Richard Mulholland should know everything there is to know about giving awesome presentations. He's owned a presentation company for over 10 years, and the number one reason why clients flock to him is to avoid boring people to death in their next presentation.
“The problem with this is that blaming PowerPoint for the bad presentation is like blaming the pan for a terrible meal,” says Mulholland. “It's far easier on the ego to blame the software than it is to admit that the problem lies with you, the speaker... but it does. What we need to do is not change the tool but rather to rethink the way we use it in the first place. To do this we need to rethink presentations generally.”
Mulholland advises that you imagine your presentation is a theatre production, and that you have a script, a set, and an actor. “The script is the hidden document that you prepare from, it's an item that audiences never gets to see. The set, well that's the elaborate visual that helps the audience get immersed in the story, it's the support material that you use to add flavour to the script, making it easier for them to remember later. Then there's the actor - that's you, pal.”
Break a leg
The founder and owner of Missing Link, South Africa's largest presentation firm, and co-owner of Thunk, a perspective lab that changes the way companies think, Mulholland says corporate South Africa needs to spend more time on their scripts. “The script isn't lines that we need to remember word-for-word though, it's simply a structure we need to follow, and it dictates what needs to be said and where. It covers the three acts (tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them). This can be written out on a scrap of paper or in a document. Once you have the structure right, add the flavour, the anecdotes that your audience can connect to. This works as well with presenting figures from a balance sheet as it does with explaining your new vision statement.”
Mulholland advises that you imagine your presentation is a theatre production, and that you have a script, a set, and an actor.
Mandy de Waal, ITWeb contributor
The last piece of the puzzle, according to Mulholland, is the set. The pictures and cognitive candy that feeds the audience's brains and makes it easy for them recall the facts. “It makes no sense at all to replicate the words you're saying, that's repetitive. In theory, if you've prepared well, you could get away with not a single word on your set, just a great visual representation - and that will be more than enough to ensure that you stay on message. Remember your audience bought a ticket with their time and just want to enjoy the show, not do the thinking, that's your job.”
Another great resource for ensuring you don't deliver PowerPoint presentations that are weapons of mass destruction is a book called “Giving Great Presentations”, by Drew Provan, who says while presentation skills are very much a part of professional life, few corporations provide the training to help people develop these skills. Provan's book is devoted to deciding on the key messages, putting the presentations together, using other media and settings to present information, dealing with anxiety, dressing appropriately for the event, and then, achieving a perfect delivery each time. The guide also covers answering questions from the floor and strategies for dealing with them.
Provan says good performance is a solid preparation for the event and every slide has to be designed with one aim in mind - to enhance the talk and emphasise key messages. In “Giving Great Presentations”, readers will learn that presentation techniques are not innate but learned, and that the best presenters use fairly simple slides, which serve to complement the spoken presentation.
Giving Great Presentations
Author: Drew Provan
ISBN-13: 978-1-84078-371-1
Format: Trade Paper
Available from: Intersoft
Page Count: 192
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