Making an impact with presentations

Communication competencies and skills are often considered of lower priority than technical ones by scientists and technical specialists. Yet they are critical to professional success. I was recently involved in organising a meeting concentrating on communication skills for the British Occupational Hygiene Society (BOHS) – professionals who specialise in the assessment and control of health hazards in the workplace. The first half concentrated on report writing and the BOHS guidance on report writing that was published last year and was led by one of it’s authors, Adrian Hirst of Manchester University. During the second half of the meeting I ran a session on presentation design.

• Occupational hygienists have to make presentations in a number of different situations, Including:
• Presenting results, conclusions and recommendations from surveys to management and workers
• Talks on occupational hygiene to various types of audience
• “Toolbox talks”
• Presenting papers and keynotes at conferences

How the presentation is designed and delivered is important if you want to make an impact and a good impression. So it’s worth putting some effort into presentation design. For me the overriding principle is

never prepare and deliver a presentation that you wouldn’t want to sit through yourself!

Careful thought needs to be devoted to a number of key elements, illustrated in the following diagram

The format of the presentation should be adapted to the type of situation and, very importantly, the particular audience. What’s appropriate for a meeting where results are presented to management or Safety Representatives is unlikely to be the same as if you were presenting the same results as a paper at a conference of your peers

Features of good presentations include:

• Clear objectives
• Well structured
• An appropriate amount of content for time available
• Content pitched at the right level for the audience)
• Good materials - including well designed slides and handouts
• Clear, interesting delivery

The key steps in preparing to deliver a presentation are :

1. Define your objective – what you can realistically achieve in the time available. When doing this take into account

a. The audience – makeup, prior knowledge, what they want or need from you

b. The time available

2. Design your content – prepare an outline . It’s usually best to avoid using Powerpoint (or other presentation software) to do this. Use a pen and paper to sketch out your ideas and then tipdy them up and rearrange them if necessary.

3. Design your materials – prepare good quality slides and handouts. Think about their content and how they should look before you start typing

4. Practice and rehearse and then deliver

The standard of visual aids used during most presentations, particularly Powerpoint slides, is often quite poor. This is probably because little though is given to the design of the materials and insufficient time devoted to preparing them. We spent a major part of the workshop on slide design and I’ll be covering this in another post in the near future.

Standup routine on slide design

This very amusing short video of a routine by comedian Don McMillan illustrates in a very effective way some common traps people fall into when designing presentation slides.

Which of Don’s mistakes do you commonly make?

Monty Python's guide to creativity

I came across this entertaining talk given by John Cleese to a conference in Belgium on “Creativity” via Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen Blog.

I guess many people associate “creativity” as something that artistic types have (or need). But it’s not restricted to the arts. We all need to be creative from time to time, whether it’s producing a painting, writing a poem, working out a scientific theory, designing a bridge or something more mundane such as pulling together a presentation or writing a report.

In his talk, John Cleese stresses a number of key points:

• “sleeping on a problem” can help to solve it
• leaving something for a while after it’s finished and going back to review or revise it can often allow you to improve the original – this ties in with my own experience. When working on a report I try to leave it for a day or two, and then reread before I issue it. I usually find there are things that I can improve.
• the key to creativity is to avoid interruptions -
• “we don’t get our ideas from our laptop” – ideas come from the unconscious – to be creative we need to “get off the grid”

His main conclusion is that in order to be creative you need to create a “tortoise enclosure,” with “boundaries of space and time” to provide an atmosphere that is safe and free from the threat of interruption. Again I can relate to this. When working on a problem, trying to think how to approach a report or some course notes, or problems associated with running a business, it can be difficult to think straight when working in the office. I find that things often become clearer if I get outdoors and go for a walk out on the moors or in the woods away from everything. I guess that’s my way of creating a “tortoise enclosure”.  There’s probably also an additional benefit. 

