The Mobile Presenter

Imagine that you're going to organise a conference. Obviously, you would need speakers. There are two ways to get speakers for your event: You can invite them or you can put out what is commonly called a Call for Papers (CfP for short).

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, btw. Keynote speakers are often invited, for example, whereas the rest of the speakers might be selected via a CfP.

Anyway, let's assume you're going to do a CfP. You're probably going to set up a web form for potential speakers to fill out. You want to know their name, biography, the title of their talk, and a short summary of what they're going to talk about (commonly referred to as the abstract). Hopefully, you'll also provide a text field where they can explain to you, i.e. the conference organiser, why they think they would be a good match for your conference.

In my ongoing exploration of the local startup scene, I got to watch yet another pitching contest. In this case, it was sort of a relegation round as part of a series of pitching events: Those startups who won the audience vote in previous contests but did not win the actual contest were given another chance. So we got to see pitches from teams that had been through all this before.

Since I just discussed rehearsing too much: Hans Rosling is a speaker who is known to rehearse thoroughly. But even he is not immune to technical problems.

At TED Salon Berlin, the first official TED event in Germany, he was one of the most famous people on the list of speakers, so the audience waited for him with some anticipation. And then, only a few seconds into his talk, he ran into technical problems.

It should be obvious that you have to rehearse your presentation before you give it. Although, given the fact that I'm often seeing speaker overrun their time slot, I have to wonder if it's really something many speakers do. I get the impression that not rehearsing (at all or earnestly) is the number two reason for going over time (number one would be trying to cram too much content into the presentation).

Assuming you do rehearse: Is there an upper limit to rehearsing? I.e. can you rehearse too much?

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.