Evidence-based Presentation Skills - does such a thing exist? You bet! And add a hefty dose of emotion while you're at it

Home > Presentation Skills/Keynote > Evidence-based Presentation Skills - does such a thing exist? You bet! And add a hefty dose of emotion while you're at it

Evidence-based Presentation Skills - does such a thing exist? You bet! And add a hefty dose of emotion while you're at it

Date Created: 12 May, 2007, 09:32 PM

Earlier this year, I submitted a workshop proposal to my professional society's conference organising committee, for a conference to be held in Brisbane in September.

In fact, I submitted two proposals: one on Technologies in psychological practice, and the other on Presentation Skills for psychologists.

The former was accepted, the latter wasn't. This was despite my arguing for the evidence-base for presenting, and its wide range of applications for psychologists in academia, through to those in the business and the corporate sector, as well as those in independent practice. Even more important perhaps is the increasing efforts being made to add distance-learning programs to the society's internet presence, in order to help members keep up their professional development activities.

This is especially important now that psychologists' presence in Australia's nationalised medical scheme called Medicare has been ratified, such that patients now receive a substantial rebate when they visit a psychologist.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I accepted an invitation to present today to a psychologists' peer supervision group who meets monthly to discuss cases and have guest presentations.

A presentation about presentations to a group of practitioners might sound odd, but nowadays more and more practitioners are picking up sessional lecturing work, conducting workshops and in-house training, presenting to groups as part of their marketing activities, and of course, a considerable number conduct research with their own patients and choose to share their findings at conferences.

Additionally, because some have returned to study to improve upon their qualifications, this means they are required to present in their study courses.

Accepting the invitation, I decided to give the group an abbreviated version of a three hour workshop I have given to other professions, squishing it down to an hour's fast-moving effort.

This means that I had to do two things: Crystallise my own thoughts of what's needed to know, choosing to leave out some two thirds of the material; and choosing those slides and their information pertinent to psychologists.

I started by reminding the group that humans come hard-wired to be superb pattern recognisers, such that we chunk data into manageable components. This allows us to take in a great deal of data and sort it into a meaningful array. The downside is that we can also be led to incorrect assumptions if we leap to conclusions on minimum information and so complete a pattern that is best left incomplete until more information is available.

By way of example, I focussed on two publications which appeared on the web within a few days of each other in early February, 2007.

The first was a paper by noted cryptographer and computer security expert and technology commentator, Bruce Schneier.

I described his work as dead-ending in terms of how the encryption technology can be improved upon, and that the final barrier to effective security was with.... and one in the group guessed correctly... people.

And hence, Schneier's paper was called the Psychology of Security, and that got their attention. As did the paragraph from the paper reproduced below, (click to enlarge).

Because a number present in this morning's group work with anxiety disorders, they knew of the overestimation of risk by their patients. But I also pointed out that underestimation can be equally as important, leading patients to ignore warning signs and engage in risky behaviours, compared to those who avoid situations because they over-represent danger.

So I then showed (in Keynote of course) a table (below, click to enlarge, pertinent colours added) from Schneier's paper comparing the qualities of events which see us either over-estimate or under-estimate the probabilities of the event occurring. These qualities have been established through solid evidence-based research.

I then moved onto my mate Garr Reynold's paper from February 9, published just a few days later, more as a brochure, which he entitled, Naked Presentations. This is a play on words, given Garr's work in Japan where hot tubbing (or "soaking with others") is a way of life, and of course it is a metaphor for a presentation style he advocates on his blog, Presentationzen.

I was intrigued to read a paragraph, which I reproduced for today's group, which seemed to match some of my thinking about Schneier's work too, which you can see below.

Engaging the group early in my presentation with stories of risk, presentations, and anxiety, as well as how we are hard-wired to perceive in certain ways appealed to the group, especially how we seek out patterns to make sense of the world around us.