According to John Medina, the author of “Brain Rules”,  exercise boosts brain power. So although disappearing for a few hours out into the countryside may seem like “skiving off”. In fact it can be quite the opposite – a way of enhancing creativity and productivity. Workaholics who anchor themselves to the desk are probably fooling themselves that they’re achieving more.

Making training stick

“Made to stick” by Chip and Dan Heath – a book widely recommended on various blogs on presentation and management. Its about how to get ideas to “stick”, and the principles outlined can be applied in various contexts, but the one I’m interested in is teaching and training.The core idea in the book is that to make ideas stick the message need to have a number of attributes, summed up by the acronym SUCCES. They should be

• Simple
• Unexpected
•  Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• use Stories

The last of these is particularly important as stories usually involve concrete examples, can get to the core of the idea and can be framed to include unexpected and emotional aspects. The Heath’s practice what they preach with stories (lots of examples) forming the basis for the book.The occupational hygiene profession is not very good at making things “sticky” – the very name we use for our discipline is perhaps a good example of this!

Although we often can work out what our core ideas and principles are, we are not always very good at using the other aspects discussed by the Heath’s to put them across to an uninterested audience we are trying to influence, whether management, workers or regulators. For example, I was discussing the COSHH principles of good control practice with a colleague a few days ago, and we both agreed that while the principles are good and sensible, they are anything but “sticky” and its perhaps not surprising that very few people, including many general safety practitioners, have not really heard of them. From a training and teaching perspective, making ideas “sticky” is important if the learners are to remember what you’ve tried to get across, and the SUCCES principles can be applied to make the instruction more memorable.

Making things “simple” doesn’t mean “dumbing down” but making sure ideas, however complex, are put across in a way that can be understood by learners new to the principle. Things that seem obvious to an expert need to be carefully explained. This can be made easier if the ideas are illustrated by concrete examples. Every good trainer will have “war stories” that can be used to illustrate application and implementation of the principles. Case studies too are types of stories and can be based on concrete examples and are a good way of getting the learners to think through the principles. The stories and case studies clearly need to be credible if they are to be seen as relevant by the learners.

The idea of using emotion might seem a bit airy fairy but is really about making the ideas relevant to the learners by showing them that what they are learning is relevant to them, either as individuals or as part of a group. Unexpectedness is probably the most difficult principle to apply – I think that it can only be used sparingly – you can’t make everything unexpected. However its a good way of waking up the audience and grabbing attention and can be particularly useful during awareness type training, particularly where the audience might be uninterested, and can help to get the emotional “buy in” you are trying to achieve.

One thing isn’t covered in the book, which is particularly important in making training and teaching “sticky”. The book focuses on getting a message across and making it stick by presenting people with information i.e. by presenting the information verbally or in writing. Learning isn’t just about listening and reading- quite the contrary. People learn best by doing – sometimes finding things out for themselves or reinforcing the points put across in presentations and written material. Perhaps some of the ideas in the book could be applied to practical exercises. As I’ve already mentioned above, they can be applied to designing effective case studies.

So all in all, a useful book. The ideas it contains have certainly stuck with me!

Information overload in presentations

Like most professionals I attend meetings and conferences to keep myself up to date with the latest research, ideas and approaches in my field. Inevitably the presenters use Powerpoint for their presentations and, in most cases, use slides crammed with information – far too much to cover in the short time slots they're allocated. This normally results in them moving through the slides too quickly (so the audience didn’t have time to finish reading the individual slides) or  skipping and missing a number of slides.

Why do they do this?

I think that one of the reasons is that speakers at conferences usually have a limited time slot, but have a lot of information they want to communicate. By cramming information onto slides you reduce the total number and fool yourself into thinking that the amount of material you are trying to get across is manageable in the time available. It’s a little like burying your head in the sand. The problem of too much material disappears – until you try to present it!

