For my blog today, I'm linking to an interview I did this week with Thomas Clifford, filmmaker and Fast Company expert blogger on how to use the principles I talk about in creating and appearing in film and video: http://tinyurl.com/mehdhr
Enjoy!
Recently, I called for an improvement in the way conferences are run and pointed out that the current downturn is an opportunity to make some long-overdue changes in conference behavior. Conferences should involve their audiences more, and in more significant ways. Conferences should tell coherent stories, not fill endless time slots. And conferences should use MCs as audience representatives. Among other changes.
To further promote these ends, I’m announcing a contest for the best story about the worst conference experience you’ve ever had. First prize is an hour’s free telephone coaching either for a speech or a conference design. Second and third prizes are copies of my new book, Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.
The contest begins with this posting and will run through the end of next week. Entries must be 200 words or less, and my decision is final.
So bring it on. Was it a memorably bad speaker? A particularly stupid theme or breakout session? A location? An audience? What made the experience awful? Dish it out, and we’ll compare notes as they come in. It’s time to raise the game by punishing the evil-doers.
So I don’t know why I haven’t talked about the wine guy Gary Vaynerchuk before, but here goes. You can see him waxing passionate about wine here: http://tv.winelibrary.com/. And you can see him on Web 2.0 giving a talk on following your bliss and social media here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4.
Either way, you have to agree: you can’t take your eyes off this guy. Why? Three simple reasons. In honor of the Wine Guy, I’ll call them Gary Vaynerchuk’s 3 Rules for Success in Public Speaking.
1. Be absolutely passionate about what you’re doing. Gary’s passion spills out all over the set, the stage, the audience. He’s taking no prisoners, and the result is captivating. It covers the many little ways in which he breaks some perfectly good rules of public speaking. For example, in the Web 2.0 talk, he’s constantly pacing back and forth. He only comes to a halt occasionally, and if the talk had gone on much longer, it would have become distracting, and ultimately wearying for the audience. In small doses, it’s fine. And of course, on his show, he’s behind a table for the most part drinking wine, so his energy goes into his face and his commentary, where it belongs.
2. Be absolutely authentic about what you’re doing. Gary’s geekiness and occasional clumsiness are endearing because they reinforce his authenticity. Authenticity is the single most important quality for speakers today. Historically speaking, that’s because of the current mood in the country (and the world) thanks to AIG, bank bailouts, rampant hypocrisy in high places, 9-11 and probably Watergate too. Whatever the precise reason, we are drawn to people who are authentic because we’re tired of being spun, lied to, conned, and generally abused by authorities. I go into the need for authenticity (and how to achieve it) in my new book, Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.
3. Maintain a sense of humor about yourself. If you follow rules # 1 and #2, you’ll get noticed. But if you don’t have a sense of humor about yourself – and occasionally let it out for air – people will quickly tire of you. Gary’s saving grace is that he’s funny about his passion and doesn’t take himself too seriously in the end.
Study Gary for his inner qualities, not for his mastery of the technical detail of public speaking. He's not a polished speaker, but he’s the real deal, and he’s absolutely wonderful to watch.
Following is a list of questions that speakers should ask meeting planners in getting ready to speak at an event. You won't need to ask all of them all the time; the list is meant to give you a broad set of ideas.
A. The Venue
When is the speech taking place?
Where?
How many in the audience?
What time of day? How long should the speech be?
Will the audience be eating or have eaten?
What is the hall like?
Is there lighting?
What is the sound like?
The layout?
Are there backdrops, sets, stages, props, podia?
Are there barriers between speaker and audience?
How long is the audience’s day?
How many other speakers?
What is the nature and content of those speeches?
What kind of chair is the audience in?
How long have they sat there?
What is the event theme?
Slogan?
What is the arrangement for slides and other visuals?
How quiet is the hall?
Is there background noise?
When can we get in the hall for rehearsal?
B. The Audience
Describe the audience
What is the age range?
Socio-economics?
Do they know each other?
Do they work for the same or difference orgs?
Describe the organization(s)?
What should my talk be about?
What is the point of the event for the audience?
How is the audience feeling?
What is the business climate?
What does the audience fear most?
What are their hopes and dreams?
What makes them laugh or cry?
What makes them worry?
What do they need to succeed?
What are their cultural references?
What is they worst speaker they’ve ever seen?
What would you like them to do differently as a result of the talk?
Who are their heroes and villains?
What are their recent successes and failures?
Why are they there?
Have you made any arrangements to get feedback?
A DVD?
C. The Speech
Why did you pick me?
Who or what determines the success or failure of this event?
How will that be measured?
How does the idea of my speech work for your event?
Give me some audience members that are great (or bad) examples of the points of my speech?
Can I interview them?
What is the problem the audience has for which my expertise is the solution?
Is the audience expecting interactivity?
Is the audience used to Power Point?
Can I ask for volunteers?
How many of them will have read my book?
Can we arrange for a signing/sales event?
What journey do you want the audience to go on?
Why should the audience pay attention to my speech?
How will you know if they have taken something important away from the speech?
Yesterday, I commented on Seth Godin’s TED.com speech, overall finding it impressive, and making a few suggestions for improvement. Seth commented on one of those, and his comment has raised an interesting question: what do you do when you discover that the event organizer has thrown you a last-minute curve?
In Seth’s case, it was a piano in the middle of the stage, eating up the space he normally has for working the audience. What could Seth have done to cope?
First of all, let’s say that the event organizer had no business messing with a speaker’s mind at the last minute. The speaker is in adrenaline mode, and it is very hard to change directions under those conditions and with that kind of time pressure. A pro like Seth has a last-minute series of preparations to go through, and it is unfair and unprofessional to interrupt those with sudden, 11th-hour changes.
But it happens. So what do you do? You’ve got to confront it, come up with a plan, deal with it immediately, and get it off your mind. Otherwise, the result is that it detracts from your performance because it takes up that part of your brain that would normally be delivering a brilliant speech.
