People often try to complain to me that their presentation wasn’t how they planned it.

They forgot a point/story/clever thingy, or something.

If you’re doing it well,  it should never be exactly how you planned it.

If a presentation is exactly how you planned it, you’re working from a script and aren’t responding to the people in front of you.

This is the Presentations As Classical Music paradigm: presentations are a piece of Mozart (yuh – you should be so lucky) that need rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing until you remember the whole ’script’. You can tell someone from this school as they talk about ‘writing a speech’.

I adhere to the Presentations As Jazz school: you learn to play your instrument, you get to know the tune, think through some possibilities, put together a plan, but allow there to be interplay between you and the audience, have the experience be fresh.

Then your listeners are getting something worth listening to, rather than just reading.

Thoughts?

**

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

**

Recent articles:

~ Using a microphone in presentations

~ Why people make weird decisions

~ Chris Says It Better (Leadership/Presentation Tips)

Ever wonder what to do with a microphone?

Lisa B Marshall does it again – everything you need to know about using a microphone.

Check it.

**

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

Recent posts

~ Why people make weird decisions

~ Chris Says It Better (Leadership/Presentation Tips)

~ Avoiding Groundhog meetings

What if you’re the crazy one and they’re the sane ones?

Do you find yourself dealing with people who are (from your totally objective, if not god-like, point of view) making short-sighted or irrational decisions? What if their decisions come from where they stand in the organisation/world, rather than from some inherent flaw in their decision-making apparatus?

How to stop people from being so patently freakin’ crazy

1. Put yourself thoroughly in their position – think what information they receive in a timely way and what’s delayed or never reaches them, what they’re rewarded for doing/not doing, what’s visible/invisible to them… In short, work out how the (mad, stupid, loco) decisions they are making are the logical, rational ones to make.

1b If possible, verify your understanding of their situation with them. Find out what’s missing from your model of their model of the situation.

2. Work out what information is obvious to you in your position that they might be missing.

3. See if you can find a way of communicating that missing information to them in a way that is relevant to them.

4. Step back. Breathe. See if anything changes.

***

There is a concept in systems thinking called bounded rationality (coined by Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize winning economist, apparently).

Bounded rationality means that people make reasonable decisions based on the information they have from where they stand in a system (a system being a collection of connected processes – an organisation, a political system, a relationship…)

The problem is that they (we) don’t have perfect information, especially about distant parts of the system.

It is, for example, the structure of your company that forces people to make decisions that affect the whole organisation negatively. They only receive/are interested in detailed information about their area, and receive incentives to fulfil objectives that optimise the performance of their area. What’s missing is how those decisions affect the WHOLE system.

People in IT make the decisions you would make if you were in IT. People in the business make decisions you would make if you were in the business.  Management make management decisions, staff make staff decisions.

The final word today goes to Dana Meadows, author of Thinking in Systems (my book-of-the-week):

Suppose you are for some reason lifted out of your accustomed place in society and put in the place of someone whose behavior you have never understood… Perhaps having been an environmental critic of big business, you find yourself making environmental deicsions for big business…

In your new position, you experience the information flows, the incentives and disincentives, the goals and discrepancies, the pressures – the bounded rationality – that goes with that position…

Although we think we’d make different decisions, remember our previous point of view, the likelihood is that the position would govern our thoughts…

There is, Dana says, some hope…

It’s amazing how quickly and easily behavior changes can come, with even slight enlargement of bounded rationality, by providing better, more complete, timelier information.

***

Whose behaviour do you really not understand? What happens when you think things through from their perspective? How might you be able to supply some needed information about the wider situation?

***

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

Links to books are often to Amazon for convenience and aren’t affiliate links (i.e. I don’t make any money from them). I’d much rather you ordered from an independent bookseller. If you’re in the UK, phone Kirsty the friendly bookseller at Westbourne Books on +441202768626. Nine times out of ten she’ll get the book in the post to you within 24 hours. Tell her I referred you – it’ll make her laugh. (Again – I’m not on commission – she’s just my best book enabler…)

Recent posts:

~ Chris Says It Better (Leadership/Presentation Tips)

~ Avoiding Groundhog meetings

~ Getting situations to shift

Ok, I’m never writing about presentations EVER again.

Because Chris Witt says it better.

**

I finally got around to buying Chris’s book Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint.

Loved it.

Not being a presentation skills specialist any more.

Here’s why.

**

First off, Chris chooses some great quotes…

“Safety first has been the motto of the human race for half a million years but it has never been the motto of leaders. Leaders must face danger. They take the risk and the blame, and the brunt of the storm.” Herbert N Casson.

“Information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Herbert Simon, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

“A confused mind always says no. ” Len Torres, Primus Design

**

Then he says so much that’s true, in a pithy way.