Slides should support the presentation – they’re not a substitute for it. However, where they are used they need to be well designed if they are to perform their function effectively. I think that most presenters don’t put too much thought into that aspect of their presentation. They tend to default to using the standard Powerpoint template that focuses on using words, structured as bullets and sub-bullets.

Research has shown that its better to minimise the number of words on a slide and to use pictures or other visuals where possible. I don’t intend to go into it here, but there is a good explanation of the theory in a post on Olivia’s Mitchell’s blog“Speaking about Presentation” which includes a summary of some recent work byChris Atherton, a cognitive psychologist from the University of Central Lancashire.

Some good advice on slide design is available also available  in a number of books such as Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson, Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and Slideology by Nancy Duarte.

Music lessons for conference organisers

I came across this on aWordPress blog http://returnon.wordpress.com/

I think the speaker makes some good points in his short presentation. Conference organisers everywhere take note!

Turn of that projector!

The best type of learning is active. People learn best by doing, rather than simply listening. Unfortunately too many training course involve sitting and listening to the trainer while watching an endless stream of  poorly designed PowerPoint slides. After a while the audience inevitably starts to lose concentration.

Slides have a role to play in training, but they should be used carefully. They are usually used in a passive way where the trainer talks over the slides. This can be OK for a short while, to introduce concepts or sum up a discussion, but it can get tedious after a while, even if they are well designed.

There are ways of using slides actively. For example by showing pictures on screen which can then be discussed by the class or by using them as the basis of a quiz. But there are plently of other ways of including active elements in a class. For example, brainstorming, exercises, practical demonstrations and role plays.

Introducing variation in courses keeps the audience more involved and interested and breaks up the monotony which can be associated with using one teaching method.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to turn off the projector!

Using Powerpoint in the Classroom

 I spend quite a lot of my time these days teaching and training small groups in a classroom setting. Inevitably this involves making presentations using the default tool – Powerpoint.

As I see it, there are a number of  problems inherent in using  “slideware”, like Powerpoint, in the classroom. These include:

• learning should be active – slideware is passive
• it isn’t good at distributing large amounts of information
• it inhibits spontaneous feedback
• it is not good in conveying information using non-linear paths
• it is not good at recording input from the audience

There are some other problems too. When preparing slides the standard template drives you into producing lists of bullets. This is what Edward Tufte calls the “cognitive style” of Powerpoint. Preparing a presentation using Powerpoint drives you into producing an outline of your talk. The outcome is really a set of speaker notes which is too detailed for the audience.

Faced with slides full of bullets, I find that most people tend to try and reproduce all the points. Their attention  is divided and as they have to concentrate on copying from the slides, so they can’t listen properly to what you’re saying.

Well, they’re the problems I’ve identified, and I’m sure there are others too. What can we do to get over them?

The first thing is to ask yourself whether making a presentation with a stack of slides is the best approach for the class. Active learning, where the learners are engaged, is much more effective than passive techniques where the instructor stands at the front and talks at the class. Consider the alternatives – hands on practicals, exercises, demonstrations, brainstorming, role plays, group work etc. Depending on circumstances it might be viable to incorporate one or more of these into a class. Introducing variation in the teaching methods is always a good idea. To me the best classes are more like a discussion than a lecture.

The second thing to ask is whether having pre-prepared slides is the best visual aid to use. Sometimes its better to revert to the old “chalk and talk” approach using a whiteboard, flip chart or some other active medium. This allows you to be more flexible and draw in and record contributions from the group.

Sometimes there are other options – using models or pieces of equipment you can use for demonstrations, or even pass around.

Where you decide that you need or want to use slideware, there are a number of things you should think about

try and minimise the use of slides. Ask yourself is there another way of getting this across? Use slides only for those points where its really necessary

Remember that slides are free! Break them up. Ideally each slide should focus on one point (although you may want to include some summary slides that pull together the key points, but even then don’t cram too much on one slide – have your summary list on two or more slides if necessary)

Use diagrams and pictures where possible. I’ve attended many presentations where the presenter has slides full of words when a diagram would have been better.  For example, which of the following slides on the structure of the eye would you find most helpful?

