The Subtle Art of Delivering a Presentation
“The success of your presentation will be judged not by the knowledge you send but by what the listener receives.”
– Lilly Walters
The above aphorism truly demonstrates what is demanded out of a successful presentation. In my opinion, Delivering a Presentation is no less than Art as whatever we classify as an artwork comprises of expressing an idea or an opinion. Presentation is agnostic of the audience size, duration of presentation or complexity of content. The potency of a presentation is simply dependent on how much audience retention and engagement we could achieve as speakers. For a speaker, the cardinal point is to gauge the interest of the audience and he/she should drive the presentation accordingly. As a speaker, we tend to squeeze in oodles of content in a very short span with the intent of passing on as much knowledge as we could; but this practice is surely counterproductive as it ends up making the audience confused due to overload of information. Speakers ought to strike the right balance between what they say and how much they say.
The above graph demonstrates the trade-off between Time Duration and Volume Duration. It iterates that for a presentation to be perfect, we need to look out for optimum time duration with respect to the Volume of content. Apart from a perfect presentation, the above diagram conceptualises 4 more variants of presentation:
- TIRESOME PRESENTATION: More often than not, speakers have the tendency to use as much time as they could, to deliver as much content as they can. This might be satisfying for the speaker but for the audience it is nothing more than an ordeal that they have to sit through. Such a presentation forces the audience to get saturated beyond a limit and leaves them with no constructive takeaways.
- UNSATISFACTORY PRESENTATION: Here comes another form of variation which corresponds to a presentation within sufficient amount of time, the speaker broadcasts insufficient amount of information. Such a presentation causes resentment in the audience as it fails to contend the listeners.
- OVERLOADED PRESENTATION: An overloaded presentation is the one where the volume of content encumbers the audience due to time constraints. As a Harvard study says, Too Much Information (TMI) in Too Little time (TLT) compounds a perplexing problem. The time people have to dedicate to learning has decreased and become more piecemeal. At the same time, the amount of available content has increased exponentially. Thus, unintentionally the speaker wishes to fit in hefty information in the permissible time frame which in turn causes unnecessary overload and complexity for the spectators.
- SHORT AND CRISP PRESENTATION: In this fast paced world of ours, we look out for quick bites and shots of information every now and then. People are loosing out on retaining what they hear due to either lack of focus and concentration or due to the haste of finishing up tasks. This confirms the notion that people have started looking for alternatives where they can quickly grasp new information within couple of minutes, provided the information is limited. A presentation that suffices such needs of the individuals can be conferred as short and crisp presentation.
Honing up the presentation skills is a matter of practice and also the opportunity one gets to interact with the right set of people who give them constructive feedback to improve with each passing presentation. My time in the corporate world made me believe that presentation skills are predominant for establishing your presence in your organisation. Your knowledge remains futile if you cannot reciprocate that in words. Believe it or not, we humans love communicators and consequentially a person with the gift of the gab gets more opportunities than the ones who are rather reticent. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that people who are at the top of their games are brilliant orators because they tend to influence the crowd with every word they utter.
Process of Developing a Presentation is essentially a four-step process that would enable the speaker to groom the content in accordance to the stipulated time.
- First step of the process revolves around narrowing down the main points of the presentation. It should include on a high level what all is to be covered and the depth and breadth of the coverage the speaker is aiming at. The first draft should not be exhaustive and should only cover the agenda items of the talk.
- Moving forward to the second step; it would require extensive research on the subject of the talk. At this step, the speaker should incorporate data points from as many sources as possible, making the content voluminous. At this point, deep dive into all the agenda items has to be taken to have a full coverage of the highlights that were pointed out as a part of the first step.
- Once the all-inclusive content is ready, the speaker would drive his/her way to the third step of the process which embraces leaning out the content by time-boxing. Now, the speaker would time-box the content and would get rid-off the unwanted or verbose material from the presentation that is killing away the precious delivery time.