This was a theme that persisted throughout the talk, and reinforced one of my major assertions when presenting: Wherever possible, keep linking back to a central theme or idea your want your audience to go away with, to then use in their work or thinking.

Too many times, those who value their logical thinking styles overwhelm audiences with words and ideas, with the hope that slide handouts will help them remember later. I take an alternative view, that I want the audience to walk away remembering maybe one or two main ideas, despite perhaps going through 100 slides in a three hour workshop, which might incorporate 400 transitions and effects.

Because not just do I construct slides to be memorable, I plan my whole presentation with the view that when attendees see me listed to present at a conference, they drop their plans to visit competing talks and attend mine because they know they'll get value: solid evidence-based information, an entertaining presentation, a fair amount of surprises and challenges, and a sense of satisfaction that it was time and money well spent.

Which is why, as I have written elsewhere in this blog, I slave over my slides, because I believe paying audiences deserve to be treated with respect, and not bored silly. The other quality I try and instil - passion - comes easy for me, so in the preparatory phase when I put the slides together, I'll practice speaking aloud how I would "work the slide".

If I can't bring an element of passion to the slide, even one containing a graph or chart,
I will rework it, usually adding an animation that allows me to tell a story with a graph or alternative picture or cartoon. I rehearse "in my head" how the slide will work, not just what I will say. To this extent, I never work with a script, but I have well-rehearsed "lines", something I learnt a long time ago from my radio days.

This is especially important when presenting visual information like charts and graphs to audiences unused to "reading" or interpreting charts. I literally lead them through the chart's construction, drawing X and Y axes and labelling them with appropriate fonts.

Today, I wanted to show a slide where I explored the relationship between "Happiness" and "number of Choices". This is based on some of the work of Barry Schwartz, from his book, The Paradox of Choice, right.

Here, below, is how the chart shaped up before I entered the data.

I want you to notice a couple of things.

First the choice of fonts. My point for this slide was that many people assume that if a few choices allow for some happiness, a lot of choices will allow for much happiness, almost in a 1:1 ratio. What I wanted to say was that too few choices leads to unhappiness, but too many choices paralyses and overwhelms leading also to unhappiness.

So I choose what I thought was a happy font for "happiness" on the Y axis. This took quite some time and experimentation. Notice too that I place the word "happiness" inside the graph, not alongside it vertically. I don't know where this convention started, but I abhor it. Why must the audience work hard to decipher the wording, when English is usually read left to right, not top to bottom. Why? Because this is what a lot of presentation software will automatically do for you, so it must be right, right?

Wrong.

Start thinking for yourself, and construct graphs with your audience in mind. The more familiar they are with graphs and the concepts you are discussing the less you need to work to lead them through the graph's construction, and comprehend your essential message. Don't use a graph if it obfuscates.

The less sophisticated the audience, and the more unusual the X and Y axis parameters (happiness vs choices?) the easier it is for the audience to get the point of it all, by leading them through the graph's construction.

Notice too the font I used for "choices". It's an elegant font more often used for invitations and likely to be associated with wealth and pleasure, like an invitation to a wedding or elaborate function. Moreover, it hopefully conveys what wealth is seen to offer us: more choices and opportunities.

Where is it written that X and Y axes must use the same font? Because these were the only words used on the graph I estimated I could get away with the potential confusion of different fonts. Indeed, I offered a third font later on, when I suggested unhappiness might better be expressed as misery, and after shifting the X axis too, I used a gothic font.

In this way, the fonts take on the value of a picture, rather than just words. They convey more than just the English meaning of the word, they help to convey the emotion underlying the concept. Look around how fonts in advertising are used, especially billboards which must grab your attention and deliver a message as you quickly drive by.

Would the same words - happiness, choices, misery - in Arial bold as quickly and unconsciously convey the concepts I wanted my audience to perceive?

And this brings me to a concept of which I am embarrassed for my fellow psychologists who present. Even though so much of our clinical work is about helping people in emotional distress, when we present we seem to do so as if emotion has been excised from us. We present without passion - just the facts, ma'am - and use slides filled with text which further reinforces our lack of passion, dulling our audiences.

