Effective communication using slides (Comms for GM1)

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

The episode stems from consideration of the pitfalls presenters fall into concerning use of slides.

Simply by avoiding these pitfalls, you can make your presentation outstandingly communicative.

This is the second of three episodes on presentations. There is a parallel set of episodes on poster presentations.

Contents

• 00:00 Key issues
• 04:37 Audience engagement
• 07:10 The three functions of slides
• 12:57 Using slides interactively
• 15:51 Implications for time management

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to our second episode on presentations from our recorded series on multidisciplinary design. This is Dr. NG Musa and I'm delighted to be accompanied by Mr. Anthony Haynes to particularly speak today about slides. So first of all, greetings, Mr. Anthony.

SPEAKER_00: 0:22

Greetings, NG.

SPEAKER_01: 0:24

So starting a bit broad and recalling that presentations are and should be much more than slides. The main concern is then when would I use slides, if at all? What are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00: 0:37

I answer that problem by asking myself three questions, so it might be helpful to go through them one at a time. The first question is, for this presentation, do I have content that needs to be presented visually? So I'll give an example. It may be you want to refer to a map, such as a London Underground map or an Ordnance Survey map. And it's very difficult to try and communicate the information from a map verbally. So there I would say, well, I actually want people to see what the terrain looks like. I need a map. I'm going to have a slide of a map. So that's my first question. Do I have any content that really needs to be visual? The second question is, If I do have such content, can I limit the slides to such visual content so the slides show the things that have to be done visually and the other stuff in the presentation we don't need slides for?

SPEAKER_01: 1:34

Fascinating. and just going back to something that was echoed in our first episode the idea of interaction right that the presentation is more of an interactive exerciser and then just a talk where would slide fit into that approach

SPEAKER_00: 1:50

okay so that's my third question which is how can i then use slides as a means of building a bridge to the audience, creating interaction. So I'll give you an example. This is my favorite example. You know, when people whack on graphs, this happens a lot in the physical sciences, for instance. And I said, well, as you can see, and maybe they've got five different curves on the graph and they want you to think about the interaction between the curves. Well, it's incredibly difficult to take in all at once. I mean, even if, to echo a point we made in the first episode, I mean, even if when they put the slide on, they pause for a minute to give you a chance to look at it, it can still be quite difficult. What you can do is say, let's have a look at relationship between these two variables. And then what you do is put a graph up and all it has is the axes of and the labels on the axes so we can actually see what the graph is showing. And incidentally, presenters very rarely change the size of the font on their graph away from the default settings. And usually the labeling of the axis is far too small. And it seems to be just common sense that if people don't know what the axes are measuring, we don't know what the graph is showing. So let's just give people a graph without any data and just label the axes. And then you can say, let's have a look. You know, we ran this experiment four times. I mean, let's have a look at results we find. You put the first line on and people can see. And then you say, now let's put the second line. And when you're doing this, people are already beginning to make predictions. I think the second line should be much the same as the first line or not. And then you put it up and then internally they react and think, yeah, yeah, I thought it'd be like that. And then when you get to, let's say, the fourth line, you say, now here's another iteration of this experiment and this is what we've got here. And slight pause and people are anticipating. And then you put a curve on that's different. And you're almost sometimes out loud in the room. You get people going, oh, I wasn't expecting that. What school's that? And then you say, let's try and explain why that happened then. That was surprising. And so what you've got is a sort of silent dialogue going on between what you're saying and what the voice inside the listener's mind is saying. And that makes for really good engagement. You've got them when that's happening.

SPEAKER_01: 4:34

Brilliant. Wow, that's fascinating. If I may build upon that, but just take us in a slightly different direction. So I think the example you mentioned is hugely beneficial in terms of how we can use slides as an interactive tool. But just as a general advice from your end and from your expertise, how without slides can we still optimize the sense of engagement interaction?

