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What folk dancing taught me about presentation skills: lessons from the dance floor to the centre stage

Date Created: 22 Nov, 2007, 02:43 PM

Mention the word "psychologist" and many people immediately see patients lying on couches for years.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In 25 years of practice, I have only met one psychologist who practised this way, and he was a supervisor of mine when I was studying about 17 years ago for my clinical qualifications. He even looked like Freud (see picture, left, on his couch).

Most clinical psychologists (the ones who practise therapy) are now trained using more evidence-based treatments, much like I use to train presenters in what works best to persuade and influence audiences.

But there is a world of psychologists who never appear in movies or on television, and these are organisational and social psychologists. The former work in industry and corporations, and are more focussed on a positive relationship between people and work. The latter spend time usually researching how people behave in groups, sometimes taking in the domain of organisational psychologists.

Occasionally, as a clinical psychologist I go into organisations to deliver training utilising my clinical skills, but deliver workshops on stress, communication, knowledge management and information "overload", technology's impact on work, and of course presentation skills.

Early in my student life, I became aware of the "names" - the leading figures - in my profession-to-be. One of those was a social psychologist, who also made immense contributions to organisations, the late Michael Argyle, a Scotsman. (right)

He was a psychologist well ahead of his time, something I occasionally think about with regard to myself! Twenty years ago, he turned his scientific methods to studying the psychology of happiness, way before it became a topic of much contemporary exploitation. It was he, having established a Chair in Social Psychology at Oxford who gave us the term "social skills", a term which has now passed into everyday usage. Argyle also offered a distintly non-American style of researching non-verbal communication and shyness.

Later in his life, he turned his attention to not just definitions of happiness but how to be happy. And he concluded it was not strongly associated with wealth.

Towards the end of his career, he engaged in what was really one of the first Reality TV shows on the BBC, looking at a multiweek program to help shy and depressed people once more find their mojo. He incorporated all he had learnt over his long distinguished career to help this mixed group find joy once more in their lives.

I strongly recall the final episode of the series where he took the "graduating" class to a Scottish Folk Dance class. There he was in his kilt dancing with his group, holding hands in a circle as they learnt basic steps. He communicated in the show the value of such social activities in normal human contact, and how they could be a bulwark against depression.

Two of the features of depression are a sense of isolation, and unworthiness. Thinking becomes difficult and distorted, and low mood and energy follows. Folk dancing, Scottish or otherwise, almost always places people in a social context, usually giving people permission to hold hands or touch each other in socially sanctioned ways. Movement is planned rather than random, and gently learning movements in synchrony with the emotional impact of music, energises the brain centres not usually associated with language, thus temporarily short-circuiting the vortex of negative thinking.

(In one of Argyle's many obituaries, I located the following: "Physically energetic and active, he was for years an enthusiastic and excellent Scottish dancer. He would rather mischievously explain dancing’s appeal by suggesting that it epitomised basic factors in human happiness: a skilled activity shared by aficionados, involving vigorous exercise, social interaction, and close bodily contact with the opposite sex.)"

For the past 18 years or so, about the time I switched from educational to clinical psychology, I have been involved in Israeli folk dancing. My girlfriend at the time had taken it up (she was a former trained ballet dancer) and I formed the "if you can't beat them, join them" philosophy to spend more time with her.

This form of folk dancing is enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, not restricted to Israelis or Jews. Many from Christian evangelical movements folk dance because a subset of dances have a biblical basis, others incorporate it into their International folk dance repertoire, others because it is a social event, still others because it is fun exercise (think Texas-line dancing, or better perhaps, think not), and so on. One can be secular or deeply orthodox and enjoy dance, although the latter do it only in single sex settings.

When I first started dancing, I found that I easily learnt the steps, and moved through the various levels from beginner through intermediate. Eventually, having amassed a reasonable repertoire (an average dancer will know a thousand or so dances), and with a "clean" dancing style (my steps were easily copied) I was approached to become a teacher, and I have been teaching for about ten years now.

I was also the first to take digital videos of dancing and using my Titanium Powerbook, Apple's iTools, iMovie, and Apple's .Mac homepage software, quite revolutionised the Israeli folk dance "movement" in 2001 by disintermediating the existing sources of dance distribution such that even very small groups in Taiwan, parts of Europe and the US, and New Zealand, can watch dances and maintain their connection to the dance community.

On a parallel track, as my attention turned to better presentation skills, starting because of the appalling presentations I had to endure when I returned to study at the post-grad level in 2003, I began to see the relationship between how I taught dance and how I taught presentation skills.

