The Mobile Presenter

For the brainstorming phase, when beginning to prepare a presentation, I do recommend to "go analogue" and get away from the computer. Thinking about your topic and how best to explain it feels a lot less like work when you're not sitting in front of a keyboard. You do need a way to jot down your thoughts, though.

A notebook is a good companion during the very early phase. Just write down what comes to mind. Don't worry about the order of things so much yet.

The average attention span of an adult is said to be about 20 minutes. That's 20 minutes of sustained attention, during which people can - more or less - concentrate on a specific task or, in our context, a presentation. The "20" is not be taken as an exact number, of course, but more like a rule of thumb. Methods like the Pomodoro Technique, which uses 25-minute intervals of focussed work would also be covered by this.

However, as Dr. John Medina argues, it's probably a good idea not to rely on your audience's undivided attention to last the full 20 minutes. Instead, he proposes a 10-minute rule (again, the "10" is not to be taken as an exact number). Dr. Medina suggests that you change your approach every 8-12 minutes or so. By this he means to switch between simply showing slides to showing a video, drawing on a whiteboard, or doing an exercise.

A simple and effective way to better connect with your audience is to eradicate all barriers between you and them. Namely, avoid standing behind a lectern.

My usual advice is to arrive at the venue early so that you can spot these barriers and try to remove them. This doesn't work, however, when you're speaker number 3 in a row of 4 (with no pause between them) and the speakers before you are more traditionally-minded or less experienced and insist on using the lectern. Additionally, there's the technical aspect in that all the connectors for your laptop are often installed at the lectern and cannot easily be moved.

What can you do?

When you look at the available literature about presenting, you'll notice a certain kind of books and articles promising to reveal the "secrets" of the most prominent or successful speakers. Inevitably, Steve Jobs is usually amongst the names.

But should you really try to be like one of those famous speakers?

We all hang on to this romanticised idea about how brainstorming works, usually in teams. It's when the brilliant and most creative minds of an organisation come together to think deeply about a problem and come up with new ideas and solutions. How could this not work?

Debra Kaye mocked this idealised notion of brainstorming in her talk at the Creativity World Forum in Kortrijk, Belgium recently with a slide that demanded "Stop Brainstorming".