Tech Presenters Please Stop Making Stupid Errors

I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology.  Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses.  Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry.  He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field. He has some recommendations for us based on where he sees the industry moving over the next couple of years.

The coverage of his subject was logical and easy to follow.  It was clear he really knew what he was talking about. The slides by the way, overall, were excellent.  Very professionally done by a designer and they reinforced the credibility of his company.  Very clear, for the most part, with not too much information on each slide and plenty of white space.  Some fonts were a bit smallish and if you were seated at a distance, probably rather impenetrable.  Apart from that quibble though, they were well done. 

I was astounded though, by the way he presented his material.  I calculated that during the entire presentation, including both the Q&A as well as the main body of the talk, he had eye contact with his audience for about 1% of the time.  Where was he looking?  He interspersed his eye contact between looking at the floor and the monitor he was using to show the slides.  In fact, it was almost like some extremely primitive tribe living in the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea, encountering a high spec, large form monitor, showing amazing scenes for the first time.  They would be amazed by what they were seeing and their eyes would be glued to the screen. This describes our modern, urban, high tech presenter to a tee.  He seemed hypnotised by the screen and just kept looking at what was on it the whole time.

Mercifully, he wasn’t reading the content to us, line by line, like some other dim presenters I have had the misfortune to encounter.  He was transfixed though on the screen and just totally ignored his audience.  Occasionally he would break free from the siren call of the monitor and amble around the front of the room, wandering to and fro, staring down at the carpet tiles.

He did have good energy, was obviously expert in this area and had some passion for his subject.  He did prefer to speak in a monotone, where every single word gets the exact some strength treatment and there was no vocal variety.  I liked his gestures, although they tended to be held a bit low. It would have been better to get his hands up higher, so they would be more visible.

He didn’t seem to be lacking in confidence.  I spoke with him briefly before we started when I exchanged business cards. He didn’t come across as some nerdy, painfully shy techie, who wants to avoid contact with human kind as much as possible.

I put this dismal display down to a lack of knowledge.  He knows a lot about the tech but knows close to zero about how to explain it to an audience.  He didn’t seem to understand that to convince an audience of your point of view you need to work on them.  Like a lot of technical people, he must have believed that by just putting the data and information up on the screen, the goodness and sanctity of the content would carry the day.  He must have imagined that his part in the process was not relevant.  Even during the Q&A, he completely ignored the source of the questions – the rows of people seated in front of him.  He just continued to stare at the screen. The words up on the screen at that point were “Thank You”, so not a lot to look at.

The basic rule of presenting is to use all the tools at your disposal.  Eye contact with your audience is so powerful as a persuader.  We wrap that up with our vocal variety, pauses, gestures and body language. 

Hold the gaze of one individual in your audience for six seconds.  Longer than that it becomes too intrusive.  Speak to one person, on a point while holding their gaze, then switch your gaze to another person.  Don’t do it in order, because people will predict what you are doing and switch off , because they know their turn is not coming yet. 

Rather divide the room up into six sections.  Front to the left, middle and right and the same for the rear half of the room.  Then at random move your gaze around picking up people, making eye contact with them and converting them to your point of view on the subject.

Our presenter missed a big opportunity to persuade his audience to use his firm.  He failed to sway us with his point of view, because he under powered the persuasion bit.  The quality of your content may be the best on the planet but that does not remove your role in explaining it.  Back up what you are saying with knowledge of presenting as well and unlike our speaker, become the total package.

How To Be An Inspiring Presenter 

At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed.  How about you? When people are filing out of the hall, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if your were able to eavesdrop on their conversation?  Being clear is always a favourite and please listen to Episode 144 “How To Be More Concise, Clear and Persuasive When Presenting”, where I go into more detail on how to do that.  Another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring.

Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before. Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk.  Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems.

What would a business audience find inspiring?  It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will.  Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one’s circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard.  The problem is business people’s activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean  crossing exploits.  These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview. 

The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope.  This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds.  When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too.  It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper. We are magnets to lessons on survival. We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves.

You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull.  How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others?  Maybe you can’t.  Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk. 

I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason.  I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top.  Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information.  They are usually brief summaries of a person’s life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both.  Don’t just skim over these heroes tales, instead collect these rich stories.  These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence. 

There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm.  These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate.  Okay it wasn’t you, but the audience doesn’t care that much.  They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the mess doesn’t have to be your personal catastrophe. 

Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use.   Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared.

You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant.  This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world.  As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences.  When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate.  I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc.   I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful.  I just need the temerity to tell more of them.

So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instil in your audience. The raw material is all around you.  Just start looking for it and begin compiling it. When you hear something you can use, capture it immediately for later employ.  Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience.  Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages.  The reason we still do it today is because it works a charm.