Let me make a disclosure: Whatever I have learnt in both domains has not come from formal didactic teaching, but from my being exposed initially to others' teaching methods as a student, then my honing my talents when I became a teacher. With regard to my presentations, I continue to stay up to date with the vast body of academic research on the topic. With dancing, I speak often with professional teachers about their methods, and of course participate in their workshops.

Naturally, over time, I have developed my own teaching style in both the dance and presentation domains. And I see an important crossover, joining these seemingly disparate ventures. But they have much in common.

Both require complex ideas or movements to be broken down into components - made simple - then reassembled seamlessly so they became memorable, engaging and persuasive. Both are usually performed in groups that are often diverse, with respect to prior knowledge and current skills. It is up to the leader/presenter to ascertain ahead of time some measure of the groups familiarity and skills level, and then continuously monitor in real time how the group is taking up the ideas or movements.

In each case, repetition is important - not too much lest you take too much time and dumb it down; not too fast so that important concepts are insufficiently linked, preventing appropriate take up of the next important concept or step sequence.

In both cases, learning is enhanced if the teacher/leader conveys passion and enthusiasm, frequently checking with the group as to their assimilating the new material, reviewing progress so as to appeal to the widest possible number of group members so none are left behind and the quickest learners don't feel held back.

This requires mastering a challenging set of skills on the part of the presenter.

Not just do you have to know your material (the dance) back, front, and upside down, you have to know how to teach or convey the concepts, not just what to convey. Too much detail, and the audience is bored and confused, too little and the concepts ask too much of a leap of logic or physical prowess for the average group member to absorb.

Moreover, it requires considerable rehearsal before your present to a live audience to know how to teach or present. For both presenting and dancing, I'll rehearse sequences over and over to learn my own weak points. If i can't do the steps or convey the concepts, the audience won't get it either. One doesn't do the presentation or dance in one's head, you stand up, find some space and do it aloud, practising timing and movement. I can't emphasise this similarity enough, and their absolute importance if you're going to nail it when you perform the real thing.

Presentation giving and dance teaching also require not just a fundamental understanding of the central ideas or step sequence, well rehearsed, but they also demand the teacher/leader take a very educated guess as to the parts of the dance/talk where the audience is most vulnerable to not "getting it". This is often perceived during practice runs.

For beginners, this can be where the dance sequence causes them to face away from the teacher who usually teaches in an inner circle. Facing outwards, they must now rely on audible commands, rather than watching and emulating the teacher. In presentations, there is also a curious mix between what is said and what is seen, and better presenters know when to emphasise each. They know when to highlight aspects of a slide, not by relying on a wavering laser pointer, but being a step ahead and guiding the audience to look at a part of the slide, perhaps by circling it in red, or keeping that area sharp, while diffusing the surrounding area.

Even when dancers are looking at the teacher, he or she can improve the likely take up of the dance steps by verbalising the steps, just like a presenter verbalises a concept then shows the word after (so the presenter doesn't read the slide to you, the number one enemy of good presenting - unless it's a quote). You use a language that does not contain jargon, unless it's a technical term that best summarises a step sequence. Shifting weight from one foot to the other is called a "sway", which may need to be verbalised to beginners, but is an assumed term for more advanced dancers, a short-cut or "chunk" if you like. One "builds" a dance by helping people "chunk" sequences. It's no wonder Keynote refers to "builds" on a slide.

My whole presentation and teaching style can be summed up this way:

I know what the whole thing will look like at the end of my time in the centre/in the limelight. I also know I have to build up a story-like set of sequences, each with its own integrity, to be assembled into a consistent, reliable "whole" eventually. I know or seek to know where the weak links are, where the group has to make a leap - a new concept or unfamiliar step sequence - and choose the right way to connect "new" to "familiar". These are called transitions, and they are an important aspect of both presenting and dance teaching.

My task is to challenge the audience by taking familiar elements and presenting them in consistent ways (all folk dances contain a majority of familiar elements or sequences put together uniquely for each piece of music or song); or take unfamiliar ideas and simplify them by breaking them down into easily assimilated components.

In each talk I give, I take people out of their comfort zones ("Huh? Why is he talking about THIS?") and then bring them back onto a central idea or theme, where the audience goes "Aha!" when they get it. It's the same for dance. They go "Huh" when they see a complicated sequence, then go"Aha" when they get it. "Ahas" are very important means to make an emotional connection to the group/audience, and means they are coming with you on your story-telling journey to their enlightenment or enjoyment.

Both dances and presentation end up being filled with "Huh? - Aha!" sequences leading to mastery of new concepts.

