Learning How To Present Better From Others

Although giving presentations is only one way that we communicate, we sure seem to do a lot of them. We've talked about how to create great presentations that work. Additionally, there are many talented folks out there who have spent a lot of time thinking about how your slides should look so that your presentation has the greatest impact. Here are a few presentations that they have put together that (1) look beautiful, (2) tell us all how to do a better job putting together presentations:

• Death By Powerpoint: 61 slides that talk about how to make a presentation and not to bore your audience to death. Alexei Kapterev is a Russian presentation & design consultant who has put together a great presentation that talks about how to build a presentation that includes how to add significance, structure, simplicity, and rehearsal.
  
  
• Enhancing Visual Effects In PowerPoint: 76 slides that provide a brief guide to some visual effects for Presentations using PowerPoint. Lots of good info about using matching colors, adding color to your text, composition (the rule of thirds), reflections, etc.
  
  
• Brain Rules For Presenters: 131 slides based on 3 of Dr. Medina's book "Brain Rules". The points covered are fairly basic; however, we all need to be reminded of them over and over again. The presentation itself looks fantastic.
  

The web has a lot more helpful information; however, remember you are the one who knows your audience the best. Simply taking the time to understand what they are looking for will help you to create the presentation with the most lasting impact.


Tags: basic rules, color, presentations, structure, web resources

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?

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.

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!