Aya McCrindle recently graduated from our High Impact Presentations Course and did her first TED talk. She was well and truly ready for it, because of the training preparation she received. Aya has her own company, Aya Jean Style Coach, where she helps people with mastering first impressions. In her area of expertise, she is the brand. She runs her classes as the leader and that means being credible with her students. All leaders need excellent persuasion skills and this is where the High Impact Presentations Course comes in. If you need to be able to communicate at a high level, if you need to be persuasive, if you need to be able to motivate people, then don't waste your time trying to work it out by yourself. Do the course. It has a proven track record of over 100 years. It is taught in over 100 countries in thirty five languages. It is the Rolls Royce of presentation training. Don't you deserve the Roller?

I Hate Sitting Through Underperforming Presentations

This global company is a household name in Japan.  They have spent a fortune getting the brand name known here.  They had some tough times early on too and got a hammering from the media about aspects of their business model.  A lot of negative publicity was generated, so the name is well known, but not in a helpful way.  The President is giving his talk about the company and the industry to a mixed audience here in Tokyo.  It was sadly underwhelming.  Sitting there was a form of torture for me, who teaches this stuff.  Well what made this an under performing presentation and what can we learn from it?

The meltdown in the media from a few years ago is a common memory.  But what a great “return from the dead story” lies therein. There must have been amazing characters involved.  Even the foreign head office President had to get involved and apologise.  There was drama aplenty and lessons numerous falling out from the catastrophe. We all love to learn by hearing about the errors of others.  We gobble that stuff right up, because we have that Schadenfreude thing going in the background.

Instead, we got a very one dimensional, flat talk about the business model and not much on the lessons learnt.  It was delivered with a very passionless effort, that failed to ignite anyone in the audience.  The speaker looked tired and sounded only slightly interested to be there talking to us. His facial expression was single throughout.  There were no highs and lows of the journey reflected in his expression.  He seemed to make sure to match his voice to his wooden face and spoke throughout in a deathly, dull monotone.  This means he gave up the chance to punch out specific words for emphasis, to bring phrases to life by turbo injecting them with power or alternatively, dropping the strength out for contrast.  It was bland.

In fact, this was a major brand damaging exercise from go to woe.  By that, I count both his personal, professional brand and also the corporate brand.  He mentioned that he had given a couple of these talks to various audiences already and I was thinking that is pretty sad.  Why sad?

I was reminded of that story about Campbell’s tomato soup.  I can’t remember who was the ad guy in charge of the advertising account for Campbells, but the owner complained that the advertising agency was promoting all of the other soups, except tomato.  The ad guy’s reply is very informative for speakers.  He said the reason was that their tomato soup was orange in colour and not all that good.  If he promoted it vigorously, more people would try it, become unimpressed and Campbells would suffer severe brand damage.

This is what happens to speakers like this one.  They nefariously roam around destroying their personal and company brands, by exposing more and more people to their zombie presentation performance. He needed to be a lot more energised in his talk.  This was potential high drama, full of powerful stories that would stick with us, long after the talk was over.  Here we had a great redemption story of how they came back from the brink of expiration in Japan, to recover, regroup and re-conquer the market.

The delivery had one gear and that unfortunately was stuck in low gear.  We never had spurts of speed or energy.  We just dawdled along at three kilometres an hour until it ended.  We all need to become passionate about our story, telling it with a lot of voice strength and using our body language to good effect. 

We take the audience with us on a trip to Space Mountain at Disneyland.  We are strapped in, and then we whiz into the blackness of their downfall, curving at high speed around the media assault, dropping precipitously into a deep dive of lost business from which it looked there was no return.  Next, we soar skyward as we get over the disaster and rebound the company, people and the brand.

We needed that passionate retelling of the journey, the highs and lows, the lessons, the characters involved.  All we got was a slide deck with lots of data on it.  What a lost opportunity.  We all have many stories, good, bad and educational.  We need to use these to engage our audience, so that they feel like they have been with us through that hair raising ride and have touched back down with us, exhausted but elated at having survived the ride.

Remember, people won’t recall the detail of your talk.  They will forget all the statistics. Even if they wrote them down, they won’t consult them ever again.  They will not remember all those groovy slides you crafted and assembled so meticulously.  They will remember the stories though.  They will remember you and how you came across.  They won’t forget how much you excited them or didn’t excite them. Treat every chance to talk as a great brand building or exploding opportunity.  As the speaker definitely be passionate, tell energising stories and be memorable in a good way.  This is how you build both your personal and company brands to good effect.  The negative alternative is not a very pleasant contemplation.