For dancers, mastering a new dance is a real accomplishment especially if it looked challenging when the teacher first demonstrated it. For presenters, seeing your audience nod their heads, or laugh, or cry when they absorb your ideas, is the same thing and just as satisfying.

And there is one more component of similarity. Both require the teacher/presenter to seamlessly integrate new technologies with old or new ideas. The presenter must use the technology and place it front and centre when needed, then get it out of the way when unnecessary to convey concepts.

For the dance teacher, he or she needs to understand how to speed up or slow down the music to assist the dancers, adjust the most appropriate volume, work with the wireless microphone to maintain clarity of expression, and not be fazed when the technology falls over, which happens on a too frequent basis to the best of us.

Just like forgetting a dance step, or momentarily getting lost in your talk, better presenters/teachers have an array of stories to tell while the equipment is being reset, or their brains re-adjust should they forget or become distracted.

Recall Steve Jobs at this year's Macworld keynote where his slide clicker wouldn't function, his back-up also failed, and so while the assistants were rebooting, he told a story of how he and Woz in their early days would use clicker-like devices (remotes) to play pranks on Woz's dorm mates.

Contrast that with Bill Gates on The Late Show with Conan O'Brien a few years back during CES, where Bill continually fiddled with a Window Media Centre remote which refused to do his bidding. Bill kept clicking with Asperger's-like frequency when it would have been best to joke with Conan on what is really his comedy show.

Experienced presenters/teachers come equipped with funny little stories ready to launch in case of equipment or brain failure, which can happen because we're human, and Murphy has not left the building. Or if the group or audience is struggling to get the concepts, better presenters don't make fun of them, but of themselves to normalise the experience. Unhappy audience members do not learn easily, while happy engaged members have an easier time of it, and will stay the course when the concepts get difficult.

But mastering difficult concepts or steps produces much enjoyment and self-satisfaction which has two flow on effects: people come back for more, and they wish to share the fun and bring others back with them.

Why Keynote could be Apple's enterprise Trojan Horse - or what Google could learn from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead"

Date Created: 11 Nov, 2007, 09:20 PM

A few, pre-Leopard, weeks ago, I wrote of Al Gore's success in sharing the Nobel Prize for Peace.

I asked the readership to consider how successfully Gore's message would have been received if he'd conformed to the traditional cognitive style of Powerpoint, which is to boringly reduce complex ideas into fractured bulletted selling points.

Indeed, I said I was preparing to use two images of Gore, one with him presenting about Hurricane Katrina using Keynote, and the same image of Gore Photoshopped in front of a bullet-point slide, using the usual blue background, in a presentation on Presentation Skills to a group of business people. (Scroll down to the previous blog entry to see).

They were invited to attend a business breakfast presentation in the Melbourne seaside suburb of Elwood, in a restaurant called "Sails" (below, right), with its own special meeting facilities.

This was to be a one hour presentation to CEOs, national sales managers, property developers, lawyers and accountants, and various business owners, all of whom employed presentations in their work, with internal and external clients.

And as I was to discover after the presentation, none had heard of Apple's Keynote, none used Macs, and of course all used various flavours of Powerpoint.

It requires no genius to guess that inviting a cross-section of the business community to such a presentation would offer up that 100% used Powerpoint.

It was in that vein that I prepared my presentation, one that I have given numerous times this year around Australia, but which changes each time so as to reflect recent events to give the presentation more currency, and thus raise its "engagement quotient".

While the beginning and conclusion will vary, the middle section contains favourite elements (groups of slides that tell a story) in order for me to get across my main messages:

1. How to engage audiences using what cognitive neuroscience tells us how we orient, learn and remember.

2. What makes my way of presenting different from the 30 million Powerpoint presentations Microsoft says is offered up each day. And why it is based on evidence, rather than tradition and social conformity.

3. Slides that provides categorical and undeniable evidence as to why my method works, engaging the audience in its own learning process using visual and other illusions that deeply impress the audience. It conveys to the audience both my expertise and my sense of fun - a rare combination.

4. That I am doing the walk and the talk at the same time - the talk is not just about the slide content (issues related to text, images, colour, movement, etc), but about how to make the technology go front and centre when it's needed, and then have it get out of the way when I resume centre-stage. To this extent, whenever I play a movie (I played several in the talk), I don't stand near the screen or the Powerbook, but I sit down with the audience, watching their reactions, which might form part of what I'll say next when the movie stops and I need to describe and elaborate on perhaps the more subtle aspects missed on first seeing some of the videos.

(See my blog entry about Paul Potts and story-telling. I showed this video and had senior managers verging on tears as many had yet to see it).

