We come up with a long list in short time.  The only problem is, just as soon as we identify the list of agreed-upon qualities for effective presentations, we come across a presenter who breaks many of the rules, but is still fabulous.  For example, we watched Jamie Oliver rushing all over the stage at TED, reading off his notes and turning his back toward his audience (all things we listed as ineffective) but because he made us care about what he was saying, the rules didn’t seem to matter much anymore. We liked him anyway.

We also watched a student presentation that was technically perfect- the speaker did every single thing we identified as being important—but which did not engage us at all.  We didn’t connect with the presenter, but for reasons that were hard to articulate—we didn’t like her topic, she seemed artificial, almost too perfect, not real.  We didn’t like her.

I can certainly embrace the idea that presenting is an art.  Good presentations are dependent on audience perception, which is shaped and reshaped by many constantly shifting factors.  But what is the role of an individual’s credibility in an audience’s response to her presentation?  Jamie Oliver can get away with things a student presenter can’t get away with, simply because he IS Jamie Oliver and he has an enormous amount of automatic credibility by virtue of his accomplishments.  Jamie Oliver, Steve Jobs, all the speakers we point to as models, all step on stage with credibility intact, it precedes them.  Most of the rest of us, the average presenters, don’t have the luxury of automatic credibility.  Instead, we have to earn credibility.  And how do we do that?  (to be continued . . . ).

So my colleague Richard Miscovich and I been working on a before/after example using the following graph, which shows how our university has been trying to improve student quality by tightening up admission standards.  While working on this, it occurred to me why this kind of interpretive activity doesn’t happen on a more regular basis in presentations: it’s hard and it’s a lot of work trying to dig your way down into the core meaning of data. It is SO much easier to just deposit the graph on the slide and be done.   But as Seth Godin says “Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic, or whatever else you are).  If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report.”

So the first slide shows the original graph on a typical templated logo slide and the second showa our first effort at a revision.  We’ve tried to zero in on the core message in our revised slide, answer the SO WHAT? question, interpret the meaning of the data for the audience and we’ve tried to eliminate unnecessary clutter on the slide.  It’s still a work in progress, but I think we’re on the right track.

LESS IS MORE PPT SLIDE EXAMPLES

There has been a lot written about how to overcome nervousness in presenting.  My feeling is that it really helps for the speaker to consider the question, “why are you giving this presentation?”  The answer to that question is probably not, “to show off how good of a speaker I am” or “to illustrate my talents as a presenter.”  More likely, the reason we give presentations is that we have some valuable information we feel is important to share with our audience, so it is not really about us at all (and what we look like, or sound like).  Instead it is about our audience, their needs and our desire to help them in some way by sharing important information.  If, as a speaker, you can shift our mental focus from our own emotions, to the needs of the audience, to their emotions and to using the presentation as a way to help the audience, then that mental shift can help eliminate some of our nervousness.  Think if it this way.  If you are setting out thinking primarily about what the audience needs and how you can help them and your primary goal is to focus on their needs, then that will do a lot to help you as a speaker to shift your attention away from yourself.  Don’t think about yourself; think about your audience. 

This insight came to me after a presentation done by a student on celiac disease.  She was very, very nervous about presenting.  Her speech was full of important, if rather dry information and it had little audience appeal.  In our revision process, I asked the student why she had chosen the topic and she explained that she suffered from this disease and that when she was first diagnosed, she was scared.  All she could think about was what she could no longer eat.  But after having learned to live with the disease, she came to understand that is was not nearly as bad as she thought—in fact life was much better for her since her diagnosis.  She wanted to share that insight with those individuals who might feel as scared as she did when she was first diagnosed.   So we set out to revise her content and focus in this way.  This shift in focus from “giving a speech on celiac disease” to sharing her own experiences in a sincere desire to help out others, had a dramatic effect on her presentation and on her level of nervousness, because she stopped thinking of it as giving a speech and began thought of it as an effort to reach out to other people and help them.  She was still a little nervous, but it was not as overwhelming as it had been in her first try. 

I think it makes sense.  If the speech is all about us, as presenters, all about being judged and evaluated, then it will make us nervous.  But if a presentation is about a sincere desire to help out our audience, then it is a lot less scary.

I think that this is one of the primary problems I see with presentations in which the presenters simply gather some information from a source, say a website, and then replicate the information in their presentation.  First of all, the chance that someone else has already seen that source is pretty good, which makes the presentation rather unnecessary.  Second, this kind of transference is missing the input of the speaker, whose job it is to do something important or interesting with the information. 

So what kinds of things can we do to transform information?  Here are some thoughts which arose out of our class discussion last week:

1. Put the information in a new or surprising way by shifting the context in which we look at it.  That might mean comparing it to something else to give the audience a clearer perspective on what it means.  It also might mean changing the frame around the information so that it takes on a new meaning. 
2. Make the information personal.  Instead of just giving some general statistics, try and translate the statistics into information that has personal meaning for the audience.
3. Use the information to tell a story. Translate raw data into a personal story to make it meaningful and memorable. 

Much of this thinking is derived from Heath and Heath’s fabulous book, Made to Stick, which does an amazing job of exploring how to make people remember what you say.  My goal for an upcoming post will be to provide concrete examples of all these things, since examples are another way to make people remember.  Any suggestions?   

