Our presenter was vivacious, sparky, bright and engaging. She works in a cool area of business and has the opportunity to see what works and doesn’t work in many industries. This enables her to pull together terrific insights and back these up with hard evidence based on numerous case studies and who doesn’t love a good case study. A big crowd turned out to hear her talk, so the place was packed.
Chatting before we started, she mentioned in passing that she had not planned the talk and was going to wing it. I thought that was “brave” but in a bad way. The talk has been advertised for weeks. She knows when it is on, so why would she want to wing it? I just dismissed that as either bravado or laying out an early excuse, in case it bombs as a presentation. Either way, I didn’t believe it and sure enough, when she went through the slide deck it was obviously structured and well planned. She was speaking to what was on screen, so definitely no “script” required, but it had a plan.
Early in, she said something disturbing. She mentioned that she intended for this to be an interactive talk. This sounds pretty sexy, getting the audience involved and it can be, but I got worried immediately. Her invitation to contribute to participate flags the issue of time control.
Whenever we invite the audience to chip in with their thoughts and experiences, we lose the ability to keep on time. Some responses are short, but many are surprisingly long. I am always amazed by how much pent-up demand there is out there for people to add their two bobs’ worth. Maybe these days, with everyone so engrossed with their individual phone screens, the opportunity for some people to speak up has shrivelled and they are desperate for their thoughts, musings and comments to be heard by others. When you make that “interactive” invitation, there will be a proportion of people who will take you up on your offer and more. The “more” bit is where we lose control. That impacts the overall discipline of the talk to conform to the schedule for start and finish.
There is nothing wrong with involving the audience, but it requires discipline on our part to control proceedings such that we finish on time. When we combine this interactivity at scale, we can blow out the time required to get through the prepared material. This happened to me recently when teaching a class on presentations for a luxury brand. In typical Dale Carnegie fashion, we plan our classes out to the second. People in the class, however were much more talkative than I expected and I found a dilemma of more material to cover than the time allocated. I had to drop some parts out because we had a hard stop.
The secret in this case is to skip those parts, but in a way which is not obvious to the audience. Only you know what is in the slide deck and so you can make adjustments if you need to. I just jumped to some later slides in a way which was not public to the participants. As far as they were concerned, this was all part of the plan.
Our speaker ran out of time and made the amateur error of showing us al what we had missed out because she wasn’t able to control the proceedings. This is really bad. Now the audience feels unhappy because they were enjoying the first part of the presentation and they want to receive all the value they are trading their time for. Seeing sexy slides whiz by with no commentary or explanation is really a tease, but not one we can enjoy.
My calculation was she needed about another thirty minutes to cover what she had prepared. If she had been more disciplined, she could have allowed some degree of interaction bit capped it so that it didn’t blow up the presentation time schedule. She got caught by the organisers, giving her the bum’s rush to get off stage because the time was more than up.
Reflecting on the structure, she had spent a fair amount of time at the start establishing her credentials through trip down memory lane with her career. It was relevant to what she was presenting about and it was incredibly charming, but I think it went a bit too long. Consequently, at the end she had to sacrifice the juicy bits about the case studies. She could have let her evidence do the hard lifting to establish her credibility on this subject, because she certainly had the goods. This is another discipline point – don’t get too caught up in talking about yourself, as fascinating as that is to you.
Her takeaway points were a letdown at the very end, as she wrapped up. She had the right idea, but the content was a bit ho hum. She could have come up with some harder hitting recommendations at the end to really provide benefit to the audience. No one was photographing the take aways, and that is always a bad sign with any sort of summary.
Her final impression was her rushing through the content, teasing us with the sexy bits we didn’t cover and then leaving us high and dry with humdrum guides to our next steps. The lack of discipline meant the presentation started well and just slowly imploded and collapsed at the end. She was still vivacious and charming, so that always helps. Better though to be more professional and bring value to the audience. That is what we want them to remember us for.
