What makes a good presentation (Comms for GM1)

If you're a student on the University of Cambridge's Multidisciplinary Design course (GM1), this episode has been created for you.

The episode stems from consideration of the big pitfalls presenters often fall into and provides advice on how to avoid them.

Simply by avoiding the pitfalls, you can make your presentation outstandingly good.

Contents

• 00.00 'Presentation' and 'slides' aren't synonyms
• 02:37 Where to look and why
• 08:06 Creating flow
• 10:18 Getting the timing right

Further listening

This is the first of three episodes on presentations. The other two concern:

• slides
• tactics concerning group presentations and course-specific factors.

Credit: The music is from Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, courtesy of the US Marine Band. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:16

Welcome to this recorded series on multidisciplinary design. We are very excited to speak about two very important topics. First presentation hosted by myself, Dr. Inji Moussa, and the second will be on posters hosted by Dr. Bart Hallmark. This is the first of three episodes on presentations. In this episode, we are discussing presentations in general, and I'm very delighted to be accompanied by Mr. Anthony Haynes, creative director of Frontinus Limited, to share his expertise on this topic. Greetings, Mr. Anthony.

SPEAKER_01: 0:48

Greetings, NG.

SPEAKER_00: 0:49

So lovely to have you with us today. So to get us started, one big myth I wish to address right away is that presentations are equivalent to slides. What do you think about that, Mr.

SPEAKER_01: 0:59

Anthony? I think this is a huge issue. If a presenter can get this bit right, then they're well on the way to doing it. a good presentation. So I find increasingly the words presentation and slides are treated as synonyms. For example, there is one course i teach in cambridge each year and every time the administrator writes to me beforehand and says could you please send me your presentation and the answer strictly speaking is one well no i can't because my presentation hasn't happened yet and when it does it will be a human interaction So obviously what she means is, can I send the slides? But she's using them as presentations. So obviously she's treating them as synonyms. There are two harmful problems concerning treating them as synonyms. One is there is just an assumption that you will be using slides, whereas actually not every presentation needs slides. And the second thing is that if you equate the two, there's a real risk that in the preparation, you're going to give all your preparation time and all your energy to thinking about the slides and not thinking about the other elements that make up a presentation.

SPEAKER_00: 2:20

Yes, indeed. Now, these are extremely important points. And I hope our audience is convinced by this point that presentation are much more and should be much more than just slides, particularly because, as you said, what if you don't have slides? Does that mean that you don't have a presentation? Definitely not. So let's narrow things down slightly and speak about specific aspects of a good presentation. What would be your first advice in this

SPEAKER_01: 2:45

respect my first piece of advice would be to avoid looking backwards at your slides whilst you're presenting so i'll give you an example i'll give two examples i went to a session in which several phd students at st john's college gave presentations about their work and one student stood up and said hello my name is so-and-so And she read her name off the slide. And then she said, and I'm a PhD student at St. John's College. And she read that off the slide. And I thought, if you don't know your name and you don't know the name of the college, even though we're all sitting in the college at the time, I think you haven't done enough preparation. And if you do happen to know those bits of information, why do you need to turn away from us to read it? The second example I'm going to give I went to a day in which 15 master students presented their work. This was in a course on construction engineering in the department of engineering. So 15 people presented. Of those, 14 spent some time and often a considerable amount of time turning around looking backwards at their slides rather than looking at the audience and one of them avoided doing that and looked forwards looked out at the audience and at the end of the day the professor awarded a prize for the best presentation and you can guess who got the prize for the best presentation

SPEAKER_00: 4:28

no i think definitely avoiding looking back is is a huge trap that most of us, if not all of us, have to either kind of face head on or be conscious of during the presentation. But just if I may be a bit sympathetic with people who might have to kind of treat that point seriously, what would you say when people say that, well, it's kind of, they are treating slides as a comfort zone, they fall back into looking for reassurance at the slides, right? Obviously, echoing what you said earlier, presentation isn't reading slides, it's about communication. But can you elaborate a bit more on that?

SPEAKER_01: 5:13

Yes, well, I think you're right to say that is one of the reasons that people look back with the slide. And what I would say there is I think they've misconceived the task. So they are treating the task of presenting as essentially a task concerning memorization. But what they've done is devise a script earlier. And what they're trying to do is remember it like an actor tries to remember something. the text, the script of the play. And of course, they're worried that they might not remember it. So they're looking back at the slides to kind of prompt their memory all the time. I think that's a misconception. I don't think it is a task of memorization. After all, supposing you don't exactly remember the script verbatim and you improvise, paraphrase and so on. Well, how would the audience actually know? Because they don't know what was in your mind in the first place. Yes. So it's only a problem for you. It's not actually a problem for them. If you say, instead of saying my task is memorization, you say my task is to communicate. There's a topic that I know a lot about, and I think I've got some interesting stuff to say, and my job is to use the time available to try and convey that to the audience. Well, you don't need a verbatim script for that. You just focus on communication. Can I also put it more positively, which is to say there is a corollary here, which is If you're not looking backwards at the slides, where are you looking? Well, you're looking outwards towards the audience. And that's immensely helpful. Firstly, they can see your face and they can see your mouth. And incidentally, a lot of people rely to some extent on lip reading. So that's actually enhancing your communication. But also you get feedback from the room. You get a sense of what's going on in the audience. And it might well be, depending on the lighting conditions, that you actually make eye contact with the audience. Well, eye contact is immensely powerful. We've evolved as a species to be very, very sensitive to what eye contact tells us. And so you can discern things like, oh, they don't seem to be understanding what I'm talking about. Well, maybe I need to kind of say that again and put it a bit more simply. Or, actually, I didn't think I'd be very interested in this bit. that they seem really interested in this bit, maybe I'll put in a couple of extra details. So what that allows you to do is to improvise and tailor your presentation better for the specific audience. And that makes for much better communication.

