Vote for our presentation!

I have entered the PowerPoint presentation created by me and Richard Miscovich into the contest for The World’s Best Presentation at the slideshare website, http://www.slideshare.net/contest/worlds-best-presentation-contest.  Put my user name, lisasisco, into the search engine and check it out.  While you’re there, give us a vote!

Too much information . . . .

I’m a little overwhelmed with information after listening to twenty different presentations and trying to come up with a meaningful way to provide effective feedback. (For those of you who want to review the presentations, here’s the link http://informativepresentations.blogspot.com/).

I think what I have learned is that it is one thing to read about a technique, like Weissman’s WIIFY, (see his fabulous book Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story or check out http://www.powerpresentations.blogs.com/) and plan for it, but you can’t really know whether or not the audience gets it until you hear their feedback. The “Curse of Knowledge” can really blind you to the perspectives or interest level of your audience. That’s why revision is so important.

My colleague Richard Miscovich reminded me that Chip and Dan Heath’s new book Made To Stick http://www.madetostick.com/ provides some good exercises to help us focus like a laser beam on our persuasive purpose. He quotes the text, which says:

The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions:

• If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission we must _________________.
• The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is ____________ .

Miscovich adds the following application for presentations: “The Commander’s Intent can also be interpreted as the Presenter’s Intent (PI). In fact, this should be the first step in the planning process because it sets the goals and objectives for the presentation. What is the best way to determine the intent of your presentation and what needs to be considered in order to determine that intent? How does the PI affect the delivery of the presentation? Does the PI change in the face of technological or logistical problems? Should the PI be altered for different audiences or in response to comments from a particular audience?”

These are good questions, and good places to circle back to when we are reviewing and evaluating–comparing the presenter’s intent with the audience’s experience and trying to identify where and why there might be a disconnect.

Heath and Heath also talk in that chapter about prioritizing your message and getting to the core. Going back to refocus on the core, and assessing whether that core message came through to the audience, is probably a good place to start the revision process. We’ll see how that goes.

Evaluating Presentations

It is important to have all the elements mentioned previously in a presentation.  In reponse to those of you who feel as if you don’t know your content very well or you don’t have passion for your subject, I’d say that if that is the case, then you probably shouldn’t be giving that presentation, or at least not yet, not until it meets those requirements.  Not knowing your content very well or caring very much about the outcome of your presentation probably means that you are just doing the presentation because you have to, which is not ever a good reason for presenting.  Your audience will be able to tell immediately if you don’t care and if you don’t care, how can you expect them to care?  Go back to the preparation stage and find a reason to care.  That’s your job.

 That said, how do you go about evaluating or grading a presentation?  Is grading artificial?  Should we only evaluate presentations based on audience assessments of whether the presentation achieved its goal?  What criteria should we use to evaluate presentations?  Should all presentations be evaluated by the same criteria?  Or is evaluation so subjective, that we should eliminate it altogether in favor of focused feedback, which may or may not be evaluative?  Maybe we should ask:  When you have finished giving a presentation, what are they questions you want to ask of your audience?  What would you like them to tell you? 

So what makes a good presentation?

There are many important things to remember in preparing any good presentation.  Here’s five of them:

1. Understand and respect your audience.  Putting the audience’s needs upfront and concentrating on what they need is an absolute requirement for a strong presentation.  Jerry Weissman, in “Presenting to Win” calls this the process of indentifying the audience WIIFY (What’s In It For You), or their stake in the presentation.   Of course, this requires some work, to assess what is important to an audience, what level of knowledge they possess and perhaps most importantly, how not to bore them.  All of this takes work and planning.
2. Trust yourself.  No two presenters are ever the same.  And they shouldn’t be.  If you work on building your individual strengths and trusting in your own abilities, you’re on the road to success. 
3. Know your content.  Business professionals give presentations about information they are experts on, typically information they have been working with for a long time.  If you know your stuff, you are less likely to be nervous about talking about it.
4. Have a passion for the subject.  “Effective communication is 20% what you know about the subject and 80% how you feel about what you know.” –Jim Rohm
5. Practice.   Like anything else worth doing well, practice is important.  As Aristotle tells us.”That which we learn to do, we learn by doing.” 

Of course, there are plenty of other attributes to a good presentation, but they probably can all fit under these five points. 

The “Prepilogue”

The Rhetoric of PowerPoint Prepilogue

One of my students and I were talking about the “dead space” before a presentation when students or audience members are filing into the room. We discussed the fact that this is a valuable chunk of time that could be better used to communicate with audiences and get them engaged in the presentation, before it even begins. My student (thanks Richard) decided that this should be called a “prepilogue.” I recently tried it out at the ABC annual convention and it seemed to go over well. I wanted to add sound to it, but didn’t have enough time to figure out how. Another presenter also recommended I have a hyperlink from the prepilogue to the presentation, which certainly would have made the transition a lot smoother. Check it out above.

Thinking anew about PowerPoint

The Rhetoric of PowerPoint (Beyond Bullets)

The Rhetoric of PowerPoint (Bullets)

I just returned from the Association for Business Communication Annual Conference in San Antonio, where I presented on “The Rhetoric of Powerpoint” and discussed alternatives to bullet points when designing PPT presentations. See my PPT above.

Welcome to Strategic Communication

This blog expands upon the book Strategic Communication: Persuasion at Work by Lisa A. Sisco, published by MindEdge Press.

You can order Strategic Communication: Persuasion at Work here.

About the author:

Lisa A. Sisco is a Professor in the Alan Shawn Feinstein Graduate School at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island where she teaches courses in written and oral communications in the MBA program with an emphasis on effective business writing.

A member of the Association for Business Communication, Dr. Sisco has taught writing and presenting courses for corporate and not-for-profit organizations, including a workshop for physicians on the Grand Rounds of Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Sisco received her doctorate in Composition/Rhetoric and American Literature from the University of New Hampshire, focusing on 19th century literature and the narratives of Frederick Douglass. Dr. Sisco earned a bachelors and masters degree from Georgetown University.