In fact, let me share one of the the videos that early in the talk set the pattern. It was about patterns, and how we are pattern-detecting creatures, and this ought to form the basis for our slide creation. A few weeks before, I'd heard the esteemed Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, interviewed by WNYC radio host, Leonard Lopate, a favourite podcaster.

Lopate began his interview with Pinker by reminding him of his encounter with the comedian Stephen Colbert, on the faux Fox News-style The Colbert Report.

Colbert comedically put Pinker on the spot by asking him, "Ok, describe how the brain work - five words or less."

Caught momentarily off guard, Pinker caught his breath then magically ad-libbed:

"Brains.cells.fire.in.patterns".

Brilliant! And exactly the neuroscientific message I wanted my audience to see. So I tracked down the Colbert Report (February, 2007), clipped the section I wanted, saved it in Quicktime format, and embedded it into a plasma screen in a Keynote slide (See below). It played perfectly on cue, and deeply impressed the audience.

That said, I made one monumental error.

I mistimed the talk, and stopped at the appointed time with this slide:

I looked up and saw that we had only 5 minutes of question time, and this section, despite me trimming it down, would take at least 20 minutes. And this was really the "money slide": many of those attending really wanted to know about charts and graphs as they spent so much time developing and analysing them in their businesses.

Now I could have commenced my presentation with the Charts section. But without the theory and examples I had offered as to why an alternative to Powerpoint's traditional bulleted text style is needed - and how there is an evidence base to this - I would have neutered its impact.

So I took a risk: I said to the assembled group that I had committed one of the cardinal sins of presenting, asked for their forgiveness, and suggested we return very soon for a follow-up breakfast, where, following a brief recap, we would spend exclusive time on charts and the visual representation of information. And if they wished they could send me their own Powerpoint slides and I would offer a critique of how they could be altered to make them impactful - if they needed it.

This retrieved the situation and many after expressed a desire for the talk to be expanded into a three hour training session.

For me, this meant that many had "got" what I had tossed up in a high-risk play. As one soon-to-be-CEO said during the question period, "We think we do great presentations, but you've raised the art of presenting to a whole new level!"

This is music to a presenter's ears, isn't it?

In the aftermath, as people were packing up to go about their morning's work, quite a few came up to me afterwards, and asked what I had used to perform the presentation.

These very experienced presenters knew it wasn't Powerpoint. The clarity of the minimal text I used, the sharpness of the illustrations, the different transitions handled with devastating smoothness by Keynote, the ease with which movies played embedded in the slide without dropping into Windows Media Player or Quicktime, and how it all worked together to reinforce and illustrate what I said, all screamed,

"This is not your father's Powerpoint!"

Think for a moment what these various experienced presenters - for whom presentations really count (we're talking multi-million dollar contracts in some cases) - encountered.

They were challenged to consider that their trusted and much used means to convey information was based on tradition, social conformity, and the vagaries of Microsoft's software engineers (yes, I showed them pictures of Bill Gates' recent presentations to make my points).

That was the theory. Then they had to experience the challenge of seeing and hearing a different style of presentation, fuelled behind the scenes by Keynote's ineffable qualities. I made no mention at all of Keynote, or that I was using a Mac (which could have been using Powerpoint for OS X).

But these experienced presenters came up and asked what I had used. I said aloud, it's a software program from Apple with an educational price of $79:

"Great, Les! Is it available for PCs?"

"Um, no. Sorry."

And therein lies the sting in the tale (sic).

Apple doesn't need to write specialised applications to help it gain access to the enterprise setting, nor offer up different versions of Leopard to satisfy PC-dominated IT departments. Nor kill its marketing mien by porting OS X to the PC, despite the noisy clamour of the crowds.

It can get to the organisational "C" level, vaulting over the IT department lackeys, by helping get the focus on the bottom line where Boards of Directors need to see how a company's strategy will play out.

Go along to any stockholders' AGM and watch the CEO give his or her Annual Report, and die another Powerpoint death. Perhaps a graphics department has prepared the report (perhaps using Macs) but you can be pretty sure it will be delivered in the familiar style of Powerpoint.

Notice this screen shot (above) of a CEO's 2007 AGM speech online, which cleverly incorporates his slides. Notice how, while employing the company''s logo and brand colours, they are the usual "stiff" slides, mirroring the CEO's stiff presentation style. The company is Nordea, a Nordic bank of 10 million customers.

Around the world each day, there are probably scores of such dry dull CEO speeches being given: passionless number regurgitation using passionless Powerpoints.

It's at this point I reflect on an important, influential film I always watch when it makes it occasional appearance on the Turner cable network. It never fails to remind me that running against the social conformity of crowds and following your passion is my preferred way of acting (both as a psychologist and trainer of presentation skills).