SPEAKER_00: 8:04

Brilliant. That's so, so nicely put. If I may take a step back to the pre-presentation moment, what would be some of the advice you give to people regarding preparing for the presentation?

SPEAKER_01: 8:18

The main piece of advice I'd give there is actually extremely simple to follow. which is to prepare the transitions between the slides, if indeed you are using slides. So let me explain what I mean. Very often people will prepare by putting a slide on their computer and thinking, what am I going to say about that slide? And then what they do is put the next slide on their computer and think, well, what am I going to say about that slide? And they don't necessarily prepare what they're going to say in terms of, well, how do I get from one slide to another?

SPEAKER_00: 8:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 8:54

And what this often does is produce a very jerky kind of staccato rhythm where you talk about a slide and then they stop at a full stop and then they click on their machine and that brings up a new... And then they say, okay, so next... And it's very jerky. So what I would liken it to is if you've ever taught someone to drive a motor car, when they start, their gear changes tend to be pretty awful. And every time they change gear, you kind of lurch in the car, don't you? So it actually feels very much like that. My advice would be to say, practice making the click between one side and another. not in the full stop at the end of the sentence, but in the middle of the sentence. Interesting. And then you get this kind of very seamless way of presenting where it feels like the sort of slide progression is happening quite naturally. And when you watch really good expert presenters, what are the things that set them apart from most of us? and certainly novices. Well, I would say one of the differentiating factors that's right up there is that they're good at doing smooth transitions.

SPEAKER_00: 10:14

Absolutely. Well, that's fascinating. Absolutely. If I may just take us in a slightly related but different direction, which is one of the main concerns that people usually have during and ahead of presentation is how they are going to manage their time. oftentimes people run over. Some people treat that as a sign maybe of disrespect, others who might be a bit more sympathetic will say, well, they just didn't manage their time properly. But either way, Can that be prevented? Can we do something about it to actually plan not to run over?

SPEAKER_01: 10:54

Yes, so this is a massive problem. I'll give you two examples. I went to an event at the Judge Business School in Cambridge where each PhD student had 45 minutes to present their work. And one of the students, I won't say who he was, he's a good friend of mine, but he had prepared far too much stuff to get into the 45 minutes. And subconsciously, he kind of knew that. And so he spoke very quickly in order to try and get it in. And it was a disaster. And the more quickly he spoke, the more the audience interrupted and said, sorry, could you explain that again, please? Which just took more time. So then he got further behind. So then he had to talk more quickly. And obviously, at some point, you have to think there's a lesson to be learned there. The second example occurs to my son, Jonty, when he was doing a master's degree. each student was given a certain time to do their presentation and they were told very explicitly if you run over time we will automatically deduct marks and the more you run over the more marks you lose and then what happened was with a minute to go you get a bell or a ding or something to tell you you've got a minute left and he said many of the students they got to the end of their time but they hadn't got to end of their presentation so they carried on talking even though they were losing marks because of it. So what that tells you is somehow there's a mindset there that people think it's all about maximizing the amount of content that you cram in. They're trying to maximize that. No, you should be trying to maximize the communication, not the amount of stuff that you kind of manage to mention in the time available. Another reason why that happens is often they structure the presentation so that the punch line is right at the end. And then they worry that they're going to run out of time and no one's ever going to get to the punchline. So it's understandable why people run into problems with time and have anxiety about it. But I do think there are solutions to this.

SPEAKER_00: 13:00

So what would be some of the solutions you would kindly share with us so we could benefit?

SPEAKER_01: 13:04

So the first I've touched on already, which is the mindset of thinking of this as an interactive exercise and that what matters, in fact, the only thing that has any value at all is what the audience takes away from it. The main solution is to plan a presentation that's going to take less time than the maximum you have allotted. So supposing you've been given 15 minutes plus question and answer, I would avoid preparing a presentation that's expected to take 15 minutes. I would prepare a presentation that's going to take you 12 or 13 minutes. So there are various reasons I say that, but the main one is stuff happens. Things take longer than you think they do. You know, someone knocks a bottle of water over or you click on the wrong set of slides or something like that. Stuff happens and you don't want to get nervous about that. So if you've allowed a bit of extra time, it's okay. No problem. It may be that you do indeed finish a couple of minutes early. If so... No one's going to complain about that. The audience are not going to be sitting with stopwatches and thinking, oh, you finished two minutes early. And if, by the way, they get to leave for the coffee break two minutes beforehand, no one's going to say, oh, do you know what? I wish you'd carry on talking because you're such a wonderful talker. I want every single second that's been allotted to you. So it's really not a problem finishing early.

SPEAKER_00: 14:35

Brilliant. Yeah, that's very, very helpful. Well, I think that actually brings us nicely to the end of this episode, where if I may quickly summarize, we talked about general things about presentation. And when it comes to specifics, there are three things which Mr. Anthony have kindly highlighted. And these are one, regarding the general approach to presentation. So presentation should be approached as an interactive exercise. It's not a memory. exercise or test, it's actually an interactive exercise. The second one regarding preparation, where you should rehearse, right? We should really practice rehearsing, particularly in terms of transitions. And the last one, which I found brilliant, which regarding time-related issues, which is quality over quantity, and even more specific, maximize communication over the quantity of information you want to convey. And instead of worrying about running over, actually plan to finish early. Thank you so much, Mr. Anthony, for all all the advice and expertise you shared with us today on presentation in general, and we look forward to the next episode on Slides themselves. Thank you, Nisam.

SPEAKER_01: 15:43

Thank you, Ingi. It's been a pleasure. Bye for now.

SPEAKER_00: 15:45

Bye-bye.