Presentation, Then …
Yesterday I attended Garr Reynolds‘ Advanced Presentation Zen workshop. I had attended his first workshop in 2008, and loved it, so I was very excited about the advanced session.
This was a refresher course. Although there was nothing particularly new in this class, it was great to have an opportunity to think everything over again, especially after having a year to apply some of Garr’s ideas in practice.
His message is that the vast majority of presentations can be more engaging, and that when you incorporate design, story and emotion into your presentations you can do a much better job of persuasion than you can with badly designed slides covered in words and data. And although having slides that augment your message (rather than flat-out documenting it) is an improvement, your delivery is hugely important too.
In essence, it’s the difference between a dry PowerPoint yawn-fest full of bullet points and verbatim delivery and compelling presentations like a TED talk or Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
Garr went into some of the specifics around how great presentations are constructed, with some nods to the work of Duarte Design (who prepare talks for some of the world’s best speakers), describing a process that involves going analog: brainstorming, chunking, storyboarding (preferably with post-its for easy re-ordering), and only then moving to slideware (PowerPoint or Keynote).
As part of this you would also create both an audience map (what are they like, why are they here, what keeps them up at night, how can I solve their problem, what do I want them to do, how might they resist?) and even a speaker map (what is their perception of me, how do I establish credibility without arrogance?).
In winning over your audience and creating sticky ideas, he referenced Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, which posits six traits that which future workers must utilise in order to thrive in an age of concepts: Design, Story, Sympathy, Empathy, Play and Meaning.
In relation to story: he recommended Robert McKee’s renowned Story as a great primer (although aimed at screenwriters, it contains truths universally acknowledged amongst storytellers in many other disciplines) and pointed out Isabel Allende’s 2008 TED talk Tales of Passion as a great example of story in action. “What is truer than truth? Story.” He also singled out Steve Job’s 2007 MacWorld keynote as an example of withholding information in order to build anticipation.
Regarding design, Garr’s view is that design thinking is one of the most important differentiators you can have. We spent some time reflecting on the qualities that designers have (or stereotypically have) and the benefits to communication that effective design brings, through the use of things like contrast, simplicity and emotion.
I do wonder whether those students who had been in the first workshop only a day earlier would have got as much out of it as those of us who had had the benefit of a year’s worth of reflection. And, perhaps surprisingly for a Presentation Zen Master, Garr had to jump through large chunks of his material. This was okay though, Garr is very much about ‘naked’ delivery, relying less on the strongly scripted approach and channeling the adaptive, reflexive approach of jazz musicians and stand-up comedians. And he talked about how to deal with situations where you have prepared an hour’s worth of material and have been told you only have ten minutes, so his own presentation provided a good example in practice!
In short, the workshop was a recap and review of ideas presented in his book: Presentation Zen, but with the benefit of having Garr provide some more recent examples and some practical tips and pointers. Is it worth it? In truth, most things he covered are conveyed in his book, and in greater depth. But personallly, I found that the opportunity to spend six hours in the company of the author and talking through his ideas with others extremely valuable, and galvanic in a way that only good presentations can be.
July 11th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Nice post Matt.
Did he have anything to say on that age-old presentation structure – tell them what your going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you just told them?
Interesting that he holds such a strong opinion of design, which as a designer of course I would agree with. What's more interesting though is the notion of going analog to nut out the important parts of the presentation, get the information and ordering right before moving onto slides. Dare I say presentation information architecture.
Cool.
July 11th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Yeah, he spoke a little bit about that, and I guess that's the key to being able to adapt your timeframe to suit: you set up a path and then you spend the rest of the presentation walking that path as quickly or as slowly as you want or need.
The analog stuff was great. He gave us some cool MUJI notebooks which are pre-printed with storyboard frames. And of course if you use post-its, you don't have to mess the notebook up.
July 12th, 2009 at 12:31 am
Garr is a werewolf.
Don't believe him if he claims otherwise.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:43 am
Thomas, that's a good thing to know. Thanks, villager.