1. Innovative Content That We Know Very Well.  Two things here—first we have to know our stuff (no reading from prepared notes) and second, we have to make some effort to bring information into the presentation that is innovative in some way.  We need to do more than transfer information from an outside source to our audience; we need to instead transform information by doing something with it—filtering it through our consciousness or experiences; putting it in a unique context; in other words, surprising our audience with what we do with the content and in the process telling them something they don’t already know.  To do that, we need to be creative and innovative in our thinking and presenting.  This takes time and research and planning.
2. A Deep Understanding of Our Audience and Their Needs. In order to decide whether information going to inspire our audience, we need to spend quite a bit of time understanding and exploring the world from their point of view.  Of course, this also takes research and planning, but it will help us speak to the audience’s needs and interests and to frame our content in a way that is relevant and meaningful to them. 

1. Rhetorical Genuiness (or an appropriate topic).  One of the big differences between the work we do in the classroom and the work we do in the professional world is that in the real world, we don’t typically have to “pick” a topic; instead the topic is determined for us by the event or because of our area of expertise or both.  So in an academic arena, is it not unusual to find students giving presentations about things they don’t know a lot about or about topics that are kind of random—in other words, topics that are not rhetorically genuine.  In the professional world, this is not as much of a problem since most of us speak about what we know. 
2. Strong Credibility:  The need for rhetorical genuineness presents a real problem for those of us without a lot of experience or expertise because we know that a central ingredient in a good presentation is credibility and if the speaker is not experienced with the topic then it is more difficult to earn or build credibility with the audience.  That’s why, though it is interesting to watch very established public figures give presentations, it seems unfair to use them as models for the rest of us, because these presenters begin with a huge advantage—they walk in the room, usually, with an already established credibility because of who they are and what they have done in the past (or because of their mesmerizing personal stories or experiences as in the case of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor http://www.ted.com/index.php or Randy Bausch (see link in previous post).)  So where does that leave the rest of us?  At a distinct disadvantage because if we don’t have an inspirational story or an established reputation, we have to “earn” credibility in the process of speaking.  How do we do that?  (to be continued . . . )

As I search for useful models (because I am teaching students about how to give a good presentation), I continue to ask “what makes a good presentation?” and struggle with how to come up with criteria against which to evaluate presentations.  Also check out this list of the top 10 presentations of all time. http://www.knowhr.com/blog/2006/08/21/top-10-best-presentations-ever/   [In a particularly insightful moment last week, I decided that the only criteria should be that the presenter makes the audience listen and care—nothing else matters. Oh, and add to that that the presentation style has no obvious distractions that detract from the message getting across clearly.]

I’m thinking all this in the midst of our presidential campaign and all the media discussions about the persuasiveness of Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton (heart vs. head, inspiration vs. information, collaboration vs. competition) and I seem, instead of getting closer to an answer, to be getting farther away from one.  That’s because, in the case of each presenter, what I like about each of them is different.

I like Barack Obama’s style because he has charisma (more about that later) and because he talks a lot about collaboration in government (that would be a nice change) and working with people as against to working against them.  I don’t like Hillary Clinton’s style as much because it is not as inspirational, though I do respect her experience and her command of the information she presents—she really seems to know her stuff.   I have a huge amount of respect for John McCain’s political background and his experience as a prisoner of war.  In every case, there seem to be more differences than similarities, differences which relate to the source of the speaker’s credibility–what makes the presenter trustworthy, believable, likable?  Aristotle called it ethos.  In some cases, it could be their innovative thinking (see Seth Godin at this link) http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/28 or because of their inspirational message (see Rick Warren here) http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/71 or because their personal story makes them more credible (see Randy Pausch here) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8577255250907450469&pr=goog-sl All of these speakers have different messages and styles, but they all have a high level of credibility, the source of which varies from one to another. 

So maybe that’s the answer—that the magic ingredient to a powerful presentation is that the speaker has a high level of credibility and that the source of that credibility can be different for each speaker, as long as he or she has it with the audience.  If you are really lucky, as Barack Obama seems to be, the primary source of your credibility can be your charisma (see an interesting discussion about charisma in today’s Boston Globe editorial “The Power of Charisma” by H.D.S. Greenway.) http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/03/11/the_power_of_charisma/  If you are not so lucky (that’s most of the rest of us), you have to rely on other ways to build and gain credibility.  If you have a reputation which precedes you, the reputation will go a long way toward building credibility with your audience, though the presentation must reinforce or support the audience’s prior assumptions; in other words you have to deliver on your reputation.    If your audience does not know you at all, you have a more difficult task, which means you have to rely other ways to build credibility and you also have to work against an audience’s tendency to make quick judgments (i.e. they don’t like the tone of your voice or the style of your skirt or the color of your hair) by building credibility in the process of giving the presentation.  Is that what I am teaching my students, then—the various ways to build credibility in a presentation, by either being somebody important or by saying something important (providing persuasive data or information) or by making the audience feel important (establishing a strong personal rapport with an audience or entertaining the audience with wit or humor)?   I’m still not sure . . .

Do people listen to presenters to decide if they like the person? or to decide if their message is persuasive (regardless of how we feel about the person delivering it)? Or does the persuasiveness of a message depend on its source?  or do we expect to be entertained? to get some valuable new information?  to determine if the presenter thinks like we do?  If we’re watching to decide who to vote for in the presidential election, it could be any of the above.  Some people vote for candidates simply because they like them.  Some people vote for candidates because or their records or their affiliations.  It all depends on the person listening.  So where does that leave us?  Back to audience analysis, to continuing to explore who we are speaking to and what their needs, interests and motivations are and how to build credibility with them.  I guess that’s as good a place as any to end for now.