**

Here’s Chris…

On leaders

Here’s the paradox:  Leaders have to be themselves at all times and yet, when they speak, they speak not for themselves, but for their organizations.

Leaders speak to make a difference, and unsettled times are when their words can have the greatest impact.

Their value to the organization isn’t in what they know; it’s in their ability to present what they know to people in a variety of fields in a way that can be understood and acted upon.

Leaders either stand with, stand for or stand against.

On PowerPoint

In all the times I’ve asked the question [What made the most powerful speech they can remember hearing so impressive?], never once has anyone answered, “I liked how the speaker used PowerPoint.’

On knowledge

Knowledge isn’t power. Communicating knowledge is.

On being present

When you connect with yourself, with the audience, and with the moment, you’re truly present. And that kind of presence, when you’re standing in front of an audience, has a power all its own.

On engaging your audience

Your audience doesn’t care what you know until it knows that you care.

I divide audience members into five kinds: (1) advocates, (2) supporters, (3) neutrals, (4) naysayesr, and (5) opponents. Generally speaking, you can at best move people one or two steps higher on the scale.

When I’m preparing a speech, whether for myself or someone else, I find this question – Why would the audience want what I want? – to be the hardest, most time-consuming one to answer. But if I can’t answer it, I don’t have a speech.

On keeping it simple

The bigger the words speakers use, the smaller the ideas they advocate.

Any damn fool can complicate something. But it takes skill and effort to clarify a complex subject.

On your message

It takes moxie to state your idea baldly.

You can’t say the important things too often.

On starting your presentation

Jettison the formalities. Don’t thank the emcee, don’t acknowledge the other dignitaries present, don’t apologize or waste time explaining how or why your time is limited. Don’t explain how you thought of the idea, unless that’s part of what you’re talking about. Just begin.

Don’t waste time on pleasantries. Don’t tell your listeners how happy you are to be speaking to them. Don’t tell them what a great group they appear to be. In other words, don’t introduce your introduction.

On presentation delivery

Delivery involves using your body and your voice to communicate your message. It’s more than technique. It’s about projecting your authentic self as powerfully as possible.

On Q&A

The most important question to ask yourself when you’re brainstorming what queries you might get is this: What’s the killer question that I most want not to be asked?

On fear

There’s another type of fear that rarely gets acknowledged. It’s the fear that wells up whenever we lay bare our authentic self. It’s a formidable challenge to go in front of others and take a stand, giving voice to the truths we’ve learned the hard way, not knowing if we – not just our ideas, but we, ourselves – will be accepted or rejected. No techniques or strategies are known to quell this unnamed fear. The only remedy is courage.

**

SEE? I TOLD you.

All questions on presentations now go to

LifeAfterPowerPoint.com.

See ya. Off to learn flower arranging or start some other professional endeavour.

**

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

Links to books are often to Amazon for convenience and aren’t affiliate links (i.e. I don’t make any money from them). I’d much rather you ordered from an independent bookseller. If you’re in the UK, phone Kirsty the friendly bookseller at Westbourne Books on +44 1202 768 626. Nine times out of ten she’ll get the book in the post to you within 24 hours. Tell her I referred you – it’ll make her laugh. (Again – I’m not on commission – she’s just my best book enabler…)

Recent Posts

~ Avoiding Groundhog meetings

~ Getting situations to shift

~ How to use graphs in presentations

Ever feel like you’re having the same meeting again and again?

A system will produce the similar results no matter what the content is.

If we use the same meeting processes, then even if the topic is different, the results will be largely predictable.

Think back to meetings you’ve had recently.

I bet that they were mostly presentations/updates and open discussion (open discussion being unstructured ‘talking things through’).

This is fine for what Sam Kaner, Participatory Decision Making King, calls business-as-usual meetings.

Business-as-usual meetings are for low-impact, relatively inconsequential decisions that have a reasonably clear solution people easily agree to.

However, if you’re dealing with a complex situation, with large potential consequences and no clear solution, the meeting process needs to change.

Open discussion has certain limits.

What are the patterns?

Off the top of my head:

• The most articulate/stubbon people are the one’s who get heard.
• Quieter people try a couple of times to be heard, then give up.
• People harp on about their favourite themes.
• At the first sign of conflict, some people back down and some people ramp up.
• People adopt intractable positions and defend them.
• Solutions are generally the obvious ones, with little thinking through of ramifications.

Not quite the best environment for sustainable solutions to be created, especially bearing in mind that if business-as-usual thinking would work, it would have worked already.

