We often get asked the broader question: How can you assess audience’s reaction? There are the obvious responses of people falling asleep, looking angry, or walking out. But what about the more subtle responses? Usually if people are fidgeting or looking down most of the time, they are bored.

It can be hard to tell. In smaller centres in NZ, often audiences don’t interact much, but will stay on to discuss things  afterwards. In bigger cities, they may interact so much that you think you have made a whole lot of NBFF; then as soon as you finish, they leave!

Individuals within an audience may have unusual reactions.  Recently a client told me about a presenter who just used slides, each containing a great deal of information.  The presentation involved the audience reading them. Sounded tedious to me, but my informant said the presentation was fascinating, because of the interesting slide content. 

It is very difficult for a presenter to accurately read audience reaction.   You might think the whole thing was a disaster because you missed an important point, yet the audience may have liked it. At other times some of the audience may have looked grumpy and yet come up afterwards to say they thought it was great.

Some tips:

1. Ask someone before your presentation to give you feedback afterwards on the level of audience engagement.
2. Know your material very well, so you can stay mentally free enough to focus on audience reaction. 
3. If what you are doing is boring your audience, change it!

Made to Stick

The authors are brothers.  Chip is a Stanford professor who researched and taught what made ideas stick.   Dan worked in the field of educational publishing and thus need to find out what makes great teachers great.  They realised they had both been focused on the same question: Why do some ideas succeed while others fail?

The result of their work is their book ‘Made to Stick’ and the ideas are enormously useful for presenting as well as many other fields. They have a blog at: Heath Brothers

They pin down six key principles of ’stickability’ and every single one is relevant to making your presentation engaging:

1. Simplicity: We need ideas that are simple but also profound – this is why the Tui ‘Yeah Right’ ads caught on so well.
2. Unexpectedness: We need to generate interest and curiosity: The Air New Zealand body paint ads are a case in point!
3. Concreteness:Ideas need to be conveyed in very concrete terms so they mean the same thing to everyone.  The concreteness gives us a hook to hang the ideas on. Years ago I was very thrilled that my son’s general knowledge when I discovered he knew the capitals of nearly all the states in the US.  It was only later I realised that actually he knew all the ones that had good basketball teams, but  none of the others! The concrete fact of basketball enabled him to easily memorise the city names.
4. Credibility: People must believe the idea. Sticky ideas are credible, but people don’t like lots of facts.  Something that appeals to our idea of common sense seems to work well, even if  it is wrong!  Fears about the risks of vaccination fall into this category.
5. Emotions: We must get people to care about our ideas.Obama’s presidential nomination speech tapped into an emotional surge of hope with the famous lines: ‘Yes we can!’
6. Stories: We need to get people to act on our ideas. Stories get us prepared to respond quickly and effectively. Stories are a major source of motivation for people in every walk of life. Stories can do 1-5 above as well as #6!

By the way, if you are on a school board, Lesley Moffatt provides excellent training and consultation for people working on school and other community boards. She has a blog at: Onboard with Lesley Moffatt

I found this link via Ellen Finklestein’s useful PowerPoint Tips blog

Audience atwitter?

Recently several people have been talking about the impact of Twitter on presentations.  I haven’t actually experienced it; or perhaps I just haven’t been conscious of it!  Mostly it appears to be used in IT conferences, but it seems to be spreading wider than this. If it is becoming more common, it is worth thinking about how to manage its impact.

If you think of Twitter as being the expression of  extraneous thoughts, related or not to the presentation, to some extent it has just brought to the surface what has always gone on for audiences anyway.

In ’self-help speak’, I wonder if it is useful to think about the challenge  from a position of  either scarcity or abundance?

Using the scarcity response, you would ask people to switch off their mobile phones while you are speaking. That would probably work okay with obedient audiences. I did see one speaker who announced that he would be so riveting we would discover that we wouldn’t be interested in our mobile phones – he wasn’t!  One person I talked to had been part of a negatively twittering audience.  He thought in that situation, the negativity was in danger of becoming a group-think response.  Certainlysuch spreading  criticism  could easily lead a presenter to react from scarcity.

Using abundance could mean deciding that Twitter is a valuable opportunity for dialogue with the audience. You could decide that the people twittering are at least thinking about your content.  You could respond to the tweets using a gatekeeper colleague, rather like the chair of a panel discussion. The colleague could monitor the tweets, looking for  lines of discussion and suggesting some threads for your commentary.  If you had lots of practice and could think quickly, you could even  perhaps manage this dialogue yourself.

 There’s an interesting post on Pistachio: Micro Sharing Macro Results.  Have any of you experienced the Twittering audience?