For all of our talk about evidence-based practice, we ignore it when we present, preferring the "evidence" from Microsoft's Powerpoint Wizards that its cognitive style must be correct.

But there is a huge body of evidence about what constitutes the transfer of learning we set about performing when we present. And this is what I tried convey to my colleagues today.

I always take risks when I present. I know some slides and their transitions will work well, others I am not sure will be impactful for my audience. I sometimes lead audiences astray with my story telling then pull it all together with a slide or a movie that encapsulates the last few minutes, leading to an "Aha" experience for the audience.

And I often do it several times during a presentation so by the third time there is a sense of expectation rather than befuddlement - this is how I involve audiences in what may be a "stand and deliver" presentation which usually doesn't allow for much audience participation.

Even a twenty minute scientific presentation to an audience of 200 can involve the audience by assuming that even scientists have emotions! Often the quickest way through to involvement is to raise the emotional level by the use of humour. A funny slide, a funny story (an experiment that went wrong but allowed for a surprising discovery; an experimental subject who misinterpreted an instruction leading to a funny outcome) can involve the audience before you deliver your rather dry statistical outcomes.

Fortunately, today's group were very forgiving of my moving around the topic, and condensing my workshop down to one hour.

The one section that really brought the message home, on reflection, was my retelling an 1855 quote about a teacher's discovery of the Blackboard in 1813, as part of my description of how technologies have been used down the ages to transfer information from one individual or group to another.

I broke down the quote into several slides using a font reflecting the times in which the quote was written, and read them aloud (quotes are the only text on a slide I'll read when I present), with what I thought was appropriate phrasing and diction.

Then I showed the same longish quote as per the usual Powerpoint: a great slab of yellow text on a blue background. Yech! That got both a laugh and a wave of "we get it" nods.

And then to drive the point home, I condensed the prose quote into bullet points, and brought them in using gaudy animations. And it achieved the hoped-for result: a rejection of this way of story-telling, and thus presenting, and a reinforcement of all the things I had so far discussed as being evidence-based. Because now the group not just had the theory, but the practice where they themselves were the experimental subjects and could "feel" the difference.

Here's the bullet pointed slide that condenses the marvellous quote to elements, losing the story telling beauty of the quote along the way.

To finish the talk, I brought in my big gun, the five minute video that brings it all together in an unmistakable fashion and renders what I've hopefully conveyed memorable, exciting and inspiring: the first five minutes of Hans Rosling's presentation on global health delivered at TED 2006 (here).

Rosling came from nowhere in 2006, and presented a stellar keynote that knocked this very sophisticated audience off their expensively-attired feet. As soon as I saw it, I knew I would be using it in my talks on presentation skills.

The same effect was had on me when I watched James Nachtwey's TED presentation (left) this year. Introducing his talk, Nachtwey states that he's breaking the usual presentation rules of reading his presentation, and indeed, he does so in a monotonic fashion. The words are great, but the delivery is well... yawn-worthy. But a few minutes into it, an essay on the impact of photojournalism, he begins to show his photographs, and his monotonic delivery becomes an asset. Its flatness only accentuates the deep emotionality captured in the photos, the pain and suffering of war and the human condition.

I ran out of time to show his presentation, wanting the group to observe that despite his lack of passionate delivery (which I had emphasised as an important asset to any presentation), passion and articulation of complex human emotions can be conveyed by appealing to the pattern-detecting hard-wiring in our brains, where it appears our complex emotional response system resides. Sharp, clear photos do this exceptionally well (and means you must never use clipart, except to show why not to use clipart!)

What Rosling did to the 2006 TED crowd, Nachtwey did to the 2007 audience. You owe it to yourself to download both presentations from the TED site and review them before you give your presentation.

Your audience will thank you for it - and remember you for next time.