Shooshing Your Noisy Audience Is Ridiculous When Presenting

When a presentation event unintentionally turns into comedic relief, you know you have a major credibility problem.  Imagine it is after work, a cavernous hall filled with hundreds of people, the booze and small talk all free flowing.  The MC attempts to introduce the main host of the event, to make some worthy remarks. The hum continues as people are more riveted by their own conversation than anything the crew on stage has to say. In a stroke of pathos, the MC starts shooshing the audience to attempt to quieten them down. 

The audience aren’t buying any of this Mother stuff from the MC and keep chatting regardless.  This leads to even more ridiculous shooshing, only louder and more strident this time.  The MC doesn’t appear to have had any presentation training.  So they have reverted to parental authority over the naughty boys and girls in the audience, to restore some semblance of order.  We have now descended into comedy, but more a comedy of errors.

Almost giving up, the main speaker is now trotted out by the MC for more of the same.  This speaker thankfully didn’t try any shooshing of their own, but the MC was on a roll and unhelpfully weighed in from the sidelines, with more shooshing, during the speech.  The main speaker was not skilled, interesting or commanding, so their words were subsumed into the general low drone echoing across the hall from all the crowd hubbub.  There were other subsequent speakers and they also were buffeted by the strong winds of disinterest.

Should we blame the speakers for being unskilled and boring or the audience for being ignorant and rude or both?  Well I don’t think we can blame the audience and even if we did, what difference would it make?  Should we have burly security guards on hand, to frog march noisy offenders out of the hall. We could try this to spread the general idea that we the organisers can’t be brooked and require better manners from the assembled rabble.

In reality, I think we have to accept that if you release free flowing booze into the audience then their conversations are going to be more attractive to them, than anything else happening on stage.  In many cases in Japan, they hold the booze back for that very reason.  If you are well behaved and don’t talk over the speeches, we will reward you with a drink when we get to the toast. 

This Pavlovian style training tends to inject more discipline into the proceedings.  It is not completely foolproof and some hardened conversationalists, maybe the non-drinkers in the audience, will still continue their tete-a-tete during the main speeches.  It is a much smaller group though and generally everyone is listening to the speeches.  The negative thing about the Japanese methodology though is the speeches are usually too many in number and too long in length.  If you are all that remains between you and drinkees, then remember to make it short and memorable, then get off.

Well what can we do when it is us up there on stage, at the podium, surveying the great unwashed, unreformed and unruly rabble.  They are shamelessly standing there staring back up at us, while willfully chit chatting, with no sign of embarrassment or remorse. 

The first thing is to design your talk to be powerful, impactful and short.  Waffling on about nothing of great import or of any consequence to the audience is a guaranteed formula for being ignored.  Our main speaker did a great job of doing just that.  Naturally people were not moved and the MC, in vain, had to bring out the shooshing nuclear harpoon to corral the audience. 

If you are in this position, think very carefully about what you can say at the start to get the audience engaged.  Talking at them won’t cut it.  We need to be speaking with them and this is where getting crowd involvement works like a charm.  Ask them a rousing question.  Get them physically and mentally involved.

This occasion actually really lent itself perfectly to this task.  It had a sporting theme and the audience was chock full of opposing supporters covering a large number of competing teams. 

If our MC or the speaker had asked the audience to nominate which team was going to win the competition, then audience involvement would have been tremendous.  Additionally the pro technique is to say, “I didn’t catch that, who is going to win?”  By doing this you get the audience to really ramp up their energy and volume.  They want to talk, so give them their chance to really rock it, but only for a moment.  There is a particular mass rally, large crowd effect we want to tap into, as there is tremendous energy therein, which we want to direct.

Following that raucous reaction, thank them, then pause.  You will now have a still quiet in the room. This is when you had better say something really gripping.  You have the complete attention of the masses and they are now open to you.  They are having a good time at last. 