Presentations or speaking to groups is something most of you do everyday at work. In meetings ,presenting ideas, or more formally giving proposals etc. The people you are talkiing to are not ‘public’ , unless you are a politician and thats another whole new ball game!

You will prbably be known to your audience, if not you will have been introduced.Yet some people call it public speaking.
This is not a toastmasters exercise, most of you will be presenting in work environments where the opportunity to speak is quite different.

Here are some tips for presenting (not public speaking!)

Always put yourself in the shoes of your audience-talk their talk
Know what you want to achieve with your presentation-what do you want your take home message to be? e.g “I’m excited about the changes and understand how they will affect me”.
Use as many live examples as you can
and be real-it is important you come through as authentic and not a clone.

Thereare important differences  between ‘influence’ and ‘persuasion’:

Persuasion is a more direct, short-term  activity and requires a larger emotional component.  Influence is more indirect, longer term and depends more on logic.  Persuasion mainly involves one way communication, whereas influence is often multi-directional.

There is an interesting post and discussion on this  at Saying What You Mean, and a thought-provoking acronym from Brian Ahearn that covers both persuasion and influence:  He says that influence is about

P. E.O.P.L.E.:

Powerful

Everyday

Opportunities to

Persuade, that are

Lasting and

Ethical

Many of us put a great deal of time and effort thinking about persuasion and not nearly enough into influence.  If you are not very articulate, you will  probably find it easier to focus on influencing rather than persuasion.  At least it is a more gradual process that you can plan and execute.

So look for those everyday opportunities and use them to build your influence.

Are you better than the average driver?

… or any other skill?

Answer?  Deliberate practice.

Take driving as an example.  Recent research shows that most drivers believe they are better drivers than the average!  Well of course!  We have so much experience.

Yes.  We do,  but how much driving ‘practice’ do we put in?  If we were going to deliberately practise, we would:

• Raise our  awareness of HOW we are driving – maybe focusing our attention on one particular aspect of the skill until we perfected it, then move on to another.
• We would also really listen to and possibly even act on driving advice!!

Hmm…! How many of us could do that?  I certainly remember putting a stop to my four year old son’s habit of giving  me driving advice from his car seat!

• We would do even better if we sought regular feedback on our driving from a good instructor and then put the advice into action?  Think of the lives that might be saved!

An interesting article in Fortune Magazine shows that across a huge range of fields, the top people are the ones who devote the most time to deliberate practice.  The rule of thumb holds that experts need ten years of very intensive practice to be extremely successful in their chosen field.

On a recent long flight back from the UK to New Zealand, I watched a fascinating series of BBC programmes on child musical prodigies.  The programme speculated on which ones would make it to greatness as adults.  Once you are up there in prodigy- land, the long-run greats are the ones who have maintained intensive practice for at least ten years. Mozart was practising three hours a day by the time he was three years old.  By six, he had clocked up 3,500 hours practice – apparently over three times more than anyone else his age!

I am not sure how they know that, but back to us normal mortals and our presentation skills:  Whilst we may have plenty of presentation ‘experience’, how many of us use deliberate practice?  Do we take the time to reflect on a particularly demanding piece of presenting, seek feedback on our effectiveness and then work on the suggested changes?

So to become a good presenter:

1. Work out what aspect you need to focus on.  Each time you present, concentrate on getting that aspect right.  Keep going until the required behaviour becomes a habit, then get to work on the next bit.
2. Get feedback from a reliable observer and act on the feedback.
3. Watch what other presenters do and see if you can learn from them – good or bad.  But then make sure you practise what you have learnt.
4. International Toastmasters is a great way to get practice and to obtain supportive, constructive feedback.

Now while you are about it, about that right hand turn you just made….!

While people often comment negatively on presenters who use too many fillers, we use them in lots of other situations and they generally have a negative impact.Fillers sometimes serve a useful function in casual speech, but in more formal communication they are a dead giveaway of nervousness.

To eradicate your fillers, you have to know to acknowledge that you are a filler sinner. A presentation is a good opportunity to work on the problem because it involves a finite time during which you can focus on them. The next time you present, get a brave person to count the number of fillers and let you know the total. Next time, aim to reduce the number, get the countback and repeat the dose until you are reformed!

Ellen Finklestein’s excellent PowerPoint newsletter had a good tip last week that got me thinking about this common problem. She suggest you tape your prepared speech, then go through and mark every filler on your notes. Then re-tape, cutting as many out as you can. Keep doing this until you have removed them all.

Once you have achieved filler awareness, a positive cure is to simply take a breath each time you feel a filler coming on. The technique turns the negative of a filler into valuable pause. Most presenters can enhance their communication by increasing the number and length of their pauses. So at the very least you will gain a more dramatic effect.

Good luck with this. It really pays to …um work.. on this problem, because basically it like matters?