I am traveling home after a grueling week of UK pinball, meaning I have spent three days this week in London and therefore made 6 trips up and down the country. Today’s trip to the big smoke was to rehearse a bid team for an m62 STAT. Their presentation is on Monday and today was the final dress rehearsal stage of the process. As sometimes happens the team had decided to remove the clicks in the presentation, feeling that it would be too distracting for the audience for them to constantly be clicking during the presentation. This happens a lot. Making the shift from old style bullet point presentations (Presentations With Visuals) to modern visual communications (Visual Presentations) is difficult; but on the whole, worth the effort.

The Audience Visual Assimilation Control Device (or clicker) is the tool we use to control the pace of visual information flowing into the audiences’ visual cortexes. Our voice is the primary source for phonetic information and one would hope we are already in control of that! By putting the presenter in control of both visual information and phonetic information, we encourage Dual Encoding, which is where the Working Memory (Central Executive) processes the same information on two channels simultaneously. This is what drives the increase in both attention and retention that marks our presentations as different from the old style of death by PowerPoint. I guess that makes the presenter the Audience Phonetic Assimilation Control Device!

While it’s clearly more effective (we have measured recall to be 3-4 times that of old style Death by PPT) it is a new skill for many of our presenters. It often takes a leap of faith to trust us and abandon their anxieties and their prejudices. It does at first feel uncomfortable having to make all those clicks – but only the presenter is really aware of them; to the audience it just becomes a seamless flow of information. If we get it right the audience shouldn’t be able to recall whether the information was visual, phonetic or both.

Happily, after 18 years of coaching people through this we are pretty good at convincing them that it’s the right thing to do. I am not sure that makes it any less terrifying for them, but it does mean we have to re-animate the slides overnight tonight… Thank God for designers who are prepared to work long hours…

I’ve been thinking about the benefits to teachers or trainers of making their presentations more effective. Clearly for sales people it’s about winning more business, more profitably with less effort, but what about if you are not selling? I know, it’s a strange concept for someone like me who finds it difficult to open his mouth without pitching something, a project, an idea, or a joke but its true some people have to teach.

So why would you want your presentations to be more effective if you are teaching? Better attention from your students, higher levels of engagement, better levels of comprehension, shorter lecture times. Or how about a more erudite approach:

“Less extraneous cognitive load increases the students available free cognitive load for information synthesis thus allowing better and faster building of schema necessarily increasing information retention and recall”

But the thought train led me to recall the best lecture I have ever had. Professor Smith at Nottingham University in September 1987 gave a lecture on standard distribution.. I know I didn’t want to go either but.. he started by having an orderly bring an armchair in the lecture theatre and said it was for later (Visual Cognitive Dissonance ™ at work dear reader, we all listened ) and then said he had two proofs to show us and proceeded to show us a premise and through a process of Induction (one type of mathematical proof the other principal one being Direct) and 6 chalkboards of equations that ended in the proof with a large QED written next to it.. “et voila” he said.. 45 mins into a 50 min lecture.

“Everybody got that?” He said and then rubbed out all but the first and last lines and said “and now for proof number two, For this you will need an armchair”, he pointed, “and a large brandy” which he revealed from under the counter, he sat in the chair took a sip of brandy and said.. “After an hour or so of contemplation like thus.. you will in actual fact discover that the conclusion is entirely obvious.. class dismissed..”

OMG..  Best lecturer I have ever seen and the best lecture I have ever seen and makes me think that actually the question ‘So why would you want your presentations to be more effective if you are teaching?’

Is the wrong one, it should be:

So why wouldn’t you want your presentations to be more effective if you are teaching?

And the answer is:

“After an hour or so of contemplation like thus.. you will in actual fact discover that the conclusion is entirely obvious.. class dismissed..”

Ineffective teaching is an oxymoron.. or perhaps the practice of morons!

Today I got the feedback from the audience:

Most valuable key learning point or take away action:

• Less is better
• A reinforcement of how I use PowerPoint
• Gave a good push towards the bin to lengthy PP presentations
• No bullet points – diagrams are king
• Relevance and engagement
• Memorable aspect of presentations
• Word Interpretations
• All of it – but probably dissonance
• A totally new approach to how I do my presenting
• No bullet points

And so the lesson is one I know, but had forgotten, you can’t judge your own performance! Only the audiences’ opinion counts. It’s actually a fundamental tenant of our Killer Presentations course:  you don’t learn by performing but by watching and listening to other people performing the same material. As ultimately the people who count in a presentation are the audience then only the audience’s perspective on the performance is important.

We, the presenters, are always either too critical or too positive rarely do we give ourselves a balanced appraisal.

The feedback is like a school report and this one has room from improvement – 11/12 isn’t 100% and there were, I’m sure, more than 12 people in the room!

If you enjoyed reading this blog post please share it using the buttons below. 

In anticipation of a new blog.. here is one I wrote in 2009.. watch this space.. comments please!

• Don’t use speaker notes.
• Don’t write scripts.
• Don’t wear white socks.
• Why? Because you will come across as an amature!

Occasionally when presenters use a script they end up concentrating on it more than on the audience, which is a recipe for disaster. Presentations need to be dynamic and audience-centered. A script, almost by definition, prevents dynamism by compelling you to follow it. Therein lies the real problem..

When you use a script you ignore your slides, when you ignore your slides you drive a wedge between phonetic information (you) and visual information (the screen). That prevents Dual Encoding (understanding by the audience of what they hear and what they see at the same time).

Unless you are very, very, very good at presenting using a script won’t work well. (A professional actor can sometimes pull it off, and some TV presenters can read an auto-cue and make it look natural, but one only needs to see the show Have I Got News for You in the UK to see the difference between a professional and an amateur.)