That’s what adrenaline is for: facing and dealing with problems. So focus on the issue, come up with a solution – probably imperfect – and then move on. Don’t second-guess yourself.
The most common curve thrown by meeting planners is the following: “We’re running a little late, and we need you to shave 20 minutes off your presentation.”
What do you do?
This happens so often that you need to have 1-hour, 40-minute, and 20-minute versions of your talk ready to go at all times. In other words, deal with this one by being prepared in advance so that you won’t be surprised.
The other kind of last-minute issue that happens all the time is the technology problem. The room is too bright, making your slides invisible. The sound system doesn’t have enough volume to make your video audible. The computer you have is not compatible in some way with the system. And so on. The possibilities are endless.
The response? Bring back ups. Lots of back ups. Everything technological that your presentation depends on should have back ups. And one more thing: have a version of your speech ready to go that involves NO TECHNOLOGY. Think of it as the candlelight version. One day, you’ll thank me.
So what should Seth have done when he found that instead of a stage to work in he basically had a closet with no walls?
He should have used the piano. In some way. Always recognize the gorilla in the room. He might have started by sitting on the piano bench. Or on the piano. Perhaps he could have begun by singing (and playing) happy birthday for the event organizer, if in addition to his other talents Seth is musically gifted.
The exact solution depends on the moment. But when an event organizer throws you a curve like that, you’ve got to deal with it and move on. If it’s a real problem, like a sudden decimating of the size of the stage, then it’s best to bring it up, briefly and positively, and move on. The audience will be on your side if you handle the issue expeditiously and with charm and dispatch.
Seth Godin’s TED.com talk on his latest book, Tribes, recently became available on TED’s web site: http://tinyurl.com/o8cx5f. What does Seth do right, and what does he do wrong as he tells us his latest idea?
We can all learn from Seth Godin on both counts. First, what he does right.
Seth makes it all about the audience. The typical speaker tells us about all the research he has done, and what it shows. Seth tells us about – us. How we all want to create change, lead a movement, and stand out. Even if you personally don’t want that, you get caught up in the underlying emotional message: you’re special. It’s very hard to resist.
Seth’s passion comes through because he is open to the audience. Godin’s openness comes through in his body language and his inclusive language. That creates a strong connection with the audience, so that we are ready to receive his passionate message. If a speaker doesn’t begin by being open, we will reject the message. It’s that simple.
Seth uses humor to disarm any potential critics. If we were inclined to say, ‘hang on a minute, not everyone can be a leader; that doesn’t make sense. The world needs followers, too,’ Seth’s humor stops us from insisting too much on the logic. His humor is contained in his slides – great visual humor that you can get in one blink, like the shot of the firefighters sitting posed for a picture outside a burning house.
What does Godin do wrong? Not much, but here are a few ways in which he could improve.
He wanders around the stage. Seth has what we call ‘happy feet’ – he allows some of his adrenaline to come out in wandering around the stage. The result is distracting and undercuts the effectiveness of his message. It’s just harder to get what he’s talking about when his body provides a random visual distraction that way.
He allows his volume to get away from him. Sure, it’s a big audience, and sure, he’s passionate. But too much shouting quickly gets tiresome on the ear. He needs to vary his pitch more, like he does his pacing. Seth is an expert pauser for effect, and he should vary his volume too.
His speech strings too many ideas together that don’t really connect logically. Godin begins with an assertion in the form of a question – what do ‘we’ – that is, the audience and Seth – do today? We all want to change things, he says. It’s an assertion grabbed from the air, and it doesn’t bear much logical thought. To the contrary, most people hate change. But never mind. From there, he launches into a quick history of recent times: from factories to television to leaders (and tribes). Soon he’s talking about how to do it – ‘it’ being start a movement. It’s all a bit loosey-goosey, logically speaking, and it’s really an emotional argument (that everyone – you and you and you – are potential leaders, all special), not an idea per se.
But overall, this is a great communicator with a deep understanding of how to connect with audiences. Study this TED.com talk for how to up your own game.
Why is most public speaking so awful? Why do
we subject our fellow human beings to this form of torture when there
are so many better things we could all be doing, like cutting our
toenails, baking snickerdoodles, or watching re-runs of The Prisoner?
You’re in a ballroom with no windows in some random airport hotel. The
lighting is dim. The whir of the heating system fills your ears with
white noise. The colors around you are shades of grey and beige with
puce trimmings. You’re only awake because you’ve had 1300 cups of
coffee from the urn in the hallway. Let the speaking games begin. It’s
a diabolical sensory deprivation experiment. Why is most public
speaking so awful? Beyond soulless venues and Death by Power Point,
speakers make the same four mistakes over and over again, continuing
the sorry state of the art.....
For the rest of this free e-book: http://www.changethis.com/58.06.PublicWords
Working with clients, I spend a lot of time coaching them on delivery skills as well as, of course, helping them write great speeches. We get the whole range of ability, from brilliant to considerably less than brilliant, and I’m often in the position of conducting triage with a speaker who was trained (or learned his speaking habits) in the Cro-Magnon era. I’m talking about the type who has 60 Power Point slides for a 30 minute talk, wants to stand behind a podium to read those slides in a monotone, and begins every speech with, “What I’m going to talk about today has seven parts. The first part….”
Where do you start?
It’s always a battle to wean the speaker off the slides, but it’s worth fighting. Once you persuade the client that there really is no reason to show the audience his speaker notes, you’re off and running.
But issues like lack of expressiveness are much harder to combat. They may be ingrained habits acquired over a lifetime. And you may not have enough time to work with the client in the depth that it takes to free up the charismatic speaker lurking within. Deep within.
So, when I’m performing triage, I often turn to a simple, easy way to increase your impact and charisma as a speaker: get out from behind the podium. Because we tend to trust people, broadly speaking, who move closer to us (excluding psychos and other scary folks), if you move toward the audience on your key points, finish the point standing near an audience member, and then move to another quadrant of the audience for your next main point, you will instantly increase your effectiveness.
There are other reasons why this works, based in neurology, but this is quick version for a quick fix. I go into this in much more detail in my book, Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, but this is enough to get you started.