As you proceed into the talk, the low hum at the back will return.  Expect that, so again ask them another leading question in a few minutes time. This will allow them to burn off all that excess chat energy they have, so that they will be calm and listen to you again.  You can’t keep doing this ad nauseam, otherwise it feels manipulative. People won’t respond anymore, they won’t like you and will leave with a bad taste in their mouth.

The answer to keeping audience interest, is to be interesting.  Use word pictures, tell relevant stories, lift your speaker energy right up to the top of the scale to command the room.  Rock stars can do this, because they have massive amplifiers, electric guitars and a full drum kit to work with.  You don't have any of that, but you have to become as powerful as a rock star on stage, to grab easily distracted people’s attention.  Your projection of your “ki” or body energy, big gestures and powerful voice strength are the equivalent of the amplifiers, electric guitars and full drum kit.

In our presentation training, the participants are at about 15% energy levels when they first enter the training room.  We the instructors have to project our own energy levels up to 130% or 150%, to lift the audience up to 100% of their potential energy.  Speaking in front of a noisy crowd requires the same strategy. In this case, you have to go above their energy levels and seize control of the room. They are already at close to 80% to 90%, so we have to go to 150% to stay in command of the proceedings.

Our speaker did none of that and was totally forgettable. The MC was just annoying and the whole episode was a shambles.  Those on stage were all speaker road kill. 

If you are ever in the nominated speaker position to address a noisy assembly, take the ideas outlined here and you will be heard and well regarded.  You will emerge with your reputation really enhanced, because skilled crowd lion tamers are few and far between. 

Bland Is Bad When Presenting

Smart, capable people amaze me when I see them presenting.  This recent speaker was someone I had met in business a few times previously and this was my first time to see him present.  In our earlier conversations, he was knowledgeable, intelligent and professional.  He was an experienced person in his industry and had substantial international work exposure.  He was tall, broad shouldered, square jawed, handsome and personally well presented. His presentation itself was a dud. He had great information, probably some of the best available.  He had good perspective to put that data in context.  The delivery though was lifeless and it was killing the quality of the content.

This is a big mistake we can easily make.  We add too many slides because we think the audience will really benefit from this additional information.  Now we are rushing to get through it all in the allotted time and this detracts from our professionalism as presenters.  Or we want to put too much comparative information on the one slide.  The two or three graphs we are showing are complex and because at a reduced scale to fit on the slide, they are hard to read, so we lose our audience.  We might really go crazy and start putting up whole spreadsheets of figures on the slide and just wipe our audience out completely.

Another problem with delivery can be too much jargon, which forces large swaths of the audience to drop out and go searching for their internet connection on their phone.  They want to spend their time doing something more useful, like checking Facebook or Instagram, rather than listening to us. We may be speaking at a rapid rate of knots, because our nerves and corresponding adrenalin release are driving up the speaking speed. We are like the surf, with each successive wave wiping out the one before it.  In this metaphor, the content of the previous wave is usurped by the next wave, such that the audience cannot retain the previous point we made.  They soon lose touch with the direction of the talk.

In our speaker’s case, his voice loudness was such that with the microphone, we could clearly hear him in the room.  His speaking speed was actually, if anything, a little on the slow side.  The real killer though was his speaking intensity. What do I mean by intensity?  It was very, very low key.  This can often be the deep pit that technical speakers fall into.  They are numbers, rather than words, people and so they deliver their talk with a detached, “I am not really here” presence.  If this was a paper they had written  and they weren’t there then this is fine.  The problem is as if it were an academic or technical paper and the difference between us reading it for ourselves and them giving the presentation is abysmally tiny.

Intensity comes from within and from our mental attitude to the talk.  Are we there to be supremely grey and just inform the audience of the content?  If this is the idea then this presenter was totally successful.  Is this enough though.  In this modern, fast paced, highly competitive world how can we choose to come in last?  If we get a chance to showcase our organisation and ourselves we have to make every post a winner.  We need to better understand the full potential of the situation.  If we can present information in a way that really makes the audience sit up and take notice, then they will think highly of our firm and of us. 