So why do people do it? Well, like a number of things that people do to help when they are stressed, it’s easy. You have been reading since you were 3 or 4, and you can do it in your sleep (well, OK not really but it is easy). Reading is easy, and so using a script to help overcome stress is a popular approach – especially when your brain chemistry is being altered by that wonderful survival drug adrenalin.

Those that can do; those that can’t… read a script.

The art of competence

What are you good at? Chess, cooking, squash, sailing, wine appreciation, business, presenting or perhaps selling? One thing is for sure – you are probably not the best at all of them.

How good do you need to be to deliver an effective presentation about any of these subjects? Certainly not world class. Competent is the word that springs to my mind. You don’t need to be the best – just better than the average of the group. I have given presentations on all of the subjects above, but I am clearly not the best at any of them. The secret is to know that you don’t need to be.

• Don’t pretend you know something you don’t – the expert may be in the audience
• Don’t start by saying you don’t know something (they don’t know you are not an expert)
• Explain why you have credibility in the subject

Most of the time when we are asked to coach presenters, particularly presenters for large pitch presentations, they are far from experienced expert presenters. In fact, more often than not, they are not even the content experts. They do however know more about their company and its products and services than the prospect.

Last month, I delivered the first webinar of its kind: a live broadcast of the presenter (in this case, me!), delivering a presentation – in front of my slides.

This truly is breakthrough technology as delivering a webinar in this way has never been possible before. Being able to see the presenter as well as the slides keeps audiences engaged, and makes presentations far more effective. This really has the potential to completely revolutionise the way webinars are delivered in the future.

The webinar explained how and why businesses should be using video content to drive sales, and just what the latest technology is capable of. But don’t worry if you missed it – you can watch the recording here!

“I wish I knew then what I know now.”

Partly because last weekend I spent a heart-aching evening watching my scout troop – 14-18 years old – as they struggled to cope with the dress and demeanour of their female counter-parts at a barn dance. But mostly because I have been recording the presentation for the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) for first year undergraduates to try and encourage active learning rather than passive participation.

Although it is a cliché, I do wish I had had this knowledge back when I was a student – life would have been so much easier had I really understood how to learn.

This is a reversal of another kind for me since I generally teach or sell ideas, rather than teach audiences how to learn. But my experience in making content engaging and memorable also applies to those trying to remember what they have been taught.

Here is a mnemonic device called CRAVE I use in presentations:

• Chunking: Break the information down to manageable chunks
• Relevance: People learn what they need to, if they see no need, they don’t learn it
• Association: Storytelling, case studies, fables or parables, essentially linking ideas together.
• Visualisation: Enabling the audience to spread cognitive load across multiple information processing systems
• Elaboration: Repetition or rehearsal both rote and elaborate.

My wife and I use these techniques to help our kids study and I am now beginning to apply them to teaching scouting skills, however, thinking through how you would apply these processes during a university course has been an interesting experience.

A common understanding of the learning process bridges the gap between teacher and student.

Nobody taught me how to learn, did they teach you? Why not? Why don’t we take time to teach people how to encode and apply information? When I work with presenters, I naturally practice the techniques I am teaching. Now that I am spending more time teaching in the non-commercial world of scouts, I’m finding the need to teach learning skills simply as a way of explaining my actions.

So here is how I explain learning as a three stage process:

• Attention – kind of obvious, you can’t learn something you didn’t pay attention to, so we create intentional gaps in information (visual cognitive dissonance) to keep the audience engaged. I encourage students to not only question what they are being taught, but also why they are being taught it – an essential step in the learning process.
• Synthesis – is the process of moving the information you are paying attention to into your long term memory. It’s not a linear process. You must break down the whole subject into chunks and associate the pieces to existing, relevant information already stored in your long term memory. Processing the information on more than one cognitive level – visualization – and finally the echo – repeating these activities to firm up the new information’s place in our LTM.
• Retrieval – the final stage of learning is creating the capacity to share and use information. The ability to recite facts doesn’t really demonstrate learning – you must be able to use or those facts to truly benefit from the learning. Retrieval also prevents memory loss! Clearly, the more you use information the less you forget it.

Understanding the learning process is an essential part of designing effective presentations. As I work more with the scouts, and now with university students – tough audiences both – I realize how just how much this holds true. Please give me your thoughts on the matter – and your suggestions for making sure people remember the message you are trying to deliver.

Crave Learning Video

For the first time in twelve years of running m62, I am producing something using a Mac, a MacBook Air to be precise. Because of this I am expecting some bitter comeback from my designers, who have always used high-powered PCs in the studio.

Because most of our clients use PCs (at least for work), it has always been sensible to produce our presentations on the same platform. The last thing a client needs is his m62 PowerPoint^TM presentation collapsing halfway through a major event because we developed it in a different environment. You shouldn’t judge a notebook by its cover, and my MacBook Air seems to be running XP well, but even in this age of (superficial) convergence it is wise to keep in mind the mantra mind the gap when crossing platforms.

My experience at events with presenters has taught me the dangers of assuming absolute compatibility between Mac and PC versions of PowerPoint. As a general precaution, if you are using Mac and Office 2008 we recommend that you run through the presentation on the event hardware before you get in front of the audience and as early as possible. Animations mess up occasionally, especially motion paths, and if you are used to a one-button shiny interface this sort of glitch can take quite a while to fix. It is also always worth clicking through each and every slide in your deck the first time you open the presentation; different machines cache animations at different rates, and a once-through helps to smooth out any ‘sticky’ movement when you get up for the real thing. If I encounter any other cross-platform issues, this blog will be the first to know.

A case in point. Here I am in Atlanta to deliver a seminar to a potential client and I’ve just discovered that my animations are all screwed up. Yes, happy with the new MacBook Air, but also relieved that I got here a day early . . .

MacBook Air