There are many ways that meetings can run differently

And they needn’t be earth-shattering or even very tree-huggy. For example:

• brainstorming (temporarily suspending judgment as you produce ideas)
• individually assessing the strength of support for a proposal on a sliding scale (rather than yes/no)
• instituting a formal go-around where everyone takes a turn
• distinguishing facts from opinions
• expanding the time-line into future consequences
• allowing people some structured complaining time
• seeing things from as many points of view as possible…

These are just some simple methods that allow a different quality of dialogue to happen.

Changing the way that information flows through a system can have a profound effect on its outcomes.

Surely it’s worth trying something new to stop going through Groundhog day again…

What alternatives to open discussion have you experienced? Leave a note in the comments…

***

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

Links to books are often to Amazon for convenience and aren’t affiliate links (i.e. I don’t make any money from them). I’d much rather you ordered from an independent bookseller. If you’re in the UK, phone Kirsty the friendly bookseller at Westbourne Books on +441202768626. Nine times out of ten she’ll get the book in the post to you within 24 hours. Tell her I referred you – it’ll make her laugh. (Again – I’m not on commission – she’s just my best book enabler…)

Recent posts:

~ Getting situations to shift

~ How to use graphs in presentations

~ Helping the presentation gods to reduce the dread

What aspect of your life won’t shift despite everyone’s best efforts?

It’s possible that situations are resistant to change because of how we approach them.

A lot of situations that aren’t moving in the direction you’d like have certain factors that work to change the status quo, and other factors that work to maintain the status quo.

First, list the factors that naturally move in the desired direction.
Now,  list the factors that move in the opposite direction.

(If you’ve ever done a Force-Field analysis, this is a similar idea.)

Think of each group of factors as a loop.

The change loop is balanced out by the constraining loop.

Where we normally place our attention is on reinforcing the strength of the change loop.

The harder you push on the reinforcing loop (the one that left to it’s own devices would become a vicious/virtual runaway spiral) the more the balancing loop responds.

Systems thinking would have us work to weaken the constraints.

Maybe you’re wanting to stop smoking or lose weight.

Instead of increasing your motivation (how’s that willpower method working out for you?) how about identifying the thoughts/beliefs/practices that are constraining your process and seeing if you can lessen their effect? (I find the work of Byron Katie and Havi Brooks useful for this.)

If you’re working with a group, rather than sellsellsell the benefits of your idea, how about working with them on the barriers they see, and exploring the truth or otherwise of those barriers.

Want to help a project move forward? Find out what’s getting in the way and work on removing the obstacles.

Do you team want to change but find they can’t? Same same.

Weakening the balancing loop might be the way to have the situation change.

Where might you apply this?

***

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

Recent posts:

~ How to use graphs in presentations

~ Helping the presentation gods to reduce the dread

~ Where do objections come from?

Do you use graphs in your presentations?

Seth Godin recently expressed some opinions I agree with (it’s not the first time…).

One point that stands out from his article is to use your graph to tell a story.

He says:

There are only four reasons I can imagine you would want to show someone a graph (not a chart, or an infogram or a diagram, but a graph of numbers):

1. Things are going great, look!
2. Things are a disaster, help!
3. Nothing much is happening.
4. We need to work together to figure out what the data means.

**

My advice with all the content/structure of your presentation is to think about who you’re talking to and what you want them able and motivated to do as a result.

Seems like Seth and I agree…

Head to the full post for more,  along with some very sound advice on graph design.

How do you deal with displaying data well?

**

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

Recent posts:

~ Helping the presentation gods to reduce the dread

~ Where do objections come from?

~ The importance of energy in presentations

We really do ask a lot of  the presentation gods.

They really want to help sprinkle their magic, smooth out the rough edges, supply us with a great answer to a question or an unexpectedly hilarious yet apt anecdote…  and then we get it in their way.

I was coaching a friend the other night for a presentation she’s delivering today. Presenting some papers at some huge event with the whole of her industry attending.

You know, no pressure.

I found myself giving her this advice:

Remember: it’s never as bad as you fear, and rarely quite as excellent as you hope.

As we were talking, I realised that most of the pain doesn’t come from the presentation itself (which, let’s face it, goes past in a flash) but from the fact that almost everyone (including, if I’m not really strict, me) does a crazy thing before a presentation which makes the preparation hell, and then an even worse thing after, which means even when we’re done, it’s still hell.

All in all, no wonder people don’t look forward to presentations.

The nightmare

See, first off, we imagine all the terrible things that might go wrong – they’re going to ask terrible questions, we’ll forget what we’re going to say, run out of time, people will laugh and not laugh but the wrong way round, we’ll freeze, pee our pants, cry… whatever – and squeeze all the misery out of the waiting/planning process.

Thing is, it’s never as bad as we fear.

(Presuming you’ve done some kind of reality-based planning and aren’t just winging it.)

