Get 'Em To Understand, Get 'Em To Remember

Sigh, so you've spent all that time collecting your information, writing the report, making the slides and even created a great handout. Now how much of your presentation do you really think that your audience will remember 30 minutes after you are done, 1 hour later, 1 day later, how about at the end of a month? Getting our information to first be understood by our audience is one way to be a successful communicator. The other skill that you must have is finding a way to get your message(s) to stick in your audience's memory.

To promote understanding of your message, remember that people DO judge a book by its cover. In technical presentations this means that your audience will assume that if you have more of something in a figure, then the quantity of that thing is greater. Think about if you were trying to present plans for a new airplane and were trying to communicate how far it could fly. If you decided to show this by showing circles that showed how much fuel was required to fly a given distance. The circle for existing planes would be larger than the circle for your new plane. Although you are trying to communicate that your new plane can fly further, your figure is making it hard for your audience to understand this point.

We communicate information by changing things. As we move from one diagram or graph to the next if we've changed something, then our audience expects that that change really means something and we're trying to tell them something. This also means that if you want to communicate to your audience that there is a change in meaning, then you must make a change in the appearance of your figure / graph.

Ok, last point to be made: just like this blog posting, everyone has a limit to the amount of new information that they can take in. If you overload them with information, then they will not understand the message that you are trying to communicate. If you have a lot of information to present, then you can communicate it if, and only if, you present it piece by piece so that your audience can absorb it little by little.

Whew, all this might be too much for one post; however, I though that it was important and so there you go.

Differences Count When You Are Presenting

Ok, so you've got a big presentation coming up and you know that you want to make a difference and have the audience walk away with a good understanding of the complex info that you are going to present. What can you do to really make sure that you key points get hammered home? Setting yourself on fire halfway through the presentation or using trained animals both would be great, if impractical ways to accomplish this. How about two simpler ways that us technical folks always seem to forget as we pull together our presentations?


Audience Attention is drawn to LARGE differences that are perceptible.

Let's say that you've got a slide that contains one of the key points that you want to make to your audience. There is probably other things on that slide (like a title?). You need to make sure that your key point, be it a number, a comparison, a figure, etc. jumps out at your audience. Background images, scrolling text, clipart, video clips, etc. are all swell; however, if they distract from your key point then they need to go away. Keep in mind that PowerPoint's ability to have items join the slide via animation might be a good way to lead up to and introduce the key point.


People group elements into units automatically, which they then remember

The human mind is an amazing thing. We can quickly take in large quantities of information and rapidly make decisions about it. You can make this talent work for or against you in a technical presentation. Things that you place close to each other on a slide will automatically be considered to be related by your audience. A good example of this is labels and the thing that they are labeling. A bad example of this would be a graph that shows that both the price of copper ore and the price of apples have both increased by 25% in the past 6 moths. Both items would be shown closely together on the same graph and the audience would associate them. However, they really have nothing to do with each other (unless you are trying to talk about the cost of copper apples...).

Just a few things to consider when you are making that last pass though the big presentation that you've created -- do your main points jump out or are they buried?

How To Connect With Your Audience

So let's talk turkey: no matter how complex or technical the information that you are trying to communicate is, nor what setting you are trying to communicate it in, just how can you go about getting what you have to say to "stick" in your audience's minds? What can you say or do that is going to get them to talk about it, think about it long after you have completed what you have to say?

There are several things that you have to do an the first is to make sure that you connect with your audience. How to do that is what seems to escape all too many technical folks. Stephen Kosslyn in his book Clear and to The Point lays out a number of different ways to do this. Here are two of my favorites:

Your communication, no matter what form it takes, is going to have the greatest impact when you present neither too much nor too little information.

Think about this one for just a moment. It's very simple to understand; however, it's very hard to do correctly. Ultimately I believe that the key here is to start from the end: what do you want them to walk away with? You should then add everything that will be needed to make this happen and take away anything that does not contribute to this goal.

Your communication requires you to have prior knowledge of your audience's pertinent concepts, jargon, and symbols.

In the end, you've got to know your audience. If you present your technical information in a way that is different from how they communicate, then you are requiring them to work in order to understand what you are trying to say and there is a good chance that they may be unwilling to do this. Assuming that your audience knows more than they do or less than they really do will result in the communication of your technical material falling on deaf ears. Talk to them in a way that they want to be talked to.

Do IT CEO's Communicate Better Than Common Folk?

Greetings from Las Vegas! I'm currently attending a very large trade show that is put on by the giant storage company EMC. This year it's being held in Las Vegas and so far I'm only down about $100 or so; however, the conference goes for another two days so I can financially hurt myself still more!

The thing that I like best about attending this show is that if I move quickly, I can get a front row seat for the keynote addresses that are given by EMC upper level management team. I'm only vaguely interested in what they have to say, but I'm VERY interested in how they say it and if any of it sticks. Yesterday was the big kickoff: Joe Tucci who is the Chairman, Presidant, and CEO of this $15B firm. I had very high hopes: I mean, if anyone could buy their way to being an effective technical communicator, then Joe is the man.

So how did he do? Sadly, I believe that I'd have to give him a C. Maybe a C+, but that's it. He did a fantastic job of delivering a speech from a technical point of view: clear diction, no filler words, very little pacing, and his slides / graphics were top notch (but of course -- he's in charge of a $15B company!). So why does he just get a grade of C? He didn't connect with his audience. He talked for about an hour and must have hit on about 40 different points during his talk about EMC the company and all of it's products and upcoming product. However, I'm betting that 30 minutes after he was done, you could pull aside anyone who had attended and they'd be unable to remember more than one or two things that Joe said. When it was over, it was over -- the world had not be changed. What a waste!

