| The next big thing and presentation skills - engaging with audiences | | Date Created: 20 Jun, 2007, 09:48 AM |
 Staying with my recent theme of discussing presentation skills and its training, it should now become obvious that I, as well as others like Garr Reynolds, are speaking beyond the mechanics of how to "do" Keynote or Powerpoint.
There are a gazillion books on the mechanics, but very few on the integration of the application with the content and the process of delivering the content.
For that, you have to look into the world of multimedia and e-learning, where numerous labs have used experimental methods to develop a series of rules or guidelines about how humans learn, and how that learning can be compromised or confounded by so many of the things most people do in powerpoint without thought. Because that's the cognitive style of powerpoint and it's what everyone does, and why rock the boat?
This is especially important for young graduates who have spent years watching their mentors lecture and hold court using these "tried but (not) true" techniques of information dissemination. Until they reach some level of peer-acknowledged status, you don't one-up your superiors and certainly don't call into question their teaching style.
But in a Web 2.0 age, where consumers are contributing their share of information to the virtual libraries of the world through current technological developments, the rules of who controls the information flow are changing.
And it's not just the kind of information, it's also the way that information is conveyed and portrayed: within Instant Messenging apps, via video and podcasts, on blogs, and enhanced iTunes files such as is seen on iTunes U.
Information flow is now faster and more two-way than ever, and it seems to me that into this mix comes Presentation Skills. Because if you're going to stand before an audience who now has access to a huge variety of presenters via the web, YouTube, etc., you had better be outstanding.
What does that term mean, outstanding?
Well, already in various blog entries, I've discussed some of the characteristics of good presenting in the service of getting your message across. I've mentioned passion, and I've mentioned story telling.
Someone who has been paying close attention to the Web 2.0 phenomenon and its deployment in Knowledge Management domains is Tom Davenport, who holds the President's Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. He's a much published author, and now blogger.
In a recent blog article for Harvard Business School online, entitled "From Producers to Consumers", Davenport notes "the shift in power from information producers to consumers".
Considering too that Davenport has also co-authored a book entitled "The Attention Economy", he argues that consumers (i.e., your audience) are no longer dummies waiting for pearls of wisdom to drop from your lips. They have numerous sources of information to which they can attend, and even in the middle of your talk, can be IM'ing the person next to them, or one 10,000 miles away. Your task is to keep them engaged if you want the slightest chance of your message sticking.
Davenport acknowledges these changes with the following two paragraphs. Keep them in mind when you prepare your next presentation and its slide stack:
"All of us will try to reach readers and viewers with important messages across multiple channels -- email, IMs, phone calls, even letters and express mail. We’ll probably spend less time in forced meetings and audience events, and organizers of them will probably do more to engage our full attention. The best teachers, speakers, writers, and directors will be even more successful and celebrated than they are today. Instead of tuning into the powerful, we’ll tune into the engaging. Ultimately, the ability to engage will equal power. (Bolded text added).
On the consumption side, the power we’ll have and the vast amount of information at our disposal will make us very choosy about the sources we rely on to inform and amuse us. We won’t want to waste our time and brain cells on boring, useless information. This will be a major change, because at the moment we simply aren’t very discriminating. We consume lots of crappy content."
As I read it, it confirms my belief that lousy powerpoint is part of that crappy content, and by continuing to throw down the gauntlet by choosing to present differently, I think I'm adding to ways audiences can become more discriminating. |
|
|
|