As Byron Katie would say: Reality is much kinder than our thoughts about it.

The dream

Then, after we’re done and it wasn’t quite as bad as we thought it was going to be (in fact, probably a great deal better) we compare it to our imagined perfect presentation – you know, the one where THEY cry and pee their pants, laugh, don’t laugh (the right way round), the whole crowd rise to their feet, cheering and clapping and rushing the stage, TED and Time magazine and Google  and Seth Godin and Stephen freakin’ Hawking all offer us jobs, money, book deals, life-long friendship… you know, THAT one – and go:

Yeah, it wasn’t quite as good as I hoped…

Oh, come ON… Give the presentation gods SOMETHING to work with.

The real world

Being realistic at both ends can actually help them to help you make presentations something surprisingly doable.

You’ve just got to leave the door open at least a little…

Ring any bells?

***

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

Recent posts:

~ Where do objections come from?

~ The importance of energy in presentations

~ Teams not herds

For a long time I have talked about becoming conscious of what’s going on in the minds of the people you’re communicating with – what attitudes, objections, concerns, questions, prejudices might people have towards what you’re saying.

It seems to me that you must always be respectful of people’s positions – to work out how their response is the logical one bearing in mind the experiences they have had and the data they possess.

[Update - The initial way I described the following was an oversimplification - and I knew it - Sharon Drew gave me here most current description of this point, so I've updated it - her words are in italics, just to be totally clear)

The book that’s rocking my world at the moment (there’s always one) is Sharon Drew Morgen’s Selling With Integrity. In it she posits a totally respectful  way of selling – looking at the sales person (and that’s you, whether you think it is or not) as the servant of the buyer (of your product, your ideas, your recommendations). Their (your, our) job is to manage the internal, off line decisions they need to make to help them all buy in to a new solution, or to change.

According to Morgen, we’ve always focused sales on our product and the buyer’s need, and then we’ve sat and waited while they took their time returning. We’ve never known how to enter the buyer’s private, internal world. Morgen has a model that will give us the ability to manage this.

Buyers object, Morgen says, because we are pushing data, and price, and our needs and selling patterns, too early on in the buyer’s buying decision. So they defend themselves.

So I go: What if objections don’t live in isolation? What if we’re making them by pushing our own agenda?

I wonder how much further we might get if we just work with people where they are…

(NB I sent Sharon Drew some fan mail, and she tells me that Selling with Integrity is terribly out of date – her most up-to-date thinking is in Buying Facilitation®. I’m gonna download it and have a look… Keep you posted.)

How have you found respecting where people are to be more effective than trying to persuade?

***

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

Links to books are often to Amazon for convenience and aren’t affiliate links (i.e. I don’t make any money from them). I’d much rather you ordered from an independent bookseller. If you’re in the UK, phone Kirsty the friendly bookseller at Westbourne Books on+44 1202 768626 – nine times out of ten she’ll get the book in the post to you within 24 hours. Tell her I referred you – it’ll make her laugh. (Again – I’m not on commission – she’s just my best book enabler…)

Recent posts:

~ The importance of energy in presentations

~ Teams not herds

~ Looking after your voice

How alive are your listeners?

Smart presentation choice four: pitch your energy 5% above where the group is

The brilliant Michael Breen taught me that you should leave people more alive than when you started.

As the speaker it’s your job to be the most awake person in the room.

Pitching your energy at 50% above where they group is is too much, unless you have ambitions to be a cheesy motivational speaker, in which case you need a recording of ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ and a big dark stage to run up on to.

The natural direction of closed systems is entropy. That means its your job to guard against the natural sleepy pull of sitting in a group.

5% means you’re not so far way from where the group is at that they can’t connect with you, but not so low as to allow entropy to set in.

This is not an expert science. You don’t get out your energy meter, get a reading of each participant, find the mean, and set your output at 4.69% to 5.12%. It’s more of a way of using your thinking to engage your physiology in a way that’s useful.

This is not a one-off thing either – the group has a powerful pull on you, too. You have to keep 5% above where they are at all times. If you do this well they will rise to meet you as you raise your energy again.

This way you leave the group more awake than when you met them.

Something most speakers can’t lay claim to.

What’s your experience of speakers with great or not-so-great energy levels?

***

(This is part of a series of posts about how to develop presentation superpowers by making eight smart choices. This is choice number four.)

Like what you’ve read? Want to keep up-to-date with my articles without having to remember to visit this website? Sign up for email updates to have every post arrive straight in your inbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re not sure what subscribing entails, click here for my plain English explanation.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook if we’re friends or LinkedIn if we’ve met professionally.

Recent posts:

~ Teams not herds

~ Looking after your voice

~ Speaking It Real – A Challenge For Professional Speakers