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…

Staying fresh, when you’re not!

Last week I was in New Jersey delivering a training course for a medical services client and ran two courses back to back. This is something I hadn’t done in a long time and I had forgotten how hard it was to maintain enthusiasm for long periods of time.

Groucho Marks famously once said “if you can manufacture sincerity you’ve got it made”.  In a presentation I think this should be “if you can manufacture enthusiasm you’ve got it made”. Audiences respond to enthusiasm better than any other presenting characteristic, but it is hard to maintain. Adrenalin can help but four days on your feet in front of an audience, continually practicing what you are preaching is exhausting even when you love what you do.

Here are my tips for marathon presenting.

• Take a break (find time away from the delegates)
• Good night’s sleep (don’t stay out late the night before)
• Change the delivery of the material slightly each time

Best advice is to plan a days’ break in between. I am beginning to forget what I have said during each course as they are all beginning to run together in my head.

Where to stand in relation to the screen. During the courses I ran a few weeks ago in New Jersey, I was asked by delegates where the screen should be and where should the presenter should stand. Firstly, we recommend that the screen is in the centre of the audience’s focus, and not off to one side, even though some AV and set designers like this layout. You need to make sure that as many of the audience as possible can clearly see most or all of the screen. In general try to get the biggest screen you can. However, screens can be too big. We once ran a presentation for Jaguar Cars in the factory and built a screen 12m wide. In hindsight it was too much. In most situations you are limited by the height of the ceiling and so too big is unlikely to be an issue. You want the audience’s default focus to be on the screen. Looking at the screen needs to be comfortable for the audience; heads craned back or to the side can become uncomfortable, and people will fidget and stop listening. Make sure that the bottom of the screen can be seen by those in the back row, always ideally placed in the vertical centre. In the West (and some of the East) the human eye moves across a still image in a ‘Z’ – top-left to top-right to bottom-left and finally bottom-right. So on the whole we suggest that you stand on the left hand side of the screen (viewed from the front). You will find that the audience will then look at you just before they look at the screen each time. This makes it easier to judge the information flow. Occasionally with multiple presenters we have run shows with them on alternate sides which works well. My pet hate however is dual screens. So difficult to manage. From a set design point of you they look great but from an audience focus point of view they are a disaster. The presenter can only be close to one and so if I am looking at the other how do I see their cues? We sometimes setup for repeater screens but then we generally use picture in picture with a camera on the presenter so that the audience have a fighting chance. I know this wasn’t a simple answer it does depend on a lot of factors: size and shape of room, acoustics & sound system, size of audience, available technology, lighting, time of day, duration, presenter size, skill .. the list goes on but if in doubt use one screen as large as you can and stand on they left of it.

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.

Right Pitch, Right Time!

First, let me pose a question. Think back to the last time you purchased something that involved choosing between two suppliers. How about a kitchen or a carpet? Did you confuse the need to buy this item with the choice of who to buy it from? “I haven’t spoken to Bob for a while, what can I buy off him? Oh, I need a new carpet” is, let’s face it, an unusual train of thought. The normal thinking process would be: decide I need something, decide what I need, then select the vendor.

When we are doing an m62 STAT project we often run up against this issue; salespeople prepare presentations and don’t recognize that the first question that needs to be asked is, “What are we selling and to whom?” For example, I am working on a pitch for a client in the IT sector, who is hoping to be selected when a client outsources a critical part of their IT infrastructure. One option is for the audience of this pitch to do nothing (i.e. not to outsource at all), however, a more likely option is to select a partner and outsource it to one of four companies who are capable of doing it.

The $6 million question (or in his case $60 million, since this is the value of the contract) is ‘has the audience decided that outsourcing is the only viable option or not?’ Clearly, ‘why outsource?’ is a different argument to ‘why outsource to us?’ We always treat them as separate questions and usually separate presentations dealt with in order. The major point of discussion is usually concerned with who the audience is for each presentation, since the pitch to Senior Management is different from the pitch to the senior IT people, who are probably not going to like an argument that says, “we can do this better and cheaper than you have been able to do :)”

It often makes sense to link the two value propositions. In this case the answer to the first question may be ‘cost savings’ and ‘an improvement in service levels’. It may be fairly easy to see how the outsourcing company would get the cost savings from outsourcing at all, but it may be dangerous to argue that this is the reason to select the vendor unless the difference between us and the competition is sufficient to make a difference, (e.g. ‘in house option $100m, outsource $60m, outsource to us $59m’ doesn’t really work). If they do argue this, the proof is different in each presentation; in the first presentation the proof is that they can do it cheaper than the in-house team, in the second they need to demonstrate that they are cheaper than the competition.

