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Title : How to give a good presentation
Link : How to give a good presentation

How to give a good presentation

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(This is a lightly-reworked version of a posting I originally made on my internal blog at IBM)

The art of giving presentations is a difficult one. Apparently, a greater proportion of people fear public speaking than fear death. There are other issues too. Presenters want to impress their boss. They want to look smart in front of their audience (or at least, not look stupid). I think this makes it difficult for presenters to really think carefully about what would make their presentation a good presentation. One that engages its audience and communicates effectively with them. I don't pretend to be a great presenter, but I have thought about it quite a lot and like to think that I have improved over the years. Below I'm going to share some guidelines and tips for producing a high-quality presentation. These are, of course, my opinion only. I'm not a world expert in public speaking or anything. Caveat emptor. And if you disagree, that's fine too. I'd be happy to have a discussion in the comments :-)

Be explicit about what you are trying to achieve.

This piece of advice goes for just about anything, not just preparing a presentation. If you don't know what you're trying to achieve, it's pretty unlikely that you're going to achieve it. Obvious stuff, but for presentations I feel this is ignored more often than for many other types of task. Maybe it's the fear-greater-than-death that distracts people. When preparing a presentation, I always ask myself: what message or knowledge (or feeling) do I want the audience to walk away with? Once that's clear in my head, I can work to compose a presentation that meets the intended goal. Starting at the intended goal and working backwards to define intermediate steps is sometime referred to as "reverse planning"; I prefer to just call it "planning".

Some questions to ponder when setting the goal for your talk:

• Are you trying to convince your audience, or inform them? Are trying to inspire them? Entertain them? Note that a good presentation often has elements of more than one of these.

• If your audience only takes one thing away from the talk, what would you like it to be?

• Can you easily come up with a title for your talk? If not, is that a sign that the presentation lacks sufficient focus?

• Are you assuming knowledge or attitudes that some members of your audience may not share?

Know your audience.

Good presentations are targeted at the audience which will be receiving them. That means not explaining basic mathematical concepts at a maths conference, but conversely it requires that you don't litter your presentation with TLAs and references to software that has little meaning outside your own little clique... unless you're presenting to that clique. Beyond content, style is also important. Very formal presentations amongst a peer group are weird and often a bit boring. Overly familiar presentations to a CEO are similarly not a good idea... although it's always good to remember that there are humans at the other end of your presentation, even if they're very important ones.

What do you do if your audience is diverse? In terms of content, you have little choice but to go for the lowest common denominator. Otherwise, you will find yourself losing a part of your audience, which is something best avoided. With a bit of skill, the best strategy is to avoid going into an area where there is a vast diversity in the abilities or interests of your audience. Giving a presentation in front of experienced mathematicians as well as university administrators? Not sure whether to give a crash course on basic topography and manifold theory before launching into some heavy formula crunching? Better to avoid the issue altogether: talk about the basic idea of your work, then move on to a discussion about the potential applications of this work to industry. That way, everybody stays interested.

Treat your audience's attention as a valuable and finite resource. 

There's a reason why it's called "paying" attention, and "spending" time. As a presenter you are effectively engaged in a type of commercial transaction with your audience: they are giving you something that is quite valuable to them--their time and attention--and in return they expect something equally valuable from you. This might be information, inspiration, entertainment, or a variety of other things. Whatever it is that you are trying to give your audience, make sure you give them good value for the time and attention they have invested. That means that you should spend the necessary preparation time to make sure that your presentation is clear, concise, consumable and focused. A good presentation walks its audience through the point it is trying to make, meaning that they get more value for less attention. For this reason, I'm not a fan of presentation decks that are loaded with complex charts and diagrams. These types of presentations often exhibit little selectivity, and just aim a firehose of information down the audience's throat. This is disrespectful of an audience's attention, and is certainly ineffective in terms of getting one's message across.

Another thing to remember about attention is that your audience only has a finite amount of it. For this reason, it is important to focus their attention on the points you are trying to make in order to achieve your goal. Think of audience attention as a pie: cutting a pie into more slices does not make there be more pie; it simply means each slice is smaller. Trying to cram dozens of points into a 30-minute talk guarantees that your audience will not be receptive to any of them. The less you put into your presentations, the more control you are exercising over what it is your audience will remember after you're done talking. The best presentations really only make one point, and they make it powerfully and effectively and thoroughly. That way, every member of the audience, even if they paid limited attention, will leave with an understanding of your key message.

A special note about giving presentations to executives within your own company. In my experience, execs are always very likely to interrupt your presentation early on with knowledgable questions ("how does this fit in with our strategy for Project XYZ?), often leading to tangential discussions and little progress on your original, carefully planned agenda. For this reason, it's even more important that whatever point you are trying to make to an executive is made on the very first slide. It may be the only slide you get to show.

Tell a story.

Because your audience's attention is a finite resource, you don't want them to waste any of that time trying to figure out what point you're trying to make. Structuring your communication into a narrative means you're effectively guiding your audience through your content, freeing them to spend their attention on the substance of your communication rather than on figuring out where the latest slide fits into the picture.

Telling a story is more an art than a science, and like most arts is best learnt by observation and practice. However, there are a few helpful guidelines. First, all good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. People sometimes talk about "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them". This anticipation and reinforcement is an important part of the narrative, but there's more to it than that. What you're doing is structuring your communication so that the audience is engaged.

The beginning is the hook: tell your audience what you're try to do, and why that is interesting. If you dive straight into technical details, you've lost a chance to engage your audience. Wading through equations or UML diagrams or whatever is hard work; why should your audience bother doing it if they're not sure why it's interesting?

The middle is the substance of your talk. Now can you spring the technical details? Yes, but you still have to pay attention to structure and storytelling. Try to pace it nicely, and lead towards a climax. Explain how the different details correspond to each other, and to the whole. Try to make your audience relate to what you're doing; add observations about what worked well and didn't work well, why you made the choices you did, what you learned.

The ending is where you cement in the audience's mind what you want them to get out of your communication. This is more than just a summary, though. Summaries are boring; a good ending is about reflecting. You've explained some great new innovation, or the quarter's revenue projections, or whatever. What should the audience take away from that? What have they learned? How should they interpret what you told them? Even better, how should what you've told them influence their actions? 

Be human.

Show a bit of yourself in the presentation. Nobody likes listening to a robot. Anecdotes are good, as is a little mild self-deprecation. The latter is especially useful if you make a mistake, as it allows you to turn a minor tragedy into a tiny triumph.

Learn how to use slides properly.

The very best presentations are usually given with few, if any slides. Slides divide your audience's attention between you and whatever it is on the wall behind you. Again, making your audience pay attention to more things means that each of those things will receive less attention; it's a zero-sum game. If you look at how the best presenters use slides, they do so as a way to augment what they're saying, not to compete with it. Their slides tend to be sparse and simple, and often aim to make an impression or extract an emotional response rather than to convey information. To do this, they often use pictures (not diagrams!) and rhetorical devices rather than simply providing information. Consider a typical Steve Jobs slide: a big, beautiful picture, excellent typography, hardly any information. That's how it's supposed to be; the information is coming out of his mouth, after all. In a funny way, if it's possible to understand a presentation simply by reading the slide deck, then it wasn't a very good slide deck!

One more thing...

Nobody cares about your presentation anywhere near as much as you do. Really. So fearing it worse than death makes no sense; the worst thing that will happen is that nobody will remember anything about it the next day. People don't get fired for one bad presentation (unless your job is primarily about presenting, in which case what are you doing getting advice off this blog?) so try to just relax and enjoy sharing your enthusiasm for whatever it is you're talking about.

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