I Hate Presentations: Transform the way you present with a fresh and powerful approach

By James Caplin

Are you confident that you know what you want to achieve with your next presentation? Do you know for sure what your audience wants from it? Are you absolutely certain your presentation will deliver - both for you, and your audience?

In this practical book you will discover a completely new way to prepare yourself for a presentation. Packed with real life examples and case studies, at times laugh out loud, it will show you how to do presentations that deliver, for you, your audiences, your team, your business.

Surprise everyone, perhaps especially yourself, by becoming an excellent and relaxed presenter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9781907293221

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this book is to help you become better at preparing and doing presentations. There is a secondary aim. This is to be part of the process of ridding the world of poor presentations, so that we all have to suffer through fewer of them in future.

My belief is that, once you start doing really good presentations - ones that deliver - people will notice. You will benefit, personally and in terms of your career, and others around you will begin to improve the way they do presentations too. That will help make you happier, will speed the flow of information in your business world, and will actually begin to change the whole of your work for the better.

What qualifies me to write such a book?

My professional background, way back, is as a writer of corporate videos. I did the job for two decades. For those too young to remember them, corporate videos used to be produced when someone with some clout and budget wanted to communicate something complicated. To do this, they would often commission ‘a video’, which all too often ended up as dull, over-blown and too long. They were generally despised by those who watched them. Ring any bells? Yes, they were the PowerPoint presentations of their day.

Personally, I had quite a successful career, partly because my scripts - and the videos that were made from them - were untypical. They tended to be short and intense. As an audience, you were plunged into them, told what you needed to know, and then released as quickly as possible.

But, in my mid-forties, I decided I wanted to do something more satisfying. While I was trying to discover what that might be, someone asked me to help them prepare a presentation - something I’d never done, but thought couldn’t be that hard. I took my client through how I approached writing a corporate video, which was a revelation to her. She used the same approach to prepare her presentation. The result delighted her, and her audience. It delighted me too, because I had loved helping her, loved not writing, loved seeing her grow in understanding of how communication works. I’d found my vocation - as a coach.

The more people I coached, the more often I came across powerful negative feelings towards presentations. I began to run I Hate Presentations workshops and coaching groups, during which much of what is in this book evolved. Delegates often asked me if I’d ever written anything about the subject in detail. I hadn’t, but here it is now.

I Hate Presentations is a practical book. It contains no academic arguments, footnotes or extensive reading lists. Put into practice what you read here, and the way you approach and do presentations - and other communications - will never be the same again.

1

About Presentations

Aren’t most presentations AWFUL? You sit there as someone drones on, with PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide, simultaneously apparently trying to prove they are clever, know lots about the subject they are presenting on, and at the same time bore you into submission.

And preparing presentations just adds to the stress of already busy work lives. You have to sort out what you are going to say, probably produce some slides and perhaps handouts and - in the end - the audience don’t even really seem to listen.

When you do a presentation, it is nerve-wracking. Will it work? Are you going to say the right thing? Should you be putting in more jokes? More facts? More evidence? Or less jokes, facts and evidence . . . or . . . whatever?

Almost everyone in today’s workplace feels at least some of these feelings - many of us feel them all. Here’s the good news: it need not be like this. This book will help you do presentations in the workplace more easily, prepare them more quickly - and have lots more fun doing so. Your presentations will deliver better results, for you, your audiences, your team, business and career.

To get to that point, we first have to clear away some common misconceptions. Then, we need to do a little theoretical groundwork. Finally, we will replace those misconceptions with some ideas that work.

The first misconception is that presentations are a form of public speaking.

PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLIC SPEAKING

Who are your audience when you’re doing a presentation? For most of us, it’s colleagues, partners, associates, bosses, customers or prospective customers. Who are the audience for a public speaker? It is, as the words make clear, the public. Big difference. And the most important difference is that the public do not know much about what the public speaker is talking about. That’s why they have come to hear the speech. When you’re doing a presentation, on the other hand, your audience tend to be very knowledgeable about the subject, or at least the subject area. That’s why they’ve been invited. After all, you wouldn’t do a team briefing to people who weren’t in your team, or a project update to those who were not involved, in some way, in the project.

Where do you do a presentation? Usually, in your workplace - or someone else’s. Often it’s in a meeting room, precisely so you can say things to your audience that you may not want anyone else to hear. What is the venue for public speaking? It’s precisely that - in public. The speaker is on a stage, usually with a microphone, sometimes behind a lectern. Is that how you do presentations in your meetings? Most of us don’t - we do them round a table.

At the end of a speech, it is convention that the audience applaud. Is that the conventional, or even desirable, response to the end of an everyday presentation in your workplace? You do a project update to your bosses, and they start to clap? And a speech has to be a certain length, long enough to make it worth the audience turning up. A presentation only needs to be as long as it needs to be.

These differences between speeches and presentations exist because one is a broadcast communication, the other narrow-cast.

Broadcasting and narrow-casting

‘Broadcasting’ is what the old-style main television channels do: send out a message to anyone and everyone. When broadcasting you have to cater to the lowest common denominator, i.e. take into account that Granny and the kids may be watching. To do it well you:

- Avoid jargon, as the broad audience may not understand it.

- Pace the flow of information slowly. You communicate nothing too taxing, nothing complicated, keep repeating points you’ve made.

- Add broad humour where possible.

‘Narrow-casting’ is what MTV, QVC, blogs and many modern means of communication do (it’s also what corporate video does). Narrow-casters send their messages out to a narrowly defined audience. To do it well you:

- Embrace the language of the group you are communicating to. On MTV, that means presenters who talk, move, act and even appear to think like members of their audience.

