The Mobile Presenter

You've probably heard this phrase from a speaker before: "I'll get back to that later." I'm not talking about the situations where this is in reaction to a question from the audience but about the cases where it's uttered during the planned part of a presentation.

Having had to sit through a presentation where this phrase came up a lot recently, I was wondering about when this might be acceptable and when it's not.

It should have been a short and straightforward presentation about "lessons learned". I knew what I was going to say, so I even skipped the step of sketching out ideas first and went straight to designing some draft slides. Then I did a rehearsal - and noticed that the story didn't quite work. I tweaked the presentation somewhat and tried again. It still didn't work.

I took me a while to figure out the problem: I was stuck in the mindset of following the exact sequence of events that had led to the lessons learned. Which meant that I was trying to hold back the resolution for as long as possible. Yet, as the presentation was supposed to be about those lessons, they should have been central to the presentation, not come as an appendix.

I attended a low-key concert recently. The artist wasn't too well-known (at least around here) and the audience was rather small. The concert took place in a small venue, but it could easily have held twice the amount of people. And so they (or rather us, myself included) were standing around rather scattered and well away from the small stage.

The opening act did his best in warming up the audience (and mostly succeeded) but couldn't change the fact that it was too small an audience for the venue. The main act then did the right thing: When she came up on stage, she encouraged the audience to come forward to the stage and also to get closer together. I like to think that this simple measure helped us enjoy the concert even more.

I've been taking a closer look at the characteristics of shorter talks recently, especially pitches; i.e. the (supposedly) short and to-the-point presentations that startups use to promote their ideas.

Disclaimer: The following are observations from a rather small sample of pitching events that I attended, so take them with a grain of salt.

Presentations, especially good presentations, are rarely taught at school, at university, or at work. As a result, presenters tend to simply copy what everybody else seems to be doing. So for years, they were copying the bad habit of bullet points. These days, they copy what they think is the trend to "use pictures".

But visuals in presentations only work if they are relevant to your topic and have been selected with some care and thought.