I need to give Joe one little out here: he is in charge of the company. What he says can cause a change in the company's stock price and so he always has to be careful about what he says. However, that doesn't mean that he can get away with being boring.

Complaining is easy. Now how about if we talk about what Joe could have done differently to have been a more effective communicator. #1: know your audience, tailor your communication to your audience. Joe's audience was VERY technical. These are the people who live, eat, breath storage systems for a living. Joe talked at a very high level for his whole speech and thus didn't connect with anyone in the audience. He needed to at least once drop down into their world, show that he knows the types of challenges that they are facing, and then move on.

#2: Where's the passion? Joe delivered his entire speech in a flat, non-emotional tone. Yawn! Come on, Joe's from Boston the home of notorous hot heads. Oh, and he's a sales guy to his core. Get some of that passion to come out -- get people fired up! Tell the audience that HP and IBM make lousy products and that they made the right decision by selecting EMC products. Whatever -- just show that you really care about this stuff.

#3: Tell a story. Nowhere in Joe's speech did he include a story. Story's are how we have always learned. If Joe had included a story, then this is what everyone would have remembered long after he was done.

So to answer the original question: no, CEO's don't necessarily do a better job of communicating than you or I do. Good communication always comes down to the three basics: know your audience, care about what you are taking about, and use stories to give your audience a way to remember what you have said.

The Three Key Goals Of Any Presentation

Most of the time when we are asked to give a presentation, we spend a lot of time working on WHAT we want to say. Unfortunately we really should be spending more time on HOW we say it. In order to do a better job of this, it would probably be a good idea if we took a step back and spent just a moment or two thinking about what we'd like to accomplish by making this presentation.

If your goal is to get it over with, well then congrats -- you will probably be successful in some fashion. However, if as long as you are going to the effort to prepare and present the info, you'd like to actually make an impact, shall we say change the world, then it would seem as though you should have some higher goals.

In his book Clear and to the Point, Stephen Kosslyn proposes that we have three goals in mind for every presentation:

1. Connect With Your Audience: If they can't pick out how your presentation relates to them or their lives, then they just won't care what you are talking about.
   
   
2. Direct and Hold Their Attention: You need to tell a story that is so compelling that they are hanging on your every word, waiting for your next revelation.
   
   
3. Promote Understanding & Memory: How you present your information should be easy to understand and done in such a way that when you are done and the slides are put away, your audience can still remember what you said and why it all made sense.

Whew! That doesn't seem so hard now does it? Well, it actually is quite difficult to do well. Next time we'll spend some time talking about simple ways to start to improve your presentations so that you easily accomplish all three of these goals.

Constructive Criticism: "How Can I Say This Nicely?"

Last week I was invited to sit in on two sets of presentations by junior members of a very large telecommunication firm's IT department. They are part of a management training program and the program's instructors asked me to visit because they had had some guest presenters who were *really* bad. The hope was that I could provide immediate feedback for the teams that presented as well as things to avoid for the teams that had yet to present. Sounded fair enough, eh?

During the presentations I wrote notes like a madman. Ten separate engineers presented material and I filled about seven pages of a notebook with comments and ideas. To keep things brief, let me share with you the top three things that I noticed:

1. Who You Talking To?: Each and every one of the presenters spent a lot of their "stage time" with their bodies pointed towards the projection screen and actually talked to the screen instead of the audience. This happens way too often when you use PowerPoint to create an outline of you speech and end up reading it off of the screen.

Solution: The correct way to present material is to make sure that you always face your audience. The slides are there to reinforce your verbal message -- you should spend no time staring at them. Instead, have a conversation with your audience and let us choose if we want to look at you or your slide.


2. Here? There? Over There?: Just where to stand was a major problem for each presenter. There was a lectern on the stage (def: a lectern is big and goes all the way down to the floor, a podium is shorter and generally sits on a table. They both hold a speaker's notes) and nobody seemed to know what to do with it. Some stood behind it, some stood off to its side, and some completely ignored it. They all moved from behind it to in front of it and back during their presentations. The end result was that this turned out to be a distraction to everyone who was watching the presentations.

Solution:: Make a decision before you start to speak -- in front of the lectern or behind it. Once you make this decision, stick with it. Neither decision is right or wrong, only alternating between the two positions is wrong because it becomes distracting.


3. Handy Hands: Hands sure are nice to have. Except when you are presenting to a group. Then the difficult question of what to do with your hands when you aren't making a gesture comes up. Each of the 10 engineers who presented did something different with their hands: in the pockets, behind the back, crossed in front, praying that they don't get kicked in the groin, etc. What this ended up doing is once again distracting the audience as we watched the speaker try to determine with what to do with their hands.

Solution: When not using them as a part of your speech, let your hands drop to your sides and let them dangle there. This sounds soooo easy; however, it really is quite difficult to do. If you spend time practicing talking in front of a mirror at home, you'll be able to catch yourself doing "handy" things and can quickly put a stop to it.


Ok, that's it for now. I've got much more to share. Let me know if you're interested in learning from the faults of others and I can post it.

What Did You Just Say?

Great technical skills are no substitute for poor communication skills. All too often some of your company's best innovations and problem solving skills are locked up within your technical staff. They struggle to communicate their ideas using overloaded PowerPoint slides, rambling speeches, and confusing jargon. No matter if it's the entry level programmer or the CIO, poor communication skills mean that their talent & ideas will remain untapped.

What to do? How many times have you sat though yet another set of presentations that took forever and yet you can't seem to recall what was being said? I'm just a guilty as the next guy and yet, the information just won't stick if the presentation is bad.

This is the blog to go to if you have been nodding your head to the above question. We'll peel back the cover of just what makes technical staff tick and come up with ways to help them clarify their message. We've got to do something -- nobody has time to waste in pointless presentations any more!