Timothy Ferriss is the author of The Four-Hour Work Week ( http://tinyurl.com/cf5wxt ), a book that has generated an enormous amount of comment from reviewers who are cross with him because they believe it to be virtually fraudulent hucksterism, and those who sing his praises because the book (for them) exposes the fraudulence in the 40-hour work week.
In short, the message provokes.
Good message.
But Timothy Ferriss the speaker is even more provoking and problematic. His talk on TED.com (http://tinyurl.com/czrkbt ) either elicits strong praise or real dislike from those who have watched it. The difference seems to be that those who can get past the man’s evident ego appreciate the intellect lurking behind the conceit. Those who can’t get past the ego find him repellent.
So why is it that so many audience members dislike ego so much? And is there anything Ferriss – or another speaker afflicted with the same problem – do about it?
The short answer is that we dislike ego because as audience members we’re on the speaker’s side until he or she rejects us. We want the speaker to succeed. But if that speaker makes it all about him (or her) then we’ll eventually give up and turn off. The solution? Always make it about the audience. Put your ego on hold and don’t talk about yourself.
Ferriss starts his speech by committing the cardinal sin of inexperienced, highly egotistical speakers: he tells a childhood story about himself. He even shows us an awful childhood picture. Amateur stuff. Thus he digs a hole for himself that no amount of later charm will help much.
What Ferriss is able to do is to look at certain human activities with fresh eyes, deconstruct them, and figure out how to become pretty good at them very quickly. He needs to apply this skill to public speaking and figure out how to do it better. Much better.
In the TED talk, he mentions swimming, foreign language acquisition, and ballroom dancing as examples.
Let’s see what he’s actually figured out in these areas. Is it worth the fuss? In swimming, he’s figured out that it’s better to stay below the water as much as possible, in order to be as streamlined as possible. This is not news to anyone who watches the Olympics. In foreign language acquisition, he’s figured out that if you memorize the 2,000 or so words that are most important, along with a few grammatical rules, you can get on pretty well. Again, not news to anyone who has learned a language quickly.
As for ballroom dancing, I’m less qualified to analyze this because my ballroom dancing is about as good as Ferriss’ apparently was before he started. He basically offers 3 quick tips that (he claims) allow you to advance quickly in the art. Fair enough, but once again, it strikes me that this is pretty simple stuff.
His book is like that – it’s full of cheap tricks and shortcuts. He won some kind of martial arts contest on a trip to Asia essentially by cheating – he figured out a way to get around the rules. He got the prize but no one can admire him for the performance. In case after case, the modus operandi is the same: Ferriss games the system.
What’s missing from the book, the talk, and Ferriss himself is some kind of passion for some aspect of human endeavor besides gaming the system. That’s the other thing that audiences respond to – genuine passion for your subject. Failing that, you won’t win an audience over – and you shouldn’t be talking. Sit down, Timothy, and let someone who cares about something give a speech that will change the world.
We work with clients all the time who have absorbed rules from somewhere about public speaking. Usually those rules are bad and get in the way of successful presenting. Following are the 5 worst we regularly see.
1. “Tell ‘em what you’re going to say, say it, and tell ‘em what you said.” This old chestnut is still widely believed. It comes from WWII, when the Army worked out a way to ensure that all soldiers got the same marching orders and remembered them. The soldiers that survived the war came back, went into business, and started spreading the word. The problem is that the Army’s presentations didn’t have to be interesting or engaging. These were soldiers! They were taking orders! You do have to be interesting and engage your audiences. So unless you want the people in front of you to be diving for their Blackberries, don’t repeat like they did in the Army.
2. “A good presentation has to have slides. Has to!” So widespread is the use of Power Point and its clones that there is a widespread belief that you have to use slides to give a presentation and it is always better if you do. In fact, while there are certain kinds of presentations that do benefit from slides, many do not. Keynote speeches should NEVER use slides, unless you’ve climbed Mount Everest and you’ve got some amazing summit shots. Can you imagine President Obama using slides during his inaugural address? Real leaders don't use Power Point. Slides all too often become a barrier between speaker and audience, not to mention a crutch for the speaker. If your slides are actually speaker notes that you read, mostly, that’s a sign that you are horribly misusing slides. Think of slides as illustrations for the audience of points that you’re making that can really only be appreciated through pictures (or graphs or pie charts). Everything else is speaker notes, and should not be shown to the audience. Just to anticipate one set of comments, yes, if you're a trainer, and you're speaking for a day, or three, then slides can help.
3. “A speech is a formal occasion. It’s not the same as a conversation. Different rules apply.” This is a tricky one, because it used to be true. When FDR and Churchill strode the earth, a speech was a more formal occasion. Both of those orators began to change the genre by using colloquial language and direct address to the people. Television then accelerated the process. We now expect our leaders, celebrities, and stars to speak to us conversationally, because we’ve seen them do it for years. As a result, unless speakers do the same, they look and sound ridiculously stiff and pompous. A speech is a conversation with the audience. Get used to it. Enjoy it!
4. “When I speak, I have to stay behind the podium.” The reasons offered up for this bad advice are various. Sometimes it’s the technology – you’re speaking at a big conference and you’re on those big screens in a live feed, and the tech folks tell you that you have to stay behind the podium so they can keep you on screen. Don’t believe it. Unless the camera guy is asleep, he can follow you as you move around the stage, and even into the audience. He might prefer to snooze away at his camera, but he’s being paid to stay awake, so make use of all his talents, including his ability to hold a giant cup of coffee and follow you at the same time. Other reasons include fear, nervousness, and sheer terror. Oh, and also that your notes, or the button to advance the slides, are on the podium. I’ve got four words for you: Be brave. Use wireless.