Improved service levels are just as difficult for the same reasons, for each of the global outsourcers are pretty good at delivering a service, it is after all what they do. Proving they can do it better than in-house is fine but proving they can beat each other is difficult. Much better to play this in the first section but to make a different argument in the competitive pitch. For example, we can provide much better analytics than the competition, which gives the in-house team more control over the service quality, a win for everybody.

Or we could just sell them some carpets…

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.

About every other course somebody asks me about how Visual Cognitive Dissonance (VCD) sits with Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). My tongue-in-cheek response is that VCD is based on science and, as far as I am aware, is consistent with all the major religions, and so almost certainly consistent with the minor ones such as NLP.

Why do I compare NLP to a religion? Looking at the research, it’s at best inconclusive and at worst labeled as pseudoscience. Linguistics isn’t my main calling, but I’m pretty convinced that the fundamental tenants of NLP may be suspect. In fact I love the following quote from the founders of NLP:

We have no idea about the “real” nature of things, and we’re not particularly interested in what’s “true”. The function of modelling is to arrive at descriptions which are useful

Bandler, R. and Grinder, J. (1979), Frogs into Princes: Neuro-linguistic Programming, Moab, Utah: Real People Press
I also love the publisher! Moab, Utah…makes me think of the brilliant musical for the non-pious, “The Book of Mormon” – also beautifully relevant for this observation.

An act of faith

NLP requires an act of faith, and most believers aren’t particularly interested in a debate about whether their belief system is true or not. And, some may be offended by people like me saying rude things about their belief system. Since I have some friends who are NLP practitioners, I am careful not to offend these people by blaspheming. I do, however, wonder what NLP hell looks, sounds or feels like…

Like all belief systems that have bright, intelligent followers, NLP has to be consistent with empirical evidence. It may fail the scientific method but much of the surrounding advice is basically sound. “See the world from the others point of view” is a pretty much a fundamental NLP concept, but I’m sure its one of Coveys 7 habits (Think Win Win) and it’s pretty much in line with Phase 1 of Killer Presentations, which makes it just plain common sense.

If you want to believe that modifying your language can help you communicate effectively, then I’m in agreement with you—if you need to call that NLP, well each to his own. I’m pretty sure that most religions include some degree of practical self-help. None of this should be thrown out just because the basic tenant seems unlikely.

Most courses I have seen based on NLP would be just as valuable without validating the content with the NLP philosophy. Given the lack of evidence, I would drop it and stick to actual science. There is a remarkable amount of research that can inform most of what I have seen passed off as NLP.

So if you’re interested in this debate, take a look at some NLP literature and ask yourself how similar it sounds and feels like an advertisement for a religion.  I would love to hear your thoughts on this one. If you have observations, I’d love to read and respond to them. If you have statements of belief, I really don’t want to offend anyone and probably won’t respond.

I recently delivered the Killer Presentations course to a group of financial service industry sales professionals in New York City. An important learning in this training is to trim the information in your presentation to include only the most relavent data you want your audience to remember. A few days later, I got the following question from an attendee about all the other information that needs to be delivered eventually:

If the sales presentation delivers 4 or 5 key points you want the audience to know, what’s the best way to communicate the much weightier technical detail that lies behind those key points?

The first question is do you really need to get into technical detail in the presentation? When I am teaching kids to sail, I need them to know that to turn the boat, they must move the tiller in the opposite direction.  Do they need to understand the mathematics of how the rudder creates turning momentum on the stern of the boat?  No.

How much detail does the audience need to understand your value proposition?

People often include too much technical detail in their presentations. I’m guilty of it. When we deliver the course it’s often hard to judge how much of the science and research behind the Killer Presentations Philosophy is appropriate. Some sales people don’t care how or why it works, as long as they close more business using the techniques. Others need more proof than my recommendation to change the habits they’ve developed over 20 years of presenting.

Determining how much to deliver is difficult and dynamic based on the audience, their level of understanding of your industry/product/service; the number or presentations they’ve already seen; and the amount of time you’ve spent educating them in advance. Audience size matters as well, the bigger the group, the greater the chance of “pockets of interest” that drive information flow to minority groups in the audience. Meaning, time consuming questions that are only of interest to one or two people in a big team. You just lost the majority of your audience explaining how the sausage is made.

Over-prepare, share as needed, rinse, repeat.

My advice is to develop more material than you need, then take your cue from the audience as to how much to present. We preach to the students in our Killer Presentations course that they must refresh their recall on important information one day, one week and one month after hearing it to ensure it stays in their memory.