Have more slides than you need to cover the main options. This will allow you to be flexible – calling up whichever slide is most appropriate depending on how the discussion progresses. Using Powerpoint’s “presenter view” allows you to do this. Alternatively it may be able to include a menu with hyperlinks into the slide design.

Picture of the eye from http://www.exceloptics.in/newsletter.php

Non-verbal communication

I recently finished reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book “Travels with Herodotus”. I particularly liked the following passage:

“Negusi knew only two expressions n English: “problem” and “no problem”. But using this gibberish we communicated ably in the most fraught circumstances. In conjunction with the wordless signals particular to each human being and which can speak volumes f only we would observe him carefully – drink it in, as it were – two words sufficed for us to feel no chasm between us and made traveling together possible”

To me this sums up the role of non-verbal communication. Its possible to understand each other with using words.

This is missing when communication only takes place in writing – as when we use e-mail, carry out electronic conferencing, when conducting “e-learning” and in other situations where we rely on written and verbal communication only. Without face to face contact it is so easy for things to be misunderstood and misinterpreted because the signals given through gestures, body language etc are missing.

Another problem with e-communication is the asynchronous nature of the conversation. Its like playing correspondence chess – there can be long gaps between each “move” and take a long time to complete something which would be over relatively quickly face to face. It is also very easy for the conversation to move off at tangents, which can be difficult to bring back to the original direction.

And it's important to understand the role of non-verbal communication during presentations too. This is one of the key points made by  Susan Weinschenk,  in her video 5 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People, which I featured in a previous post, and her book 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People. In the video Susan's third point is that "what you say is only part of your message" - how it's said (the intonation) and body language - what she calls "para-linguistics" -  are just as important.

Oscar Wilde on Exams

“In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer“

The curse of Powerpoint

As soon as you put a slide up on screen with words on it - especially bullet points - your audience starts to frantically copy them down. Try and move on and you get one or more requests to keep it on screen longer. Most people do it - in fact I know that I do it myself when I attend presentations by other people - you almost can't help yourself! As a presenter, if you haven't planned for this, and need to move on, it disrupts your flow.

Why do people do this? I've come up with a few reasons:

• The "Comfort factor" - you feel you are achieving something by writing something down
• There is a perception that if there are words on screen they must be important
• Writing down the points does help you to absorb them, but it also means that you're not listening properly to what the speaker is saying (of course that doesn't matter too much is the speaker is simply reading out the points - but that's another story!!)
• Perhaps it's an ingrained habit from school - i.e. copying off the board.

I think that you have to accept that the audience is going to do this. Its unlikely that you will be able to change their habits. But we need to take it into account when planning the presentation.

When using slides for teaching or training, you want to get over key points that you want the audience to write down so that they can remember them. But the whole point of you being there is that the audience should listen to what you have to say (and when teaching or training you need to interact with your audience), and the words on the screen can distract and prevent them listening to you properly. Slides are meant as an aid to your presentation, not a substitute for it (otherwise you might as well just give them copies of your slides). They need to be used effectively. So taking into account my experience of how an audience reacts to slides, the following should be borne in mind when creating a presentation for teaching and training:

• Only use words that are important on slides - use pictures and graphics to illustrate your points
• When introducing concepts, keep the word count on a slide low - insert more slides with fewer words than a few slides containing lots of words
• Use summary slides with bullet points (but not too many per slide) to sum up concepts which you want your audience to write down, and allow them enough time to for the audience to copy them down

A fresh approach to presentation design

I  recently came across a slide deck posted on Slideshare by Chris Atherton. She’s a psychologist and used to be a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Central Lancashire. She’s now working as a User Experience Architect for Numiko ltd

The slides are from a presentation Chris made in April at the Leeds Bettakultcha. According to their website this is:

an evening of short talks accompanied by digital slide presentations. The presenters are all volunteers who have based their talk around something that they are passionate about – which can be absolutely anything.