5. “We have to save the last 15 minutes of the speech slot for Q ‘n A.” This is just a habit, and not a particularly good one. For one thing, if you close with Q ‘n A, it means that the last thing your audience hears from you is the answer to the last question that is asked. This may or may not be a good place to end. Often the last question is one from a crank who has been working up the courage to ask you if you wear boxers or briefs. So instead, save 5 minutes of your remarks for the end, and take your Q ‘n A just before that. Or, if you know your speech well, and are good at fielding questions, take them throughout. That’s the more spontaneous and engaging way to do it, but it takes practice to stay on message and not get distracted too much by the questions. For some people, it’s better to take Q ‘n A for most of the presentation, because the speaker is more comfortable that way, after a brief set of opening comments (and a closing at the end.) This is the format of most presidential news conferences, for example.
Imagine you’re settling into your seat in the movie theatre, popcorn and soda at the ready, waiting happily for the latest James Bond movie to start. You can’t wait to see what the proverbial high stakes opening chase before the credits will be – how many explosions, how fast, how many bodies littering the ground.
Instead, as the lights dim, an image of Daniel Craig, wearing a business suit and tie, appears in front of you on the big screen. He’s standing in front of a Power Point set up, and he proceeds to put up an agenda slide for the upcoming movie. He then reads the half-dozen or so lines off the screen, telloing you in some detail about what's going to happen, saying between each one, “And then, and then, and then.” And at some point, he says, “Oh, and the item you’ve all been waiting for, the coffee break. We’ve got donuts and muffins.”
How’s your experience of the movie so far? And yet, this is precisely what way too many speakers do in meeting after meeting, presentation after presentation, telling people what they’re going to say before they say it.
How much of a Bond movie is the surprise and the suspense? Why do people purposely set out to kill the surprise and suspense (what there is) in a business presentation?
Instead of an agenda slide, then, here are several ways to get your audience through the experience with a little more grace and excitement.
First, since audiences come into a presentation asking Why? – why am I here, why should I care, why is this important to me? – answer that question for them with a quick story that sets the scent. It should be one to three minutes, tops. And at the end, point the moral and set the scene by saying something like, “So it’s people like Jack that are demanding change, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today – why change is so important in this industry.”
Now the audience knows why it’s there, what the subject is, and they have some taste of the urgency of the subject because of the compelling story you’ve told them.
Second, begin with a startling statistic. “Did you know that one out of every three students at State Univ is considering dropping out because of financial difficulties?” Again, that sets the scene and tells everyone why they’re there without giving away everything in advance.
Third, begin with an audience poll. “Let me begin by finding out something about you. How many of you have done time? How many are on the lam? How many are considering returning to the state of their original arrest to clear their records?” This kind of interaction with the audience immediately involves them and begins to make the room “smaller” – and your talk more of a conversation.
Fourth, start with a contest, or a quiz. Award prizes. I’ve seen this work well many times. Ask easy questions. Or provocative ones. I once saw a speaker (back when the Internet was young) use this technique to talk about coaching businesses to use the power of the Internet to make boring products into interesting (and profitable) services. She held up a tube of toothpaste and asked the audience, “Is this toothpaste a product or a service?” After a second’s thought, some smart, awake person shouted out, “A product!” The speaker smiled, said, “Great!” and gave the toothpaste to the audience member. Again, she held up another tube of toothpaste and said, “Is this a product or a service?” Another bright spark in the audience said, “A service!” Right, said the speaker, and handed out the toothpaste. Now the audience had the idea, and soon they were shouting out answers with enthusiasm in order to pocket the (modest) gifts. It was a perfect way to energize the crowd and introduce the topic, which the speaker then went on to discuss seriously.
Finally, begin by appealing to a different on of the five senses than hearing or sight. Hold up a prop, one that is relevant to your talk, and pass it around. Let people touch it, heft it, smell it, and so on. I once saw this technique used very powerfully by a doctor who was advocating for a kind of radiation therapy in front of a Congressional committee. The topic was intensely technical and complicated. The doctor was asking for more money and insurance coverage for a treatment program that worked better than the standard one. It involved a copper tube that aimed the radiation more precisely than the standard treatment. So the doctor passed the copper tube around the congressional committee members. It made an otherwise mysterious and difficult-sounding treatment surprisingly down-to-earth and understandable.
Avoid the agenda slide. Be creative. Keep your audiences awake with these other techniques.
Pity poor Stuart Brown, who runs the National Institute for Play. His job – and his passion – is to study play seriously. That means he has to take an inherently fun subject and make it, well, god-awful serious, so that the NIH will fund him.
His talk on TED is enlightening on the subject of play, and enlightening on the subject of public speaking, at the same time: http://tinyurl.com/bgat4c. In spite of the flaws, this is must-see video.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way first, and then get to the good – and fascinating – news second. The bad news is that Stuart Brown is a very serious scientist who takes a fun and funny subject and analyzes it way too thoroughly – to the detriment of his humanity and the topic’s. Like all the talks on humor I’ve ever seen, he kills the subject, and not in a good way. He goes into a head posture from the start, which makes sense, since he’s intellectualizing fun, and tells us some very serious things about play in a slightly pompous way that makes the whole thing not at all playful. He barely looks at the audience, his delivery is slow and slightly ponderous, and he sounds more like a bank manager refusing a mortgage than someone talking about play.
And that’s the important public speaking point to take away from the talk. Your subject and your delivery have to be consistent. That’s so important that I’ll say it again: your subject and your delivery have to be consistent. If you can’t be consistent, your audience is going to reject you at some level as hypocritical, even if you’re just trying to be really, really helpful.
That’s why people who present to children can’t be adult in the bad sense of the word. It’s why business people who talk about putting the customer first can’t give a slapdash, under-rehearsed speech. (The audience is the customer! Hello!) And, it’s why people who talk about humor have to be funny.
OK, so the talk on play is not playful. Inconsistency. That’s bad. But there is so much that is good in the talk that redeems Mr. Brown that overall the presentation does succeed. The main reason is Brown’s evident passion for the subject. He replaces the lightness of play with devotion to the subject, some beautiful pictures (of animals playing, for example) and even a slightly ponderous joke or two.
