Presentations

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Over the years I have seen a number of really good presenters and presentations, but the majority of all presentations were badly prepared, badly communicated and I believe you have made similar experiences. So I started to develop an interest in how to create presentations that make the audience listen and are generally engaging. It is utopian to think that you will reach each individual member of the audience, but if you reach more than 50% you are pretty successful. Sometimes you even have only two or three people in the audience whose attention matter, e.g. in certain situations where you want to make an impression professionally with a person who can help you get ahead in your job.

So in my "Rants & Roars" on presentations, I want to share my ideas on presenting from three angles. Those are presentation styles, presentation design and presentation technology. You won't be able to find everything here just yet, as this is a work-in-progress, but I am trying my best to get this finished soon.

Presentations are not only the way you present, the way you speak, they are also about the design of your support material, which doesn't always need to be PowerPoint slides. Furthermore you have different audiences/ different kinds of presentations. While you have presentations in which you need to present a project to your superiors, or a presentations to clients representing your organization, you also have situations where you are giving lectures to students or fellow colleagues. All need different approaches, but have one thing in common. This thing is that people have to know why they should listen to you and they have to leave with the impression that you cared meeting them, which you can do by preparation and an organized approach to your presentation. These are the simple rules for presentation.

Preparation

Before starting to work on any presentation you have to ask yourself a number of critical questions. Jerry Weismann in his book "Presenting to Win", and I will use his ideas a lot in the parts to follow., names four that are essential for planning your presentation.

1. What is your plan B?
2. Who is your audience and what is their WIIFY (What Is In It For You)?
3. What are your Roman columns (order)?
4. Why Roman columnds in a particular order/ what is your flow structure?

It is always very important to generate an interest in the audience for what you are about to present/ speak about. Again Jerry mentiones a number of triggers for the WIIFY. These are starting points to get the attention of the audience and to make them "wanting" to listen to you.

1. This is important to you because ...
2. What does this mean to you ...
3. Why am I telling you this?
4. Who cares? You should care because ...
5. So what? Here is what ...
6. And ... ? Here is the WIIFY ...

Jerry then goes on and gives you his "Seven Classic Opening Gambits", and you can read about similar things in all kinds of presentation materials/ books. His openings are:

1. A question to/ for the audience.
2. Factoid: striking statistic/ little known fact.
3. Retroperspective/ Prospective lookback/ lookahead.
4. Anecdote (personal, organizational, professional)
5. Quotation
6. Aphorism, a familiar saying.
7. Analogy: comparisonbetween seemingly unrelated items.

The above are things that can help you get started and I have been using those things quite frequently and they do work.

To read further, I can momentarily only point to the excellent blog of Garr Reynolds on Presentations, PresentationZen. He also has an excellent collection of tips on tricks on his website. See: www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation

More to follow.