If you can get your prospects to review the material (repetition) and think about something new but associated (elaboration), we know recall and application increase. In which case having more detail in the follow up communication is extremely useful.

It also helps to provide that content in a variety of media, including PDFs, videos, podcasts—whatever forms your audience will absorb best. Also consider the impact of the information flow. People learn more if they can work at their own pace and journey through the material at will. Self directed learning requires more content than a simple linear information flow.

In summary:

• Give them what they need
• Give them control over the quantity and depth
• Give them multi modal information
• Sequence delivery over time to improve recall

Should you produce handouts for your presentation?

The process for my company’s newsletter allows me to edit and vet before it is published. It’s a process that never quite works and this month pretty much failed, hence I get the uncomfortable job of publicly disagreeing with the team.

Their position in the article “PowerPoint Handouts” (in my opinion) is fundamentally wrong. The short answer to the lead question isn’t that there are pros and cons to the use of handouts at all. It’s a resounding NO NO NO.

In the last 10 years, I have presented (conservative estimate) about 1500 times – and on how many of those occasions have I printed off a set of slides and handed them out to the audience? NEVER. Not once or twice, not occasionally. NEVER.

Why print and hand out your slides to the audience?

Let’s ignore the real answers – habit, fulfilling someone else’s expectations, ignorance etc. – and let’s instead look at the possible intelligent responses.

• To help the audience follow the presentation
• To help the audience remember the presentation
• To help the audience pass the information on to others
• To save the audience from the effort of taking notes
• To allow them to consider the content ahead of the presentation

Now clearly, an effective presentation has to be engaging and memorable to achieve its objectives. Lets assume you have a presentation that has been designed to be both using Visual Cognitive Dissonance (VCD) and Passive Mnemonic Processing (PMP):

1. To help the audience follow the presentation: Handouts distract the audience and encourage them to jump ahead and ignore the flow of information you have carefully constructed. If an audience member has a question, I want them to ask me, not flip back or ahead to check out my slides. More importantly, if the slides use visual cognitive dissonance, they miss everything important if they’re not paying attention to the actual presentation.
2. To help the audience remember the presentation: Passive mnemonic processing is a technique used to lock ideas into the audiences’ memory. Unfortunately for the handouts, this technique requires a human to effectively synthesize the information for the audience. If they have the option to think about it later (when they read the notes in the bath that night… and other myths!) why would they bother?
3. To help the audience pass the information on to others: If you really want them to deliver your message for you (really!?) then you will need more than a printed copy of the slides. They need to be trained on the material and to rehearse the presentation. For me, I always look for the opportunity to deliver the message again to a different audience. Why would I undermine that by allowing someone to interpret my message and my material?
4. To save the audience from the effort of taking notes: No, the act of taking notes forces them to synthesis the information, preventing them from taking notes is presenter suicide. Believing that giving a copy of the slides will increase the chances of them making notes is stupid. Easy answer: give them note pads and pens!
5. To allow them to consider the content ahead of the presentation: This just defeats the purpose of the presentation doesn’t it? Might as well send a briefing document (which IMHO is what most PowerPoint files actually are) and facilitate a debate afterwards. This might be an effective meeting but it’s not a presentation.

Printed slides versus printed support material

What if the question was not about the use of handouts, but “printed support material” (e.g. brochures). Well that’s different. Now, the m62.net article makes more sense – but even here they miss the most important point that of using Information sequencing to promote synthesis and recall.

Teaching Presentations

m62 courses have a workbook, most of which is designed to encourage the delegate to write or draw copies of what they see and learn as a means to synthesize the material. This is one of the 5 passive mnemonic processes we teach – actively repeating a diagram by drawing it as a form of rehearsal. Pre-course material covers some of the syllabus, but it does so using different examples, diagrams and visuals. Post-course material is designed to improve recall, encourage transition and embed the learning. None of this contains printed copies of the slides.

Tools to encourage the use of information learned are essential, processes, tick sheets, forms, spread sheets are all exceptional ways of encouraging post-course synthesis. None are as useless or as pointless as printed versions of the presentation slides.

One final comment, on the “it can’t hurt” argument for handouts during training. Rubbish! It can and it does alter the students’ propensity to listen, engage and therefore synthesize the information. They can and will make effective teaching harder. The only advantage of printing a copy of your slides is that its easy, it doesn’t require the thought necessary for a proper solution, it is ineffective precisely because it doesn’t take effort or thought to do. It’s at best lazy and at worst criminal.