Brown cares because his work began with a murderer who didn’t play as a child, and Brown saw the connection to the evil that came later. In many ways, playing as children prepares us for life. Did you know that people who don’t engage in building, carving, constructing, and so on with their hands as children don’t make good problem-solvers as adults? And that the lack of play leads to depression? The opposite of play is not seriousness, but – depression.
Play improves memory, makes more of the brain more active, and helps with creativity and critical thinking. And that’s throughout life – humans are unusual animals in the sense that most play during a specific time in their childhood and then don’t play (at least as much) when they become adults. Humans play – should play, need to play – all their lives.
Brown describes a fascinating study in which a group of rats were prevented from playing during their childhood. Another group was left alone. Both groups, now adult, were presented with a cat collar smelling of cat. All the rats ran and hid. The control group who had played eventually came out of hiding and resumed normal life. The play-deprived group never came out and in fact starved to death.
So get playing. We need all kinds of play as humans – body play, object play, social play, fantasy play, transformational play. Brown has categorized them all. But don’t let his seriousness about the subject prevent you from taking away some wonderful and wonderfully important lessons from this video. The play’s the thing. So get playing.
Bill Gates appeared at the TED conference last week and made a presenting mistake that put his usual gaffe-ridden style in the shade. He made the classic mistake of not respecting his audience: http://tinyurl.com/b5um5b.
And it’s a shame, because he was talking about important, life-saving work that he and his Gates Foundation are doing around the world, specifically on stopping malaria and improving education.
In many ways, it was a typical Bill Gates speech, perhaps a little better than most. It was well-written, if a little self-absorbed, and the slides were neither overwhelming nor too wordy. Not bad for the Chief Perpetrator of Power Point.
To be sure, Gates evidenced his usual nervous, self-conscious body language, and he needs to work on his voice, but by now we’re familiar with those problems. They weren’t really getting in the way of his delivery, because his status as one of the richest men in the world means that we’ll listen even if he looks like an uncomfortable nerd.
The disaster happened about half-way through the speech, in the section on malaria. Bill suddenly moved toward a little table placed in the middle of the stage, and released a (small) swarm of mosquitoes into the crowd, as he put it, of millionaires.
He commented that he wanted the crowd to get a sense of what poor people were up against.
I suspect most people in the audience had experienced mosquitoes before, if not perhaps the malaria-carrying kind, so the remark showed an insensitivity to the audience at that simple level. But at another, deeper, level, it showed a lack of respect of the audience, and here’s where the presentation really went south.
Respect for audiences should be paramount in a speaker’s mind, and that means treating them like adults, free to decide what hazards they want to face for themselves. To release mosquitoes on a crowd feels like token harassment, and takes decision-making power away from that audience. It’s arrogant and presumptuous. And it’s a cheap stunt.
Just because you’re a billionaire doesn’t mean you get to treat audiences like guinea pigs without their consent. Respect for an audience should be the first and last thing a speaker thinks about when giving a presentation.
Stewart Brand is one long-term cool individual. He was associated with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, he founded The Whole Earth Catalog, and he wrote one of the most interesting books on buildings ever written: How Buildings Learn. That last one will change the way you think about habitable space. If you haven’t read it, you should before you buy a house to live in.
So we’re talking about someone who has been around a long time in human terms and who has a deep perspective on the way humans live on the planet.
Currently, he’s working with an organization that encourages really long views. For example, he’s working on a project that’s trying to develop and find a home for a 10,000-year clock. That’s a hundred centuries.
Where do you locate something like that? It has to be a place that will withstand an enormous amount of change, to say the least. Brand manages to make the quest for a good home for the clock a story about stories – specifically the 7 stages of the mythic adventure: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stewart_brand_on_the_long_now.html.
First, he says, you have to get an image of the goal in your mind. Then, you need a good jumping off point. Third, you must go through a labyrinth. Fourth, you need a beacon – something to help you find the goal. Fifth, you need a payoff – and a secret, unexpected payoff. Sixth, you need to return, and last, you need a memento of your journey.
He quite seriously investigates a remote mountain range in Nevada for all these properties. Most of it matches pretty well.
It’s a very entertaining subject. Unfortunately, it’s delivered in an amateurish way.
Brand’s talk beautifully illustrates the danger of speaking on the fly. He clearly wrote the talk shortly before he was to deliver it. The result is that a normally confident, engaging speaker is tied to notes, too many slides, and a podium that gets between him and his audience.
He spends too much time with his head in his notes, or figuring out which slide comes next. The talk itself needs editing and tightening. The organizing principal of the 7 stages of a mythic adventure doesn’t quite allow him to cover everything he wants to cover, so he wanders off into the other areas, undercutting the inherent strength of the core of the talk.
It’s too bad; it’s like watching a famous musician learn a new piece, with all the mistakes and hesitations all-too-clearly visible.
What separates the mediocre and the excellent in public speaking? Practice.
A talk on TED.com inspired me because I often get questions about presenting in pairs – people ask, is it a good idea, how do you do it, what are the pitfalls, and so on. Keith Schacht and Zach Kaplan are two lovable nerds who run something called Inventables, which seems to be a company that collects ideas and products that use materials in new ways. For example, they demonstrated magnets in soft materials, ink that could remember what page you were on in a book, and dots that change color with changing smells – so you could tell visually when the milk has gone bad. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/toys_from_the_future.html)
It’s fun stuff, especially the 10-foot pole you can roll up in your pocket, which inspired much hilarity from the audience.
Well, these two guys aren’t great presenters – they’re stiff and monotone, with limited expressiveness in their body language – but the talked worked well enough for the audience present in the room for a couple of reasons.
First, they used an audience volunteer for the ‘dry’ water squirt gun. Audiences always feel more included in a talk when a ‘volunteer’ is chosen, because of the mirror neurons I’ve blogged about before. The rest of the audience is at once glad not to be chosen, and glad to be (vicariously) part of the experience.
Second, they managed the hand-offs well, if a little stiffly. They took turns, neither one speaking for too long. That’s important, because it’s hard to be the one not speaking in a duo. What do you do? The answer is, you model good behavior and listen to your partner like billy-o, but that’s hard because you’ve probably heard the talk many times.
