Giving Principled Presentations

A successful principled presentation is the offspring of 60 percent planning and development prior to the event, 20 percent delivery proficiency, and 20 percent environmental and situation-specific factors, such as the setting, the audience, technology glitches, and so on.

What can go wrong at the planning phase?

Planning involves translating upfront research and reflection regarding the intended purpose of your presentation, as well as features of your audience and speaking environment into a presentation structure and approach. Some common problems that emerge from incomplete or inaccurate planning include the following.

Wrong goals for a presentation. Have you ever tried to achieve goals in a presentation that would have been better achieved by other instructional methods? Your sponsor may impose outcome presentation goals that are better obtained with a hands-on session. For example, presentations are useful to communicate knowledge but fall short for skill building or motivational outcomes. When you are faced with inappropriate requests from sponsors, respond by offering other more appropriate training alternatives. My colleague Chopeta Lyons has a great response to clients with ill-advised requests: "Yes, I can do that. But I would be remiss if I did not tell you" (and she continues to explain why their approach won't be as effective as an alternative).

Goals don't fit audience or timeframe. Are your goals too ambitious (or too watered down) for the time allotted and the audience? Are there too many slides for a one-hour presentation? Or is your presentation underdeveloped, with too little meat for the time frame and audience?

Irrelevant goals. Will your presentation goals be relevant to the audience's context or background? Irrelevant presentation goals got me fired! I was commissioned by a medical equipment manufacturer to teach a one-day session on the psychology of learning and evidence-based training methods. The audience was field staff, primarily salespeople who also had collateral training duties. I had asked them to bring a sample lesson with them, thinking that reviewing their samples would make the session relevant. When I asked for a show of hands as to who had brought a lesson with them, guess what? Not one! The presentation bombed completely. Those folks had not the slightest interest in learning psychology or training techniques. I soon abandoned my presentation plan and asked the participants to meet in groups and list their main training challenges. My goal was to respond to their agenda rather than force mine. But this activity resulted in lists of complaints about how the central training staff (my sponsors) made their lives miserable. Things went downhill from there. It was a classic no-win situation that could have been avoided with better upfront analysis and planning.

As you reflect on your goals and audience, consider an organizing framework as well as what kinds of activities you may want to include. Once you have a high-level plan, it's time to start developing the core elements of an effective presentation: slides and handouts. This puts you in the development phase.

What can go wrong at the development phase?

Now your presentation plan comes to life. You are creating slides, writing handouts, and jotting down talking points. Development is the incarnation of your planning phase. At this stage you will confront many questions. How many slides should you produce? Should you have a handout? If yes, what type? What kinds of presenter notes should you develop? Here's some common development missteps.

Death by PowerPoint. How many slides should you develop for your presentation? Presentations such as classroom lectures or webinars are paced by the presenter - not the learners. Consequently, presentations run a greater risk of causing mental overload than self-paced media such as books or asynchronous e-learning. Too many complex slides can overload. Alternatively, too few slides can fail to sustain attention due to lack of visual interest and stagnation. I know of no evidence supporting any specific metric for numbers of slides. In my own presentations I average one slide per minute. So for an hour conference session, I'll typically develop 55 - 65 slides. This does not mean I show one slide every minute. During a short activity a single slide might remain in place for several minutes. During an explanation, I might have six slides for one topic and two for another. In contrast, I've heard really great keynote presentations based on maybe 10 or 12 slides. You will need to consider the complexity of the topic, and the background and size of your audience as well as the delivery media and setting. A keynote for 500 will benefit from a different solution than a smaller presentation for 15.

No visual interest. The worst case? No visuals at all. There are no slides, or the slides are walls of words. There are a few talented speakers who can command and sustain attention through their voice alone. But for the purpose of learning, even a talented speaker can get a better result by using effective visuals. Be visual from the start. I recommend a title slide that uses a visual to generate interest, arouse curiosity, and convey the purpose of the session.

Handouts. By handout I refer to a physical, usually print-based, guide given to participants at the start of a presentation. Until recently, most handouts were printouts of the presentation slides. In the last few years, many conference organizers have requested different formats. For example, rather than pages of slides, they request a brief text summary, references, and a job aid to help attendees apply the ideas of the presentation after the event.