He was grey, bland, forgettable, uninteresting, uninspiring, nice but boring – a speaker wall flower type, disappearing into the background, while standing in the foreground of the venue stage.

There was no tonal variation in his delivery.  He didn’t punch out key words to drive home their importance.  His face was wooden and rather neutral, deadpan looking throughout, rather than excited and passionate about his subject.  He had no crescendos and just settled for lulls all the way throughout the 40 minutes of audience torture.  His body language and gestures had been put away for storage, waiting for a rainy day perhaps, because he didn’t bring them to the hall. Now when you are a big guy like him, being dynamic is relatively easy, because you have mass and when put in motion, it can have a strong impact on your audience. 

He also chose to follow the arrangements by the event staff, none of whom have ever given a public presentation in their entire life and who are completely ignorant of professional presentation requirements.  Following their direction, he stood behind the podium obscuring his body language potential, had the lights dimmed to accommodate the screen and what was being displayed.  He was already grey in delivery terms but his stage positioning and lighting had him almost disappear from plain sight.

He is a great teacher of presentations.  In the Japanese language there is an expression called “hanmen kyoshi” or teacher by negative example.  This is the role he played superbly on this occasion.  We can learn a lot by doing the opposite of what he was doing.  It also makes us realize that being tall, broad and handsome doesn’t mean much, if you don’t know what you are doing as a presenter.  Having great data and information will not retain the attention of our increasingly attention deficit modern audiences, because we cannot keep them riveted to us and off their mobile phones.  The minimum requirement is a clear understanding of the importance of solid delivery skills, on top of which we pour on our unsurpassed content. Not only do we have to understand these points, we have to deliver the delivery!

Don’t Get A Grip When Presenting

Good posture never goes out of fashion.  Standing up straight shows confidence, allows good breath control and projects energy. Given this is pretty simple, then why is it we get this so wrong when presenting?  The problem is temptations aplenty in the presenting environment.  The various acting awards or music performance awards are broadcast all around the world, to celebrate people making their living as professional presenters.  Acting is presenting and so is singing, although we do not often think of the performances in that way, but fundamentally that is what these artists are doing. 

Now this is one group you would expect to do this well.  Yet, we see award recipients murdering their acceptance speeches.  They stand there shoulders curved, hunched over the stand microphone, bending low from the waist to accommodate the tech, rather than the other way around.  These are people who spend an inordinate amount of their time around microphone technology as users.  Yet they seem incapable of mastering this sound dispersal device.  We get a terrific view of the top of their heads, which when we have a bald or balding pate on display, makes the whole experience even more memorable.

If you are ever in a position like that, where the height of the microphone stand makes the distance from the top of the mounted microphone to your mouth seem too far, then change the scenario.  Actually, hopefully you will have arrived early and will have checked the equipment beforehand so will know if the microphone thus mounted will do the trick or not.  You should have already alerted the organisers to your preferred tech arrangements and because it is going to be an extended presentation, you have requested a hand microphone or a lavalier microphone.

Let’s presume you have not had that chance, because it is an award ceremony and your remarks will be brief.  Don’t worry because the solution is devastatingly simple.  Remove the microphone from the stand holder completely and bring it closer to your mouth when you want to speak.  If the microphone is wedged in there and is not relenting or responding to your efforts to remove it, then go for more radical measures.  Pick the whole damn thing up holus-bolus and speak into the microphone, so that you can be heard by everyone.  Don’t be bossed around by the tech – show it who is boss around here.

The other great good posture denier is the podium.  I always recommend dispensing with the podium entirely, if you can do that.  These days we can have our slides there to help us navigate our way through the speech.  The ubiquitous slide advance clickers free us from being trapped behind the podium and having to hit the arrow keys to move through the slide deck. We can advance the slide show from anywhere on the stage and thus be able to access our full body language, to add to our communication piece. 