I used to co-present with a friend and colleague with a sense of humor. He would turn to me in the middle of his part of the talk and say, “Nick will now demonstrate the 5 reasons why public speaking can be challenging for left-handed people,” or something equally bizarre. This was, of course, without warning. The hilarity for him was in watching me scramble to come up with the five ideas. It was all in fun, and we both had training in Improv, so it was not unjustified, but it certainly got my adrenaline flowing.
That’s why it’s so important to listen hard to your partner. You’re there to support. So support well. Be ready.
Third, the material was humorous. Paired talks lend themselves to humor, because of the opportunity to play off one another.
But what else could Keith and Zach done to truly exploit the possibilities of join presenting?
What’s interesting about two people is their relationship. That’s the only real reason to get 2 people up on stage together. It makes up for the logistical challenges involved. (Keith and Zach didn’t reveal enough about their relationship to make it really interesting. Either one of them could have given the talk without any loss of interest.)
It’s why newscasters spend a surprising amount of time interacting with one another rather than actually reading the news, or the weather, or sports. What keeps us coming back to these kind of shows is the relationships. Indeed, most shows don’t do enough to exploit the inherent interest there. Fans of detectives with sidekicks know what I mean. Fans of Star Trek who lived for the quips about Spock from Kirk and Bones at the end of the show also know what I mean.
Presenting in pairs is more fun for the pair. You’ve got someone else there to share the burden. Just make sure that you give the audience sufficient value to make it worthwhile for them too. Use the relationship in relevant ways to enrich the presentation.
Continuing my tour of TED.com, the amazing resource for those who want to study ideas and the public expression of them, I’m taking on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html)
Mihaly is the expert on ‘Flow’, that state of happy absorption into any creative process that he has documented as part of a life-long research project on happiness.
What's Mihaly's insight? It turns out, alas, that money doesn’t buy you happiness. In fact, beyond a certain minimal level, happiness does not increase with increased material wealth.
Happiness does come with flow, at least for creative people involved in doing things they like to do. The composer creating music, the poet writing a lyric poem – or the CEO running a business. Each of these can experience flow on the job.
I’m a big fan of Mihaly’s work, and highly recommend his books, including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which describes the state in question in greater detail.
Unfortunately, I can’t be a fan of Mihaly’s presentation style. He begins with a moderately interesting story, only somewhat relevant, of hearing Carl Jung speak about how Europeans coped with the tragedy of WWII. But it’s not until 2:41 minutes into the talk that he uncrosses his arms and looks up for the first time. After that, he’s still got his head down, looking at the floor, pacing randomly, connecting with the audience only occasionally. My guess is that he’s modeling his behavior on professors he’s watched over the years, and that’s a mistake.
He seems to be carrying an enormous psychological weight around, a little odd for someone who studies happiness. A little more bounce in the step would seem more consistent with his message. But maybe he studies happiness because it eludes him personally.
As the talk goes on, he does open up his gestures, but he then turns to the screen and talks to the slides, constantly backing up away from the audience until the end of his talk, where he disappears into the darkness at the corner of the stage, asking ‘OK?’ of no one in particular. Clearly, public speaking is not where Mihaly experiences his flow. Buy his book; skip the lecture.
My tour of TED.com continues with Nicholas Negroponte’s talk on his One Laptop Per Child program. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child_two_years_on.html)
It’s a great program and one that deserves wholehearted support from people in developed countries. My comments focus on the talk and Negroponte’s delivery of it, not on the worth of the program. In fact, to demonstrate that sentiment tangibly, I’ve just gone to the OLPC website and made a donation to give a laptop. I figure that entitles me to speak freely.
Negroponte’s talk represents a huge opportunity lost. Were he to structure the talk properly, and deliver it with some panache, I guarantee that he would greatly increase donations and participation in the program. As the talk stands, it’s badly structured and badly delivered.
First, the content. Nicholas begins with two minutes of rambling nonsense about himself and his education. It’s self-absorbed and disengaging. At nearly three minutes in, he finally finds his way out of his solipsistic bubble and gets to the rest of the world. But from there we get a series of random thoughts, prompted by a random assortment of slides, on this very important topic. To say that it doesn’t do OLPC justice is an understatement.
We learn a little about the Ethiopian keyboard – remarkably, the first in that language. We learn that when you offer a salary of $0.00, you get the best people applying. We see a few pictures of kids and laptops. We learn about the 4 design innovations that the laptop presents – sunlightmeshnetworklowpower – in such a slapdash way that if you didn’t know what they were beforehand you wouldn’t by the time Nicholas was done.
We learn all this, but not in a way that allows us to decide that OLPC is a great idea or that we should contribute. Negroponte does make several calls to action – including that we spread the world, that we contribute for one laptop, and that we contribute for many – but the 'asks' are made in passing, almost apologetically.
The opportunity lost is to present a thoughtfully structured talk that leads the audience on a proper decision-making journey. Negroponte should begin by engaging the audience, then describe the need, then the laptop and the program, then how the program would benefit the world. Finally, he should close with one clear call to action.
Nicholas’ mishmash of a talk is delivered in classic bad form. He wanders around the room aimlessly just as his talk wanders around the point. The only time he stops and delivers is when he utters the line “You get the best people.” He’s completely withdrawn into his own head; his head posture is combined with self-protective arm and hand gestures that keep the audience away. He talks to the screen, not the audience, and uses the slides to help him remember where he is. His head posture is also coupled with an occasional pelvic move that is very disconcerting and distracting. All in all, a performance that will lose as many donations as it gets. A shame, because the cause is so good.
If you don’t know TED, you should get to know it. TED.com is a repository of hundreds of fascinating short speeches, on every subject under the sun. It’s a tremendous opportunity for speakers and students of public speaking to study the great and near-great on line in tidy little packages.
What’s fascinating to me is how mediocre, on the whole, these brilliant people with wonderful ideas are. They’re nervous, they pace randomly, they talk to mediocre slides, they are defensive – they are a catalogue of how not to do it. That’s partly why they’re so inspiring – even the best have feet of clay. their humanity makes them feel more approachable.