- Pack in the information densely - you are talking amongst yourselves, as experts. This means assuming the audience understands the subject and talking at their level, making no concessions to Granny or the kids.

- Humour may be a help, but is not essential.

Narrow-casting is boring to those who are not in the target audience but, when done well, compelling to those who are.

How do presentations fit into this scheme?

What is a presentation?

To me, a presentation is any oral communication you have time to prepare, and where you are required to speak on the subject before others do. It’s as simple as that.

That definition covers speeches, so what I’m actually claiming is that speeches are a form of presentation, but that not all presentations are speeches. (That may sound odd, but is no odder than the statement that while all red-headed boys are people, not all people are red-headed boys.)

The difference is that presentations are a form of narrow-cast communication, and speeches are a form of broadcast communication. Presentations are done to a narrowly defined audience, who are knowledgeable about the subject and want - expect - a dense flow of information. What we all too often get is a broadcast communication: dilute, general, designed to be understood by anyone. And because of the way the world of work is developing, we are all doing more and more of these presentations; being good at them is ever more crucial if we are to thrive.

THE MODERN WORLD OF WORK

Because of downsizing and outsourcing, spin-outs and spin-offs, and the complex nature of modern projects, almost all of our work now involves collaborating with others, in cross-functional teams - often across physical borders - with people in our companies and other companies and also with associates, partners, contractors, consultants and others. To keep projects on track, and everyone involved understanding what is happening, we all have to continually do, and attend, meetings. And at those meetings, a lot of what goes on is us telling them what we are doing, and them telling us what they are doing. So we are all now doing and attending presentations. Lots of them. Continually. Day in, day out.

Think of the amount of time in each company that is wasted if these presentations are done ineptly. Think about the increase in efficiency and improvement in the way information flows through a business if they are done well. I’ve asked many of those I coach to estimate how often they do presentations. The astonishing average is at least one per day. So, what makes a good, everyday, workplace presentation?

Good presentations

In I Hate Presentations workshops, I ask delegates to describe a good presentation. The answers are surprisingly consistent. Before you read on, take a moment to formulate an answer yourself.

Delegates say good presentations:

- Capture your interest. - Are relevant to you, the audience, and say something useful to you.

- Are concise, containing everything that needs to be there, without waffle.

I hope that corresponds, at least to some extent, with what you feel.

So, what is a bad presentation - the kind we all hate, the kind that impedes the smooth flow of business?

Bad presentations

Think about a bad presentation you have experienced as a member of the audience, and take a moment to form an answer in your mind before you read on. When I ask people in workshops this question, I again get a surprisingly consistent reaction. What they say, when you boil it down, is that bad presentations:

- Are irrelevant.

- Ramble

- Contain too much detail.

Consequently, they are boring. I hope that this too corresponds, at least to some extent, with what you feel.

Compare the demands on a speech-maker with the description of a bad presentation.

- A speech has to be full of basic information because the audience do not know much about the subject. So a presentation done as a form of speech is full of irrelevant information that the audience already know.

- A speech has to be long enough to be substantial. So a presentation done as a form of speech tends to go on and on. In other words, it often rambles.

- A person doing a speech has to show that they know about the subject they are talking about. So a presentation done as a form of speech often contains too much detail.

In other words, attempting to do a speech when actually doing a presentation is almost bound to turn out badly. Which brings us to the first ‘Action Step’ of this book. These action steps - which will crop up regularly - are, as the words imply, suggestions for you to do something.

Action Step: Stop making speeches

This is actually an inaction step. It is that, from now on, you are not going to think about making speeches when you do a presentation. You are going to forget anything you may have read, learnt or been trained to do that relates to speech-making as it applies to presentations.

At this point in workshops, I often notice people relax a little. The idea that you don’t have to make a speech when you are doing a presentation offers a release from an onerous burden.

As part of that shift - from presentation as mini-speech, to presentation as a communication form in its own right - I always refer to the person doing a presentation as ‘the presenter’. Never ‘the speaker’. ‘Speakers’, to me, do speeches.

Let’s move on. How do you, at the moment, prepare presentations? Formulate an answer before reading on.

HOW YOU CURRENTLY PREPARE PRESENTATIONS

People in my workshops respond to this question with the following, or some variation of it. First, they think about the subject, what they’re going to talk about. Then, they do some research: perhaps on the Internet, in dictionaries, looking up facts and figures, reading their files. Then they write something, add PowerPoint slides, check it and finally, when they are reasonably satisfied with what they have prepared, deliver it.

A few people do other forms of preparation. There is the ignore-it-till-the-last-minute-and-wing-it technique. This occasionally works, but is high risk. Another is to take a previous presentation that worked and use search-and-replace and cut-and-paste to customize it. We’ll see in Chapter 4 (the section entitled ‘The importance of your first time’) why this almost certainly produces a poor presentation.

Let’s return to the standard preparation technique. What it boils down to is this:

1. Think about the title.

2. Research.

3. Write.

4. Deliver.

Where and when in your life did you first encounter that technique? If you don’t immediately know, read through the summary again and listen for the inner voice of recognition. Because it is shockingly universal. The technique is how we were taught to do essays at school. We take it so much for granted that this is the way to create a piece of writing, that we are not aware that it is actually a learned technique. The truth is, you don’t have to create a piece of writing this way. It’s just how children do it. I call it the School Essay Technique, which brings us to