There is no single best handout, but I do feel that handouts of slides alone are not optimal. Slides alone will encourage note taking and in many situations lead to split attention. Slides alone are incomplete and don't usually make good references. Rather than slides alone, define your handout based on the goals, constraints, and audience features you defined during planning.

What can go wrong at the delivery phase?

Imagine that you have invested sufficient time and effort to planning and developing. You have a solid presentation. However, at show time it's up to the speaker to make it come alive. What can go wrong the day and hour of the event?

Death by speaker introduction. Well-intended event hosts can take up to 15 minutes of your allotted speaking time with various housekeeping, acknowledgement, and marketing duties as well as with a lengthy speaker introduction often read word for word. I usually ask my host to let me make my own introduction and try to limit them to less than a minute. Keep your personal introduction very succinct. No one is that interested at the start of a presentation about your organization, its products, your detailed educational history, your grandchildren, and so on. I recommend just a single slide to establish your credibility and enthusiasm for the topic. As the presentation evolves, you can insert information about yourself and in that way evolve a more natural relationship throughout your session.

Audience confusion. Will your attendees immediately get what the presentation is about, what it might accomplish, or how it will be organized? If not, they have no framework, and no basis for deciding if it's relevant to their needs. Confusion may be the result of a divagating presentation with insufficient structure or failure to communicate the structure to the audience.

Technical glitches. You know the saying: What can go wrong will. Technology can let you down. First, I recommend using your own computer and double checking that your computer has the needed capacity and software for your presentation. Bring an extra copy of your presentation on a memory stick as a backup. Second, insist on a rehearsal prior to the event. Test everything. Third, don't include unreliable technology as part of your event. Even to this day I shy away from drawing on the Internet as a critical part of my presentation. Connectivity in the presentation room may be poor or the Internet may go down. At a minimum, have a backup of essential screen captures. Fourth, always have a plan B for critical elements of your presentation. If a multimedia presentation fails, go to backup screen captures or substitute a different multimedia presentation. When giving virtual classroom sessions, I always send the event producer a copy of my slides and make a paper copy for myself. That way if you lose connectivity (it's happened to me more than once), you can ask the sponsor to load the slides and continue your presentation referencing a paper copy.

Derailment. Have you ever been thrown off your presentation plan? It's easy to deviate from your plan during the actual presentation. Maundering speakers and audience questions are two common culprits. Disciplined planning and development should help. I usually print out thumbnails of my slides and write time guidelines in them. For example, I mark the slide where I should be at half my time. I believe in inviting audience questions during the presentation in most cases. It's part of being a good host. And it helps you see where you are or are not connecting. The trick is to use your responses to audience questions to forward your presentation agenda by adding an example, clarifying, or briefly discussing a different facet of your topic. Often you can use audience questions to jump start your next point.

The inflexible speaker. The most common problem is time - often too little time for your agenda. I always have some optional slides as part of my presentation. If I get questions or an activity takes longer than anticipated, I skip them. I do try to stick to 80 percent plus of my agenda, which has usually been published ahead and presented as part of the introduction. But good planning leaves your presentation scalable - you can skip some of the detail without shortchanging your agenda.

No social presence. You know all of this stuff already. If you can arrive early, take advantage of the wait time to meet and greet your attendees. Smile. It's simple, but speakers are often nervous or concentrating on their performance and forget to smile and look the audience in the eye. Use a conversational approach. Don't read a script. Build up passion for your topics - it will come through in your voice, words, and body language. Finally, never "take on" an audience member who voices a disagreement with your topics. Always thank them for their contribution and respond with either a clarification or a noncommittal statement such as "Well, that's another way to look at it," or "Hmm, it would be interesting to test out that idea."

Note: This article is excerpted from Evidence-Based Training Methods: A Guide for Training Professionals by Ruth Colvin Clark.

Ruth Colvin Clark is determined to bridge the gap between academic research and practitioner application in instructional methods. A specialist in instructional design and workforce learning, she holds a doctorate in instructional psychology and served as training manager for Southern California Edison before founding her own company, Clark Training & Consulting. Clark was president of the International Society for Performance Improvement and received their Thomas Gilbert Distinguished Professional Achievement Award in 2006.

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