January 27th, 2012
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:~
Volume;
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.
Unbelievably dull slides!
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?
Poor use of data
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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July 13th, 2010
Why ?
The messages that many speakers will need to deliver in conferences and key note speeches across the country this autumn will probably be challenging, uncompromising and in many cases, unpopular. With dramatic cuts being made in the private and public sector alike, the “doing more with less” message is likely to be a common theme. In tough times leadership is all about communication and being able to deliver difficult messages and yet still keep people engaged and involved.
One of the things that contribute to people’s dislike of change is the uncertainty they have to live with which causes them fear and anxiety. If a leader is able to communicate well, keep people informed and be open with them, this can lessen anxiety and help people cope with ambiguity.
Against this backdrop, keeping people motivated and focussed is a huge task. It is going require Churchillian or Lutheran grade rhetorical skills (along with authentic, congruent actions too). It’s going to require masterful preparation and delivery of these speeches to enable the speakers to achieve these almost diametrically opposed objectives.
The best speakers in the world know that to be that to be this effective takes hard work. They know that powerful and effective speakers are not born but created from force of effort. There is no substitute, there are no short cuts.
Many leaders are tempted to downplay the importance of speeches as the tip of the iceberg, style not substance, starter not the main course. They don’t want to have to assign the time to deliver excellence in this area. We can only hope that this conference season most leaders will recognise, now more than ever, the importance of the messages they need to convey and put in the “hard yards” to optimally communicate with their people and their organisations.
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August 10th, 2009
As you enjoy the balmy days of our “barbeque summer,” it seems like half the world is away on holiday and the remaining half are away in spirit if not body! But September is approaching… back to school for the kids and back to conferences and kick off meetings as the business and political worlds gear up for the rest of the year.
Do you loathe it or love it?
Is it a great time to refocus and set direction, to inspire and be inspired ? Or do you just dread it? Dread being required to get up on your hind legs and make the standard issue presentations, dread the bored audiences? dread the powerpoint mountain you’ll be asked to produce? and worst of all, dread the hammering heart and sweaty palms that can go with it?
To my mind it should be a time for inspiration and energy, renewal and refocus. It’s a shame if conference presentations hinder rather than help. Make sure that your / your teams presentations this autumn break the mould, see the Archimedes Website for the paper “Top ten tips for conference speaking”
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