SPEAKER_00: 5:00

One thing you can do is just find very simple ways of getting the audience to respond. How many people have done this? Who would agree with the following and ask them to raise their hand or however they want to signal agreement. That's pretty minimal, but it does create a little sense of interaction. I think I'm more interested actually in the way that you can use space to create a sense of interaction.

SPEAKER_01: 5:29

Interesting. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

SPEAKER_00: 5:32

Well, I'll give an example, actually. In 1980, I went to a lecture by Professor Joan Robinson, who was a redoubtable, I suppose you could call her Keynesian or unorthodox economist at Cambridge University. And she was a wonderful debater or controversialist. And the lecture was recapping a famous dispute that she'd had in economics with Professor Paul Samuelson. And it was called something like the Cambridge Capital Controversy. And first of all, she didn't use slides. Now, that was mainly because PowerPoint had not been invented. But even if it had been, she wouldn't have used them because she absolutely knew her stuff. So she... She didn't need a script, but also she wanted to be free to move around the stage. And so what she would do is set out one set of the argument, one piece of logic. And then when she wanted to change tack and challenge that logic, you know, thesis, antithesis kind of thing, she would stride across the stage in the opposite direction. You know, so actually what you found was the way she was moving around the stage was mimetic. It was actually imitating the changes of direction in the. in the argument and there was a lot of energy involved even though she I think she must have been well into her 80s and she was a little bit infirm I mean she walked around with a stick and so this created a sense of drama and you felt that had Professor Paul Samuelson who I think was still alive at the time had he wandered into unknowingly wandered into the room you felt she would have kind of raised the stick and kind of But the sense was, there was a little bit of, I don't think she was putting on a show. I don't think she was showing off for being exhibitionist. It was just allowing this kind of expressiveness to come through because she's not standing at the side of the stage trying to get out of the way of her slides and clicking things every now and then.

SPEAKER_01: 7:48

Fascinating. Wow. Amazing. So if I may just catch up then. So you shared with us so far three very important questions, as well as one amazing example that captured how the unique role slides could play to enhance a presentation, as well as when your creativity might fill the gap of not having slides or choosing not to have slides. Now getting more specific about the functions of slides. What are your key points in terms of actually using Slides? What are the three functions that you could share with us today?

SPEAKER_00: 8:26

So Slides potentially have three functions. The first one is to provide a script, however verbatim or loose it might be, for the presenter to follow. So it's really an aid memoir for the presenter. The second one is Slides function as a visual aid to help the audience makes sense of what the presenter is saying. The third function of slides is as a reference resource. So this is where the audience wants to look back on your presentation later and think, what was her argument again? What did she say? What was that bit of information? And they want to be able to look at the slides. So it may be you've emailed the slides to them for future reference, or it may be you've posted them online somewhere or something of that kind. Now, if you think about those three functions for even a moment, you kind of realize they're very different things from each other. And then I think you have to ask yourself the question, what are the odds that one set of slides could optimally be appropriate for all three functions? And the answer surely is the odds are zero. So if you try and use one set of slides, it might be, optimal for one of those functions, but it certainly won't be optimal for all three functions.

SPEAKER_01: 9:51

So just to be clear on that point, what you're saying is that we might actually need more than one version of the slides as a presenter. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00: 9:58

Yes, very few people do this, but it seems to me logically you need at least two versions. One is the visual aid and one is the reference results. And think about the differences there. For example, you might want to put on a citation. to, let's say, a journal paper, well, that's horrible as a visual aid because you clutter up the slide with the name of the author and the journal of this and volume this and autumn 1984 and page numbers and all the rest. No, that just clutters up the slide. And what are people going to do with that in the presentation? Are we going to sort of quickly scribble down the whole citation? They don't want to do that. But it's very helpful in a reference resource for people to think, oh, yeah, I don't know that paper. Just want to have a look at that. Another example would be URLs. I mean, URLs look absolutely horrible on slides and clutter them up. But for someone to click on later, yeah, that's really helpful. So it seems to me highly likely that you're going to want to produce two versions of the slides. The odd one out, I think, is the script because our whole argument actually from the start of these resources has been, You don't want to use the slides as a script and you don't want to be turning around looking at them. But you can put speaker's notes onto the PowerPoint. So if you're using PowerPoint, the software allows you to put notes at the bottom of the screen that you can see if you're standing behind the monitor, but the audience can't see. And if you don't want to do that, I don't particularly like doing that. You can use other kinds of prompts. It may be Thank you very much. Well, it is old-fashioned in the sense the idea has been around for a long time, but why does it matter if it does the job? I mean, do the audience care how you bring your notes? I mean, what the audience are concerned with is, did you produce a kind of entertaining and instructive presentation? I find little speaking notes that I can just glance at, and they're small so they don't get in the way, very helpful. But one way or another, you can... formulate an agenda for yourself. I don't really want to call it a script, an agenda for yourself, without having to encumber all the slides that the audience see with that information.