The format of Bettakultcha talks is 20 slides for 15 seconds each (they transition automatically), and you can talk about anything you want. Chris chose to talk about (what else) psychology.

Too many people use Powerpoint in a bad way – either creating an outline or using it as a script. In either case that results in badly designed, over wordy slides. The slides for a “lecture” type presentation should be visual aids to supplement what the presenter is saying, not to reproduce the talk or act as a teleprompter. They should be visual with minimal words that add to what the speaker is saying. Now this means that if the slides are posted onto Slideshare , where the speaker isn’t present, the slide deck can look pretty meaningless. Chris has got over the problem by annotating the slides with a summary of what she said. The annotations on the slides were added afterwards  so that they make sense to the viewer. They weren’t present on the originals. I’ve noticed that a few people have started to do this and it’s a technique that I’ve started to use with presentations I’ve uploaded to Slideshare.

She hasn’t used Powerpoint – she’s tried something quite different. The slides are hand drawn on an iPad using the “Paper”. It’s a, fresh, original approach. You’d have to be reasonably good at drawing to use it, though.

As well as showing a fresh, innovative approach to slide design, I think that this presentation is a really good example  of how to get a technical topic across to a lay audience in a limited time with well designed slides!

TV News - Lessons for Presenters

Although there are lots of ways these days to keep up with what’s going on in the world, I still tend to watch the news on the TV once or twice a day. News broadcasts are a way of getting information across to people and involves people talking supported by visuals, so they are, in effect, a type of presentation.  And I think there are lessons that can be learnt about presentations from watching the TV news

One of the main problems with most presentations I attend is that the presenter has limited time but uses a deck of Powerpoint slides crammed full of information. In many cases every single point they make is reproduced in a list of bullet points on screen. The speaker isn’t really needed. All the information is on the slides. And because most of the audience will attempt to frantically copy down the words, they don’t hear the speaker, who might as well not be there!

TV news bulletins aren’t like this. The following is a clip from a typical BBC news bulletin.

The bulletin uses lots of visuals – it is TV after all. There are a lot of video clips that illustrate the point but there is no attempt to convert everything that the news presenters say into words. There are some “slides” where key facts are displayed, and one quote from the Prime minister. But they are limited and note how they don’t have much information displayed at any one time.

On the TV News the spoken word is the main way of conveying the information with relevant pictures used to support what is being said, and with limited use of text and graphics. TV news is really meant to be an overview of what’s happening in the world. There isn’t time in a news bulleting to give all the detail. If anyone does want to know more they can turn to other sources much more suited to presenting large amounts of detailed information – such as a newspaper or, these days, websites. With presentations, rather than try to cram everything on slides so the audience can copy them down, provide a handout they can take away.

Presenters can learn  a lot from TV news

• time is limited, so keep to the essential points,
• Use good quality images to support what’s being said,
• use text and graphics sparingly
• there should be minimal text on slides
• provide a handout or references in case the audience wants to know more

Who needs Powerpoint?

I do, but only sometimes.

It seems that everyone expects speakers/trainers/teachers to have a deck of Powerpoint slides to use when they're talking. They're often badly designed and used poorly, but they can be a useful way of making a talk more visual and interesting. However, they can also be a distraction and if overused their impact is reduced.

I probably overuse Powerpoint. It's easy to do this. Preparing a talk or session on a training course can easily turn into preparing a set of slides which form the structure of the talk and end up being used a speaker prompts. The problem with this is that your talk starts to follow a rigid framework imposed by the default Powerpoint template. I think that Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds have it right when the recommend "going analogue" when preparing a talk - i.e. using paper to plan it out. This can free your thought process and allow you to think about how to present your ideas without getting stuck in a Powerpoint induced rut.