- The fourth or the final step that culminates this entire process is re-organising the content so that the flow remains intact and there is absolutely minimal context switching from one slide to another. Every preceding slide should set base of the succeeding slide and the presenter should follow the inverted pyramid approach by kicking off the presentation with simple and relatable content and then moving on to the compulsive areas of discussion.
When the speaker follows this four-way process, it’s likely that he wouldn’t face hiccups during the talk with respect to content management and time management.
Let’s come to the final bit of the Subtle Art of Delivering a presentation. We all look at some quick fixes we can do in order to present a perfect talk to the audience that can enrich them with the subject knowledge. There are substantially 5 traits of a quintessential presentation that should be on speaker’s tips. If a presenter tries to abide by the 5 thumb rules listed below, they’ll get extremely near to a flawless presentation.
- Content is the King: The sole reason why people would be attentive during a presentation would be their inclination towards the content. A binding content leads to cohesion with the audience. Speaker should make sure that relevant content is getting shared across and no beating around the bush attempts are made. When the content is powerful, everything else would follow. Content should be filled with relatable examples; should enforce proper context setting before moving into the complexities of the talk and should try to explain convoluted concepts with ease so that the audience doesn’t end up getting bewildered.
- Audience Engagement: It is indeed rightly said by Mari Smith,”Content is King but engagement is Queen and the lady rules the house”. Keeping the audience engaged throughout the talk can be tasking but a brilliant speaker knows how to handle that. There are few simple tricks that the presenters can keep in mind to ensure that audience remains engrossed. It’s pivotal for the speaker to take appropriate pauses to allow the audience to take in and digest the information. The talk should not look like a monologue and for that to happen, intermediate breaks for Q&A sessions become unavoidable. Also, it won’t be wrong to say that a light-hearted joke in between the presentation never hurts ! But just a disclaimer, Don’t try too hard to impress the audience. The speaker should try to build a rapport with audience organically.
- Time your Content: We have already discussed in detail the impact of timing the presentation well and the need to efficaciously have timing and content go hand in hand. If one of the two becomes heavier than the other, it badly imbalances the entire talk. Timing of the content can be calculated on slide by slide basis. Relatively, complex slides would take more time than slides that cover a basic idea. Speaker should take a conscious decision on the fly if he/she thinks that they are going overboard while explaining a simple idea and then can cut short nonessential information to move on to the next slide. While explaining complex slides, presenter should not skim through the information but should rather spend supple amount of time so that audience understands the details. Prior to delivering the presentation, the speaker should time-box each slide.
- Be Well Prepared: The preparation time for any talk depends upon the amount of content and time duration to cover that material. Adequate amount of dry runs need to be done before the big day comes. Small ripples of preparation stack up to form a tidal wave for an engaging presentation. It’s always better to be over-prepared than to be under-prepared. The speaker must do ample research on the topic so that the questions put forward by the audience should not come up as a surprise to him/her. It’s natural and human that you might not know all the answers as a speaker, but honesty with which you answer the queries in all your capacity is all that counts. As it is said 80 is the new 100, speaker should try to be well versed with about 80% of the topic and content so that the audience can be instilled with the confidence that the speaker is the right source of information for them.
- Voice Modulation: Voice Modulation is seldom talked about when it comes to the quick fixes needed for a presentation. But the understated Voice modulation aspect plays a key role is grasping the audience attention and helps to keep them engrossed. When a speaker talks at a low pitch, the audience pays more attention to listen to what the speaker wants to say as he/she is hardly audible. Similarly, when the speaker suddenly speaks at a high pitch, the listeners tend to think that something important or surprising is being talked about. But there’s a word of caution; voice modulation at the wrong places can definitely ruin the fluidity of the presentation. Thus, the speaker needs to be cautious about using voice modulation to his/her advantage.
The simple ingredients of an awesome presentation are those few tools and tips that can help build affinity and accord between the speaker and the audience. In India we use a phrase “Atithidevo Bhava” (अतिथिदेवो भव) which means Guest is God, on similar lines for a Presentation, the audience’s feedback is god-like. Gratification is the single best outcome of a successful presentation and that prompts me to say “Satisfied Audience is a Bliss”.