Sales Presentations

The single biggest reason for not having handouts in a sales situation is that the day you give it to a prospect is the day before they give it to your competitors.

True story: It is much easier working out how to position for a sale if you know what the competition is going to say. I helped a client bid on a $1B data center project against IBM, after reviewing one of IBM’s recent data center pitches courtesy of a friend of a friend. I am sure when the IBM salesperson gave his slides to his prospect it was with the best intentions of winning the deal, instead it cost them dearly.

The second reason is that more often than not, the biggest challenge in making a sale is finding the excuse to talk to the prospect on a regular basis. The more printed material he has the less likely he is to call or meet with you. Your chances of closing are best when you are seated in front of the decision maker. Getting there is the trick and printed versions of your pitch take away your value at best and at worst enable to pitch your wares for you. Not smart selling by any means.

I should stop here. To me, those reasons alone make the case. However, the m62.net article suggests an executive summary if you are going to leave something behind. Again, I disagree.

• Every piece should sell – any printed material should focus on the pain the client is experiencing while leaving an invitation and solid reason to contact you.
• It should pass the “3-second rule” – that is, glance at the page for 3 seconds, did you get you see a something that would leave you wanting more information? If not, then it is destined for the bin unread.

Handing out your slides is never a good idea

There is a case for some pre-presentation material and for some post-presentation material but it’s probably better as a rich media communication not a paper based, self-explanatory slide dump.

If you have a presentation that doesn’t use visual cognitive dissonance or passive mnemonic processing, and therefore is self-explanatory and poorly structured, then I suggest you don’t have a presentation. At best, you have a script; at worst you have a complete waste of everybody’s time. Have confidence in your message and your singular ability to deliver it effectively.

If a picture paints a thousand words, why do we use thousands of words and one picture (pie chart!) in our presentations?

When, how and why should we use icons in a visual presentation?

Iconography is often associated with art or religion (Cross, Star of David, Ichthus  (little fish shape used by Christians during times of religious persecution now seen on the back of cars) but the idea of using a small image as a symbol has a long tradition.

Modern usage can be blamed on Apple, the mass of computer graphic interfaces needing icons for every application and function at your fingertips. But, in essence the benefit of using icons is that they bypass the language centers of the brain. They speed up information transmission and reduce the amount of cognitive load needed to assimilate information, and idea or concept. Think about using a computer that displays text in a foreign language—on the whole you’d still be able to do quite a bit because the program and function icons all transcend the language barrier.

Iconography in Presentations

An icon is a type of symbol—an age-old way of eliminating the confusion delivered from the imprecise nature of language. In a presentation we use iconography to do four things:

• Allow the simplification of complex ideas. (Build on simple ideas to create more complex ones)
• Avoid confusion
• Speed up information transmission
• Create Visual Cognitive Dissonance (causing the audience to question what the icon represents)

Presentation iconography, when done well, is part of developing a ‘Visual Lexicon’ which is a collection of non-language dependent symbols that convey concepts, ideas or consequences, between presenter and audience. At a basic level that includes:

• Tick marks
• Cross marks
• Company logos
• STOP signs etc

These all work because they reduce cognitive load (mental effort) by bypassing the phonological loop (phonetic rehearsal system inside your head) therefore passing information 100 times faster than text (or speech). Familiar icons like the above are good practice but must be graphically consistent (a series or green ticks followed by a red one will invoke dissonance).

Do You See What I See?

But there are issues, the biggest of which is the assumption that icon meanings are as clear to the audience as they are to the presenter. As with all lexicons, it needs to be shared if it’s to work.

The Ichthus example above started life as a secret symbol, a way of communicating only to the people who knew about it. Many icons are culturally or contextually dependent. For example, in the UK we often use the Lloyds quality logo to represent quality, but across the pond it doesn’t translate.

Some are references that require contextual interpretation. My favorite line in any song is Don Henley’s Boys of Summer,  “I saw a dead head sticker (symbol of 60’s hippy anti-establishment movement) on a Cadillac (symbolizing all that Capitalism has to offer.)” While I love everything that line says about life, growing up and the selfishness of age, I tried to explain it to some of my scouts the other day and completely failed, they didn’t get the complex ideas represented by the simple symbols.

The moral to the story is that every time you show an audience an icon or for that matter any kind of symbol, its worth commenting on what it is, what it stands for and how you are using it.

So my top 5 tips for icons are:

• Use as much as you can
• State what they are
• Be contextually consistent
• Be graphically consistent
• Be sensitive (Swastikas can be used to represent lots of ideas but they pretty much always going to offend somebody)