare this series on making presentations, Neill.