SPEAKER_01: 12:45

So that's a very interesting point regarding the personal experience of the speaker versus the experience of the audience and how the speaker should maybe be more conscious of the audience. On that note... If we were to speak a bit more about the interaction between one's talk and the slides, i.e. how can you as a speaker make the balance right between using the slides efficiently, but also keeping your talk interactive?

SPEAKER_00: 13:14

I think the key thing is to consider the time difference. that the audience needs to consume bits of content that you put on the screen. So for instance, supposing you put a small table of data on. If you then say, well, as you can see, and then just carry on talking as soon as you've put the slide up, there's a real problem. So half the audience will think, well, I need a bit of time to take this in. I don't know what all this is about. What's this table showing us? So what they will do is focus on reading the slides And then they're not listening to you. Well, that's a bad thing because you want them to listen to you. And the other half of the audience will say, well, I can't possibly make out that table. I'll worry about that later. I'll just listen to what she's saying. Well, then they're not looking at the table, but you put the table in there for a purpose. So either way, that's bad. So what you need to do is say, so let's have a look at the data we came up with here. put on the table and then say, let me just give you a moment to have a look at what the data is showing us. And then be quiet. And this is something that presenters find very difficult to do and a bit nerve wracking. You stand in front of people and not say anything. And if you do it for three seconds, it will feel like three minutes if you're not used to doing this first. But just be Be quiet and let people take things in. It's sensible in terms of communication efficiency, but it's also courteous. It's just recognizing people just need a bit of time to read stuff. You then have to think about the point, of course, that some people in your audience might be visually impaired and maybe they can't read the table. So you then need to think of a way of using words to subsequently to communicate the gist of what was on the slide.

SPEAKER_01: 15:08

Wow, that's a very important point. And I think that connects quite nicely to the idea of managing the time of brief presentation. One of the reasons why people might feel urged to speak quickly and not give people time is that we haven't accounted for that quiet moment in that preparation. So what I would take from your advice here is that when you are rehearsing, also rehearse the silent minute or two that you are going to give to people throughout your presentation. So you will not feel anxious during the actual presentation that, oh my God, I'm going to run out of time.

SPEAKER_00: 15:49

Yes, so there are two things that I suggested that take more time. One is just pausing and being quiet for a moment. And the other was the earlier suggestion I made of actually, if you're presenting a graph, sort of building it up bit by bit rather than putting everything on at the same time. And when I'm training presenters, people do say, well, that takes more time. Yeah, well, yeah, it does. But not that much more time, to be honest. But the key point there is the principle is you're not trying to maximize the amount of content. You're not trying to maximize the number of things you mention. You are trying to maximize what you convey to the audience, the communication. So it's worth giving time to these things.

SPEAKER_01: 16:33

So that's a nice and very, very important point to actually bring our episode today to a close. So we talked today about when to use slides and how to use them. and particularly how to balance between the slides and the talk. Our next and last episode on presentation will be on tactics specific to our course, multidisciplinary design. Thank you for listening and thank you, Mr. Anthony, for your recommendation and advice for us today.

SPEAKER_00: 17:03

Thank you, Inji. It's been a pleasure.