And yet, the quality of the ideas does shine through, usually. These people are opinionated, often a tad condescending, convinced of their righteousness, academic in the bad sense of the word – and yet fascinating.
I’m going to spend the week talking about a few speakers from this treasure trove, but don’t take my word for it. Go deep into TED.com and check them out for yourself.
My first pick, because I’ve been a fan of space flight ever since Star Trek, is Carolyn Porco, a NASA person, and head of the unmanned flight to the moons of Saturn. I’ve picked her talk to illustrate the right use of visual aids. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/carolyn_porco_flies_us_to_saturn.html)
Carolyn’s slides are, quite literally, out of this world, being pictures of Saturn and its moons. She does manage to convey something of the magic of space flight that NASA’s spokespeople usually manage to kill. And her story of what the team found on a moon of Saturn – the first time humans had landed anything on a planet in the outer solar system – is arresting.
That said, she commits the classic mistake of an inexperienced speaker. In her nervousness, she starts out with her hands close to her side, nervously pacing hither and yon, and her gestures are circular, and repetitive, rising from the waist and spreading out, as if she’s trying to unload something, because she is: her adrenaline.
Speakers instead should find ways of channeling their adrenaline that connect with the audience and build trust and credibility.
Once Porco gets into her topic, she settles down, and becomes quite effective. It’s a good speech, and one to be studied for an effective use of visual aids.
The controversy on Power Point and visual aids will rage as long, I suspect, as we have bad presentations in the business world. Which is to say, forever.
The fundamental question is what else beside yourself do you need as a presenter? What add-ons will enhance the experience of the audience rather than detract from it?
Here, it’s helpful to think about what the range of options are, and what the competition is like. Of course, the bar is set very low in the business world. Most people don’t expect riveting presentations, and they are not disappointed. But lurking at the back of even these Stoic minds is the competition. ‘I could be playing a video game….Or at the opera….Or watching a football game…Or attending a performance of Cirque de Soleil….’ That’s because even the worst business speech competes for our brain space with all the other things we have to pay attention to – from our BlackBerrys to the financial meltdown to our entertainment choices.
If we take the most extravagant of these entertainment options – say, Cirque de Soleil – we have performers enhanced with movement, costume, music, lighting – in short, spectacle. When you add a Power Point slide deck to your own presentation, you are taking one tiny little baby step toward that.
But does it enhance the experience, like Cirque de Soleil’s costumes and music, or is it merely a distraction? Ask yourself if the PP deck supports your talk or competes with it. Is it a speaker outline, a series of slides filled with words which you either read or not, or is it a visual accompaniment to your talk? Cirque de Soleil integrates all the aspects of the performance to give you one amazing visual spectacle. When you put up a speaker outline, you’re in essence giving the audience 2 speeches, not one.
In short, you’re distracting the audience, not enhancing its experience.
Real visual aids, on the other hand, can enhance the presentation. Think again about the range of options open to you. Props, pictures, video, even the humble white board or flip chart – not to mention music and lighting – all can support and enhance your talk rather than rivaling it.
If you are ever tempted to put a PP slide up for an audience that contains more than 10 words, lie down until the temptation goes away. Instead, look for a real, high-quality photograph that tells the story. Find the single number that makes the point. Put a picture behind it. If you must present numbers, find the one line graph or pie chart that gets the point across. Visual aids are good. Slides full of words are bad. The next time you open PP and start typing a long heading, stop and remember Cirque de Soleil.
I've finally found the exception to the rule that Power Point is a bad tool for preparing speeches, delivering speeches, and reading them afterwards. Most speakers misuse PP as speaker notes, to the detriment of their speaking style, and to the horror of the audience. But Garr Reynolds proves that PP (or its equivalent) can be used by an artist to create something very special: http://www.
Amazingly, this presentation is 131 slides and yet I guarantee that you'll tear through them all right to the end. All hail Garr!
Reynolds presents a very engaging, witty slide show on John Medina's new book, Brain Rules. The book consists of 12 rules your brain runs by, and it's stuff you need to know, especially if you're a student of the craft of presenting.
Of course, Garr focuses on one rule primarily, the one that says that your brain learns best visually, so indulge it. But another one that caught my eye is equally important for speakers and their audiences. Medina says that audiences don't like to be passive -- they find it boring.
Amen, brother. So, what do you do? How do you engage your audience?
Following are 7 ways to engage audiences that I have found gets them active and using their own energy to take what you say and make it their own.
1. Get them to tell stories about who they are (in relation to your topic).
2. Ask them to brainstorm a problem or a solution.
3. Get them to play games (and award prizes).
4. Ask them to report to the group (on something you've asked them to think about, or discover, or learn).
5. Ask them to teach others (the fastest way to ensure that an audience learns something well).
6. Get them to design responses (to some challenge or problem you've set for them).
7. Ask them to design a path forward (imagine what you'd want them to be doing back at their offices once the speech is over, and get them to start that activity now).
If you're not already doing any of these things in your speeches, you're not allowing the audience to be anything but passive. That's bad. Turn them loose! Get active with your audience. The burst of energy will at first alarm you, then thrill you once you learn how to channel it successfully. And your audiences will reward you with a vastly better reception.
I've fought the good fight against bad Power Point (PP) for some time now, and the forces amassed against the Microsoft Juggernaut have made some headway at the level of the debate, but not much at the practical level. There's still a whole lot of bad PP going on.
Let's get some things clear. First of all, bad PP NEVER helps a speech -- whether it's a presentation to a team, or a keynote, or a Senator's filibuster. All bad PP does is document the horror. What do I mean by bad PP? Anything that involves more words than pictures. Those are speaker notes, and they should not be shown to the audience. I gave a speech this week, and there was one speech before mine at the event. That speaker included two columns of bullets on one slide, which he introduced by saying, "You probably can't read this, but...." Please!
