Don’t be a Twit

If what you have to say isn’t more beautiful than silence… Shut up. Confuses for Presentations and tweets methinks.

Tweeted 25 Apr 2012

I’ve been looking through my twitter account, which is largely a soliloquy  (for an audience of 1.. me) and thought I might occasionally share a collection of related tweets here.. so here is the first collection of 17

11 Feb 2013

Those who think they are good find the need to state it. Those who know don’t.

10 Jan 2013

Advice is cheap But good advice is invaluable (as it is rare.)

19 Oct 2012

What they hear and what you say are not always the same

10 Feb 2012

Win with dignity, Lose with grace

6 Sep 2011

Never underestimate # of people capable of spending 8hr transatlantic reordering bullets\slides & believe they spent the flight working!

17 Aug 2011

Presentations are what happened to the audience, not what was intended by the presenter.

22 May 2011

Presentations without structure are not presentations they are ramblings; occasionally interesting often inane always inadvisable!

9 Nov 2010

Simplifying Complexity is genius (& hard); Complicating Simplicity is foolish (& easy); which presenter are you, Wise man or Fool?

9 Oct 2010

Knowing your philosophy is right isn’t important. Knowing it’s wrong is more productive.

8 Oct 2010

Re-ordering slides isn’t presentation preparation, it’s a diversion tactic

5 Aug 2010

If the best thing about your presentation is the design… You’re screwed!

10 Jun 2010

What people feel influences what they do.. Not what they say..

26 May 2010

Audiences don’t often care about what you want.

21 Sep 2009

It’s difficult to over prepare for a presentation. But not impossible.

30 Apr 2009

Strive for effective communication not just impressive presentation

24 Mar 2009

Here I tweet, only started, wrote two lines, now departed

Excellence is not a gift; but rather a skill that takes practice.. Plato

Anybody who has attended either one of my seminars or a training course will no doubt be used to me talking about Plato and Socrates.. Socrates believed that the only way of improving our intellect was verbal rational debate; his love of philosophy (the love of wisdom) was driven from a verbal discourse base.

In the UK our political system is based on the same idea, stand up and debate your case. Prime Minister Question time for those who watch TV late at night! Written arguments, white papers, even blogs are not as persuasive nor as revealing as the cut and thrust of a debate. Having to make your case, justify your arguments and think on your feet is central to our political system; our education system and, I would argue, human relationships. I am in agreement with Socrates.

Well I am in agreement with what we think he believed, clearly we don’t really know ‘cos he’s dead! In fact the only reason we know anything about him is that one of his pupils Plato disagreed with him and felt that art of writing your arguments down helps you orgainse them and think about articulating them well. If he didn’t he wouldn’t have written about what Socrates said and we wouldn’t know about it 2362 years later.

So Plato’s quote above about practice applies to debating skills and the art of writing. I struggle to write (probably dear reader.. evidently! lol) and so blogging has always been a bit of a challenge for me. I am mildly dyslexic and don’t (unlike my kids) touch type.

I don’t believe that scripts work for presentations; I do believe that writing a script is a valuable exercise but learning it and repeating it verbatim is counter productive. I coach people to write the script to organize their thoughts (Plato) and then throw it away and get to their feet and practice (Socrates)

And what is funny is that the more we practice this.. the better we get at it. Most people put time and effort into avoiding practising (we call this practice avoidance.. clients often call it playing with PowerPoint!) but at some point the writing has to end and the practice has to begin.

Ineffective teaching isn’t teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the wrong one, it should be:

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

And the answer is:

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

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

Aristotle and Persuasion: Ethos Pathos Logos

2300 years ago Aristotle wrote that in order to persuade an audience a speaker needed to provide proof and that the most persuasive of speakers employed three different types of proof. Ethos which is personal credibility, Pathos an emotional argument and Logos which is a rational argument. We find the same thing when we are writing presentations for clients; we even often follow the same order.

• Credibility.  Sell yourself, your company and then your product in that order.
• Empathy.    Show an understanding of the audience’s needs, desires or issues.
• Rational.     Here’s why you should act, here’s evidence that acting will work.

The mistake we find more often than not is an over reliance on credibility. A presentation that last 45 minutes and spends 44 of them telling the audience how great the presenter’s organisation is. Sure it may in fact be interesting that you have 300 delivery trucks but do I really care? So What?

Most of our clients’ presentations (well the 15000 that are B2B sales presentations) follow this structure:

• Who are we?
• What do we do?
• Why do you need it?
• Why do you need it from us?
• Can I have your business?

The credibility comes in the first section and usually fits on one slide. “What we do” is not normally a service description but more a results description (Improve your sales conversion rates by 30% rather than produce PowerPoint presentations) and then the presentations become about the audience not the presenter. Ethos followed quickly by Pathos concluded with logos.

We find presenting the emotional argument prior to the rational argument more effective since to quote Nixon “When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow”

So humanity hasn’t changed much in 2300 years, same old same old. My problem is I can’t now read the name Aristotle with out hearing John Cleese and Michael Palin singing “Aristotle Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle, Socrates himself will be particularly missed, a nice little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed”

http://youtu.be/PtgKkifJ0Pw   Philosophers Song.. Live!

Marathon presenting

Staying fresh, when you’re not!

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

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