8 steps to successful business presentations in a short attention span world
Treasure your Audience is the second station in The One Minute Presenter’s journey. All future presenting success depends on how well you bond with your audience. This short video gives you a simple technique that you can use to deepen and strengthen these bonds.
Click to play the 3 minute video.
In China, click here.
For YouTube, click here or watch below:
Matt Church is one of Australia’s foremost experts on 21st century leadership. He is a best-selling author, acknowledged by the meetings industry as one of Australia’s Top Ten conference speakers. When he is not writing or speaking, he consults with and coaches the Thought Leaders of tomorrow.
For some good advice check out Matt’s blog and this article on Presentations.
l
One thing you can be sure about when you are delivering your next presentation. Your audience wish you would finish it quicker, get to the point sooner and wrap it up faster. Your audience don’t have unlimited time, attention or energy. So don’t present like they do.
If you see people’s eyes glazing over, notice sighs and hear yawns, you are in the “dead energy zone” from which no memories emerge. Your audience is switched off and waiting for you to finish. Those who are less polite will walk out.
To become a better presenter, you need to understand how memory works. One technique to learn is called spaced learning. Advocated by Dr John Medina in his book Brain Rules and put into practice in a school in the UK, spaced learning stops trying to force information on the brain. Instead it aligns with how memories are actually formed.
Spaced learning uses intense learning periods of 20 minutes, interspersed with 10 minute intervals of physical exercise that requires hand-eye coordination, such as juggling, basketball and plate spinning. Sounds barmy right? But the results are amazing. Students who took a 90 minute class on biology had a 58% pass rate. A year late taking another science subject and this time four months of conventional class study the pass rate went up to only 68%.
The technique is fast and uses “hooks” and visual cues to stimulate the learning points. How can you introduce gaps in your presentations where the audience can take abreak, move around and then be ready for a quick review when they return. You need different versions of your presentations. Insert “check slides” which have gaps in the key messages and ask the audience to fill in the missing words. Have handouts that ask key questions about the messages. Insert more five minute breaks (keep it to exactly 5 minutes though!) and don’t be afraid to go back to skim through your slides. Above all, dump your text-based slides for visuals that use pictures and slogans. Make your slides resemble billboards.
First used by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the phrase “too much of a good thing” is wise. It’s usually used to mean “too much of a good thing is not always good”. When it comes to information that is certainly true. Considering that the average Sunday newspaper with its numerous section pull outs and glossy magazines contains as much information as our grandfathers came across in their whole lives, it’s no wonder that we feel that information is overloading our poor brains. It’s like the Niagara Falls pouring into an egg-cup. Massively overpowering. Ultimately pointless.
The causes of information overload are never-ending with 24-hour cable TV, the internet, video games, messaging, newspapers, magazines, blogs, wikipedia, and social networking. It never stops. And, on the main, it’s completely useless. It provides no productive or creative use. Sure, we all go to the web to “research”. But three hours later we are not entirely sure which brand of MP3 player we should buy. The choice is overwhelming to the point of drowning out our ability to make decisions effectively.
So armed with this knowledge, what do most business presenters do? They prepare the most information-heavy presentations they can cram into a PowerPoint slide. Slide after slide of text. Data packed into font size 8 tables. Reams and reams of bullet points, which really don’t have a point. Why would any presenter in their right mind do this?
Whatever the reasons, you need to start cutting down on the information you deliver to your audience. Use no more than 10 slides for a presentation. Use graphics and pictures instead of text. Build up a photo database that you can reference while you are preparing your presentations. A picture speaks a thousand words and more importantly, it’s memorable.
Buddhists perceive life, death and rebirth as a continuous cycle. Communication seems to follow similar pattern. Once was a time when all communication was interactive. People sat around camp-fires and took time to share and swop stories. As an engaging form of communication, we haven’t surpassed this art form yet (until virtual reality gets bit better!).
As the world progressed, communication methods started getting more efficient. Town Criers went from town to town delivering the latest news and gossip. This started the trend towards mass communications which took off as technology did. Mass publishing of newspapers, radio and then television put more and more emphasis on one message for all. Even today mass communications is (probably on balance) the most effective delivery method. Especially when in China you have the national broadcaster CCTV (got to love the honesty in the name!) beaming out to more than a billion people…guaranteed. Potent stuff.
But interactive communication never went away, we still love stories after all. In the 1970s the CB Radios were the precursor to internet chat rooms.
Pagers, mobile phones, inter-web, chat rooms, instant chat, tweets, have all revitalised the more intimate forms of communication albeit with the ability to leverage it to many people. Today, people need interactivity more than ever. When you post on your Facebook page that you had a fight with your boyfriend, you are extending your emotional space out towards your friends and when they reply with comfort (your female friends) and advice (your male friends), this cycle of interactivity is complete. On a much more powerful, personal and deeper level than any type of one-way, mass market communication. Pop Idol is so popular, I think, because the general public voting has a chance to engage and pull everyone into the show. Now you have a vested interest because you voted, joined a fan page of your favourite singer and talked about it with your friends at work.
Against this backdrop, what are you doing to increase the interactivity of your presentations? Are you still wondering why your audience looks bored? Why no one can remember your last presentation. Kick your one-way delivery out the window. Learn from Pop Idol and put feedback panels into your presentations, allow voting, request devil advocate opinions, ask for buy-in from your audience. Take your presentation into the realm of interactions, personalisation and emotions.
Today’s tip covers two aspects of presentations and presenting. First, a presentation is linear. Second, the best presenter uses random access methods throughout their presentation.
Let’s start with the presentation. A presentation is a linear form of communication. While you are speaking, the audience has no idea of the words you can going to speak next. They may have an idea of the gist if you are presenting with clarity – but the actual words are unknown to them until you speak. And then, once spoken, there is no way that the audience can go back to what you have just said unless they interrupt you and ask you to repeat yourself (annoying) or they have one of those global remote controls that Adam Sandler had in the movie, Click (freaky).
Compare this form of communication with reading a book. At any time, you can jump ahead to read the next few pages or even read the last page like Billy Crystal’s character in When Harry met Sally. Or if you wish to stop and reflect on a paragraph you just read, you can. This method of communication is called random access. Using the internet is very much a random access experience with all the distractions of hyperlinks.
Today’s digital natives have grown up with a completely different approach to accessing information (learning). In the past, knowledge was passed from one generation to the next through the spoken traditions of storytelling which evolved into lecturing (how did that happen?). This took a further evolution into PowerPoint slides which have done more than any other tool to stifle learning in the business world. It’s not the software’s fault, just the way we use it. Today with the internet, we learn by using wikipedia, accessing interest-specific forums, seeing what our friends recommend and see how other people rate the problems through digg or delicious.
If I want to find a software or fix an IT problem, I could go and listen to my IT guy give me a long-winded explanation about something completely (to my mind) irrelevant. Linear communication. Or I could jump online and google the problem. Check what people with similar problems are saying on computer forums, search computer web sites for software. Check out their credibility on wiki. And then perhaps ask some friends via Twitter and Facebook. Random access communication.
Your challenge as a presenter is to use more random access methods of communication while you are presenting to give your audience the chance to make the learning experience their own. Examples include, discussion within a group at their tables, doing online research, reviewing notes and re-presenting or interpreting the learning points via a case study or role play. How else can you provide jump off points for your audience?