From an audience point of view, watching contiuuous streams of slides projected on a screen can become tedious. Its much more interesting if there is some variety in the way material is put across. You're more likely to keep their attention.

I've been running a course this week. It was a revision course for occupational hygienists preparing to take an examination. A lot of topics were covered during the week. For the first three days I'd used some slides for some, but not all of the sessions. I'd tried to avoid too many "lectures" and involved the delegates in discussions and group activities.

On the fourth day of the course we started with an open session. I'd asked the delegates to go through past some exam questions the previous evening and decide which questions they'd like to talk through in the class. This meant that I only had a broad view of we'd need to talk about. The session inevitably threw up some topics where the delgates didn't have much knowledge and were looking to me to help them fill the gaps. I could have started opening up relevant presentations from my laptop but instead we just had a general discussion and where I needed to fill in some details I relied on description and the old fashioned "talk and chalk" approach, using a flip chart. It was really refreshing to do this from my perspective and the delegates seemed to like it too.

I didn't switch the projector on all day . For the other sessions I used techniques such as brainstorming, breakout groups an, where I had to "lecture" I stuck with the flip chart.

Slideware such as Powerpoint is a useful tool, but it's only one item in our toolbox. Unfortunately it's overused. Its refreshing to use other techniques and I think we all benefited from a "Powerpoint free" day.

5 things every presenter should know about people

I came across this Vimeo video recently. It’s by Susan Weinschenk,  a behavioral psychologist who specialises in applying psychology to the workplace.

It’s produced in the style of the  RSA Animate series of talks by leading thinkers. In these animated videos you don’t get to see the speaker. You hear them talking while an artist creates a cartoon summary of the talk. It’s quite an effective technique.

5 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People from Weinschenk on Vimeo.
The talk does what it says on the tin – provides 5 key points about how people respond when listening to a presentation. I’ve come across most of these points before, but Susan brings out some key lessons on what they mean in practice for the preparation and delivery of presentations.

Her second point – “multiple sensory channels compete” – is particularly important in the context of slide design and reinforces the view that wordy slides should be avoided at all cost. When there’s too much to take in visually, your audience won’t hear what you’re saying. It's a particularly important point for presenters who too often produce slides crammed with words. Too often they're for the benefit of the presenter rather than the audience. As Susan says in her talk "the audience don't want to see your notes"

The video is, in effect, a “taster” for her book 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People, and it’s done it’s job as I think it’s worth checking out the book.

The problem with "Powerpoint presentations"

It occurred to me the other day that the problem with the phrase “Powerpoint presentation” is the word “Powerpoint”.  What I mean by that is that when somebody delivers a “Powerpoint presentation” the emphasis is on the “Powerpoint” rather than the “presentation”. And, for me, that’s the wrong way round.

Presenters will often start preparing their presentation by opening up Powerpoint, or some other “slideware” program, on their computer and start typing. What they’re actually doing is creating an outline for their talk. That’s not a bad idea in itself. The talk needs to have a structure. But  doing it this way means that they end up with a deck of wordy slides that aren’t really what they need.

The presentation isn’t the deck of slides – it’s what the presenter has to say. The slides are visual aids that should support this. The audience doesn’t need to see the outline. They need appropriate images and key words that emphasise what the speaker is trying to get across without being a distraction.

For me best practice on presentation design is to follow the approach advocated by Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen and Nancy Duarte in Resonance

• work out the objective of the talk – what you want the audience to know or to do at the end
• work out the key points that need to be covered
• organise the key points to create an outline for the talk
• decide what visual aids you’re going to use – it doesn’t have to be Powerpoint slides,other approaches can be better
• if you’re going to use slides, start to think about their design

All of these are best done before switching on the computer.

Taking this approach would mean you’re concentrating on the presentation rather than the Powerpoint . And that’s a much better emphasis.