These peas are nice dear….how not to sound like a grey bureaucrat

I’m old enough to remember the spitting image character of John Major as a terminally dull, grey bureaucrat whose peak of dinner party conversational sparkle was a commentary on the nature of peas.

 I went to a conference this week with a number of speakers from Government and various quango’s and frankly I have to say their speaking skills did nothing to dispel the image of the grey bureaucrat!

Where shall I start? There was so much! But as an advocate of the less is more approach and the rule of three, here goes:~

Despite microphone support and not a vast auditorium I could barely hear some of the speakers. Their lack of volume made for very apologetic tones that lacked energy and authority. I don’t encourage people to shout at their audiences but on a scale of 1-10, where audible is at about 5-6 is most of these speakers were at 5. This is not where you want to be if you want to sound confident and authoritative. A presentation is not a conversation. To come across well, even with a microphone you need to project and fill the room with a pleasant, “easy listening sound”. It’s the only way to grab and retain audience engagement.

Text,text,text,text and more text . Typically people presented 10-15 slides for a 20 minute slot, of which 90% were text, of which over half had 90 or more words on the slide.  Power Point is NOT YOUR SCRIPT! In this multi media age surely people know this by now..? Which part of “VISUAL aid” are they not getting? FYI… slapping a logo in the corner does not count! And if you’re just going to write your script up on a slide, why not just send it to your audience to read and save all the time and effort of being there?

The guys from the DfE  (Department for Education) and DWP (Department of Works and Pensions) were on  mission to feed us facts. So many facts that a minute or two into their presentations I felt the “drinking from a fire hose “sensation, overwhelming me. I’m quite sure there must have been a costly Royal commission that took 3 years to deliver its report and cost £3 million that definitively proved the inverse relationship between facts and audience interest, i.e. the more you bombard people with facts the faster they lose the will to live!  A few, well chosen facts that are highly relevant to a cogent argument.. Great …  but slide after slide of impenetrable graphs that they didn’t have time or inclination to explain and you didn’t have time to work out, was indeed death by PowerPoint .

So if you don’t want to seem like the dullest of dull, grey, governmental speakers then at least avoid theses 3 presentation pitfalls!

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