The Mobile Presenter

It's almost a tradition by now: For the third year in a row, Phil and Pierre of Ideas on Stage have lured presentation expert Garr Reynolds to come to Europe to hold a seminar. A few things were different this year, though.

First of all, the location: The seminars took place in London instead of Paris. And, yes, seminars - there were two this year. In addition to his standard seminar, we were also treated to the world premiere of the Presentation Zen Story Telling Masterclass, an all-new seminar focusing on the art of storytelling in presentations.

One of the big problems for a speaker is getting good, usable feedback for your presentation. You won't get it directly from your audience after your talk - people are too polite. Would you go up to a speaker and tell him or her that the presentation sucked and that you want your hour back? No, you wouldn't. If it was that bad, you would just leave the room and forget about it.

People are willing to argue with the speaker about certain aspects of the content but they don't usually comment on the form or the overall effectiveness of the presentation (e.g. whether or not it met their expectations). The most reliable feedback, in my experience, ends up in the feedback form (electronically or on paper) that the event organisers prepared. And even then you need to motivate the audience to fill those out.

So it was interesting to see a new (to me) approach being tried out at a conference that I attended recently: Feedback by coaster.

HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations by Nancy Duarte

The format of the book feels a little odd when you are used to the huge footprint of Nancy's other books. But actually, the format is a good metaphor for the content: It's cut down to the essentials.

This may sound like a silly question. How can you not know which language your presentation is going to be in?

English is the language that's spoken the most at conferences (not limited to tech conferences) these days. But what about a conference in a country which does not have English as its main language? Which language would you use? Especially if you're a native of that country?

If you're only doing presentations in English in English-speaking countries then you can probably stop reading now.

Imposing restrictions can often make things more interesting. When it comes to presentations, one such example is Pecha Kucha. The idea behind this format is that a speaker only gets to show 20 slides - and that the slides are moving forward automatically after 20 seconds. So all in all, you have 6:40 minutes for your entire presentation.

I've read about Pecha Kucha but hadn't seen it live until a few weeks ago, when I attended a Pecha Kucha night in Stuttgart. It was very interesting to see how the 10 speakers dealt with the restrictions.