Second, PP rarely improves a bad speech. A bad speech is just that, bad. Whether it's because the speaker hasn't adequately prepared, and rambles, or the non-verbal conversation is at war with the verbal, or the topic is not right for the audience -- there are a million possible ways a speech can go wrong -- when it's bad, it's bad. Of course, PP gives you something to look at if your mind is wandering, but that's like starting to study the scenery in a bad movie -- you're still not having a good time. Worse than that, your time is being wasted.
Third, good PP (see Presentation Zen, which I've recommended before) CAN add to a good speech, under certain conditions. First of all, the PP has to do something that the words can't do. So, a great picture can bring something to life in a way that it takes too many words to do. A bit of video can add emotion and context, and put you in a place that words can't do so easily. And so on.
But, NEVER use even good PP as wallpaper, especially for a speech, such as a keynote, when inspiration is supposed to be part of the deal. Here's what happens: you're asking the audience to multitask, and the studies show that multitasking makes us STUPID. So don't do it. Of course, we're used to multitasking, and having lots of distractions, and some people think they're not being fully utilized, or pampered, unless all that's going on, but a GOOD SPEECH holds an audience WITHOUT the need for PP.
Bottom line: use PP with care, make it about pictures, and focus on getting the speech right first. If people need PP to get through your speech, there's something wrong with the speech.
I just finished reading Presentation Zen, a new book on Power Point design....and more! by Garr Reynolds, on the plane back from San Francisco.
It's a very west coast book. It's beautiful, and applying the zen notions of simplicity and restraint to Power Point slides is a great idea. As someone who has been working to improve business presentations and to minimize the crimes against humanity committed by business people wielding Power Point, I can only applaud Garr's point of view and welcome a fellow soldier to the cause.
I wish everyone would design slides like Garr does. The world would be a much happier, clearer, more elegant place.
Reynolds spends most of his time talking about design issues, and how to think about, prepare, and deliver great slides. But he also gives some advice about presentations themselves in passing, and all of that advice is simple and good too -- for the most part.
I have to take issue with his notions of structuring a talk, and of story, however. They're just too simple to be truly useful for most people. He says, think in terms of three parts to a presentation -- a beginning, middle, and end. Unfortunately, that's just not the most powerful way to think about organizing a talk. It's far more respectful to the audience, and interesting, and powerful to begin with the question why? -- Why is this issue important, why should you care, and so on. Then, having framed the talk in the audience's terms, go on to describe a problem that the audience has for which your information is a solution, and end by moving to "how" questions (how do I do this, how do I get started) and giving them some action to take.
Similarly, it's not enough just to tell people to use stories. How do you tell a good story? What's the structure? Theme? What works with audiences that doesn't with the printed page, and vice-versa? There are lots of questions associated with the simple word 'story'. If it were easy to tell good stories, every Hollywood movie would be a blockbuster, and every novel published would be a bestseller.
There are basic stories that our culture understands and that people 'get' quickly, so it pays to use them in a deep sense when telling a new story of your own. Joseph Campbell most famously identified the "quest" and his books are a great place to start to understand how your presentation can fit into these deep cultural stories and move your audience to action. Great storytelling is not a simple thing. Enlist your audience on a quest to take your business to the next level, though, and you'll be on to something. Then, design your (few) slides to look like Garr Reynolds' and you'll get a standing O.
Some people make a great deal out of two words -- 'speech' and 'presentation'. I don't give speeches, they may say, only presentations. A speech is a big deal. A presentation is what I do in front of my team, or the Board, or some sales prospects.
OK, if that distinction helps you feel less nervous for that thing that you have to give next Wednesday, fair enough. But it's a false disctinction.
The essential principles of speech-giving and presentation-giving are the same. Maybe, in common parlance, speeches are more formal, or to larger audiences, or more important, than presentations. But each is an opportunity to change the world. Each involves putting yourself in front of some people and holding forth. Each should be taken very seriously.
There may be a further implication in some business circles that a presentation involves Power Point, and a speech, especially a keynote speech, typically will not. But that's to make a distinction where there is none. Most people use Power Point badly, as a crutch, or speaker notes, not as illustrations to help the audience get a few key points of the talk. Using Power Point badly will mar both speeches and presentations.
So don't hide behind Power Point, and don't hide behind the terminology. A presentation is a speech, and worth taking seriously. Prepare it thoughtfully, rehearse it fully, and give it with passion. The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.
The origins of the use of Power Point were solidly grounded in good intentions. Remember slides? People put pictures on them, or graphs -- visual aids. They were intended to act as accompaniments to lectures and presentations.
The whole idea was that the speaker would talk for a while, and then occasionally show a slide that illustrated a point with a picture or a striking image, or made a set of numbers clear with a bar graph or a pie chart.
Slides were time-consuming to create, and difficult to change. So most people used them sparingly. I once saw a speech by a National Geographic photographer that included a hundred slides, but each one was a uniquely wonderful picture he had culled from thousands, literally. He was entitled.
Then came Power Point. People soon got the hang of creating slides; they were easy to make using this software, and easy to change.
And somewhere along the line, Power Point ‘decks’ ceased being illustrative information to accompany talks. They became speaker outlines.
Now we have the dreaded phenomenon we have all lived through (barely) in which we watch in horrified fascination as a speaker plods through every word on slide after slide with 20 lines or more of text on them. We wonder, as our consciousness slowly ebbs, ‘will he read every word, or will he occasionally vary the words slightly?’
And we have the Power Point Triangle of Death, where the speaker moves to the screen to point out some illegible word, drifts back to his computer, while mumbling something about the next slide, only to come to the third point of the triangle floating somewhere uneasily in between his screen position and his computer position.
None of these moves has anything to do with the audience, communicating with whom is after all the purpose of the talk, isn’t it?
Thus, Power Point, in the hands of most business speakers, commits the fatal sin of at once making the speaker and his talk irrelevant to the audience.
If you’re a Power Point abuser – and more than one slide every 5 minutes qualifies you – then don’t bother to gather the audience together. Just email them your ‘deck’ and save everyone a lot of bother.