What we often see though, is the speaker, usually male, applying a vice like grip on the outer edges of the podium, in an effort to stop it escaping from the stage at any moment. Male speakers also love it because they don’t know what to do with their hands, so choking the life out of the podium takes care of that problem completely. This double grip arrangement eliminates the possibility of using gestures, to back up the words, because the podium has now become a function of the speaker’s balance.  This is because the speaker is standing back from the podium and leaning forward, head down, shoulders hunched over the microphone attached to the low flying microphone stand.  When your weight is back like that, you tend to get stuck in that position and wind up delivering the whole speech with that poor posture.

If for some sad reason you are using a podium as a notes bench or are even worse, using your laptop screen as your notes bench, then stand up straight and slightly back and away from the podium.  From here, you can’ t easily grip the furniture and this frees you up to use your gestures.

Good posture shows the mark of the professional, who is in control of their environment, the furniture and the tech.  Now all they have to do is concentrate on their audience and that is why we are there in the first place, isn’t it.

Go Broad, But Also Go Deep When Presenting

When you hear an excellent presentation, it is easy to be well satisfied.  When you are giving such a presentation and the audience are wolfing down your information, it is also easy to be self satisfied.  The good is the enemy of the great we say, don’t we.  The difficulty is when things are going so well, to know exactly how to take them to a higher level.

I was attending such a presentation recently and the speaker was very, very good.  The content was right on topic, for an area which has real attention grabbing power for audiences.  The room was a sell out. That is always a good thing isn’t it. The information itself was new, well designed and cleverly arranged in terms of the cadence of the argument. The actual delivery was probably one of the best that that particular business audience will see in a long, long time.  All good, so how to make something already working extremely well even better?

This is not easy, but I did notice one thing which I thought could have been added and it may be something that we can all consider when we are constructing our own presentations. When we are delivering an “inform style” of presentation, of course we need to be clear, concise and on topic. We also need to have fresh information that is new to the audience, so that they feel they were in the box seats for a very value deep presentation.  This presentation knocked it out of the park in that regard.

When we are doing that inform type of presentation, we can be spending quite a big chunk of our time on the broad brush strokes of industry direction, the shape of the trend, the predictions for the future. This is great because as audience members, we are getting treated to a business equivalent of a massive star show of the outer galaxies, like we will see in a Planetarium .

Future direction is good, but to really take our talk to the highest possible level, we need to do one more thing.  We need to connect this broad and scale based projection analysis to the day to day reality of our punters in the audience.  The talk I attended could have gone one more step and have reached out to the audience, with some steps they could take to connect the information with their daily challenges.  It didn’t have to morph into a complete “how to” presentation, but the inclusion of a few takeaways would have been the super icing on the cake.

The problem is that usually we are so wrapped up in the macro scale of what we are talking about, particularly when we are involved in discussing broad directional changes in an industry, that it is easy to get stuck at that general direction level. We are fully focused on the big picture.

We need to pick up around five things the audience can walk out with, which they can put into immediate action, to link the macro with the micro.  There are bound to be things that our audience can do, as a result of hearing this speech, which will better prepare them and their companies for the coming changes. Everyone wants to know what is coming down the pike and what they need to do be ready for it.

The addition of these concrete steps brings the talk even more alive and makes it more relevant for our audience.  Why five? Of course, we could probably list ten or twenty items, but the smaller number is easier for the audience to apply, without feeling overwhelmed.  Trying to make too many changes too quickly, usually results in nothing getting done. Five is also good as a quantity because it has volume, which gives the talk a greater feeling of worth and credibility.  These five points are sufficiently significant, without being off putting.

So the next time you are giving a presentation of the “inform” variety, look carefully at your macro points and try and pull out some practical steps, some juicy takeaways, that the audience can feast on and integrate into their own businesses straight away. If you do this, they will leave the room with a sense of they have seen the future and they are better prepared with some practical steps to deal with it.