The Mobile Presenter

When you get up in front of an audience to present, you have to be prepared for things to go wrong. But having a Plan B for possible technical problems is not enough; you also need to have the right mindset to handle problems.

On more than one occasion I've seen speakers lose their cool when they ran into technical problems. Guess what? Complaining about the problem, cursing, or blaming the organisers of the event will not make the problem go away. But you risk losing your audience, too. Initially, the audience will be sympathetic when they realise that you're having a problem - they didn't come to see you fail! But it's your responsibility now to make the best of the situation. Complaining and stating the obvious will only put off your audience - the biggest support you'll have at that moment. Don't make that mistake.

I had the pleasure of seeing Guy Kawasaki live on stage for the first time a few days ago at the Creativity World Forum in Kortrijk, Belgium. I have read some of his books and seen recordings of some of his talks before, so it was interesting to see what, if anything, he would do differently for this talk. In that respect, I was disappointed - it was pretty much exactly what I had come to expect. But then again you have to applaud him for consistently giving talks that are a good mix of entertainment and insights.

Since he was talking to creatives and people who have to pitch their ideas, he also included a short section on how to present more effectively. In addition to his well-known 10-20-30 rule (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 pt font), he also recommended to customise the introduction of your talk.

At TEDxStuttgart, we do rehearsals with our speakers. Some of them are still surprised when we mention it - it's not something conferences usually do (maybe they should?).

Such a rehearsal is pretty simple and informal, actually: Two members of the team meet up with a speaker in their home, office, or a neutral place (we don't have offices ourselves and the venue is usually not available before the event). We set up a camera and let the speaker do his or her talk.

I witnessed a case of a talk going way over the audience's head recently at a local event. It was a technical talk, but I've seen this happen with other topics as well.

Often things like this can be avoided by checking who your audience is in advance (if in doubt, ask the organisers). In this case, the audience was foreseeably mixed and it was pretty much impossible to know in advance which way the audience would skew on that particular evening, i.e. whether there would be more technical or more non-technical people in attendance. Also, the talk was very much on-topic for the event.

We're currently working with our speakers for the upcoming next TEDxStuttgart. With some speakers, we are still working on their talks. With others, we are already in the rehearsal stage. Many have come up with ideas for audience interaction or props they want to bring to the stage. It always breaks my heart a little when they come up with a great idea and I have to tell them that, unfortunately, it won't work because we're in a different venue this year.