This is the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand's, The Fountainhead.

Featuring Gary Cooper as a rebellious architect named Howard Roark (with strong overtones of Frank Lloyd Wright), it also stars Raymond Massey as a newspaper magnate (think William Hearst) publisher of "The Banner" and Patricia Neal, playing the newspaper's Design and Lifestyle journalist.

There are other more unidimensional characters, such as the newspaper's architecture critic, played by Robert Douglas and a fellow architect graduate of mediocre abilities who is used despicably by the critic in order to belittle the creative genius of Roark, who threatens established architecture with its conservative adherence to Classic Greek facades. More importantly, his rampant individualism strikes at the heart of the conservative establishment as well as the hoi polloi to whom The Banner panders.

Roark is initially mentored by an architect who has come up againt the conservative architectural community, and takes over his practice... where he waits ... and waits... including labouring in a quarry, and doing small jobs. Eventually he gets noticed and admired by self-made individualist entrepreneurs, not beholden to Establishment forces.

When he does eventually get an important commission for an apartment block by a visionary CEO, his life changes. While innovative parts of his work are admired, and co-opted by the Establishment, he knows (nor cares) that his body of work will never be accepted, unlike his mediocre school contempory, Peter (played by Kent Smith).

Roark, like Frank Lloyd Wright, and more recently, Frank Gehry, feels unbound by tradition. He breaks through with new materials, new ways of thinking about the integrity of buildings and their purpose in people's lives. (Yes, this is where you start to think - if you haven't already - of Steve Jobs and Jon Ives. As an aside, Wright was approached to design the building illustrations to be used in the film, but Warner Bros. rejected his financial terms).

When he secretively wins a huge commission to design a housing facility for disadvantaged populations, by allowing Peter - the darling of the Establishment - to take credit for it, he is then bewildered and angered to learn that his individualist approach has been overtaken by an architectural committee so that all may have a role in the building's construction.

This is where you think Googlephone, by the way. A phone or its software designed by committee, compared to the laser-like focus brought by Apple to the iPhone. Maybe Sergei and Larry ought to be sent a Fountainhead DVD to think about how each product they design needs to have its own purpose and intregrity and design-by-committee doesn't work.

In the Fountainhead, the committee-rejigged housing project is a disaster, far removed from its original purpose and design intelligence.

Roark is so angered he dynamites the yet to be completed development.

(This then allows for a very Ayn Rand court scene, above left, where the main protagonist has many pages of script to expound Rand's Objectivism philosophy).

What's the point of all this?

Well, to paraphrase Roark, a presentation has its own purpose and integrity, tailored for each audience, matching the qualities of the presenter. You can't take the company message, branded by the PR and Marketing department, laying out the company's dreams in bullets, and expect to deliver it with passion, gusto and engagement.

As a for instance, last weekend, I gave a scientific presentation to psychologists on something called "heart rate variability" and how to use the underlying science to help their patients. Within the workshop, I used some Powerpoint slides given to me by one of the world's leading authorities from a previous all day workshop he had conducted in Melbourne.

But it wasn't me. It was full of typically academic tables and poorly formed graphs, and the difference between my initial slides setting the stage and his scientific slides was like night and day. I felt like continually apologising, as this group had seen me in action a month before, and wrote to say it was the best presentation they had ever experienced.

They accepted the slides' limitations, but it required me to work hard to explain the slides' essential messages.

Let me come back to conclude this entry with a brief further discussion of my presentation to the CEOs and others at Sails recently.

Doing the presentation as I did, saw several CEOs and national managers express a desire to follow up with some inhouse training. They were able to admit, afterwards, that they too are thoroughly "over" the traditional presentation style, and would dearly love an advantage over their competitors by doing it differently.

Perhaps I was lucky, or in particularly good form that day, but there was almost complete agreement amongst those present that I had achieved the outcome touted on the publicity flyer prepared fo the event: that at its end, they would be compelled to think differently about how they presented.

Word in fact came back a week later from one lawyer who had later that day attended a senior presentation by a revered member of the legal fraternity, partly fell asleep during the Powerpoint (complete text and bullets) and then spoke to him about my presentation and how it was in a different league.

That's also what a presenter about presentations wants to hear: others proselytising your work. And along the way sooner or later Apple's Keynote will get a mention for its ability to allow the audience to fully experience the impact of the theory and practice I demonstrate during my talks.

The question however will always be asked: Cannot the same result be effected with Powerpoint?

Probably.

And, I'll believe it when I see it.

For now, like Howard Roark, I'll gently peddle my message to whomever wants to hear it, in the belief that out there are business leaders ready for a change, who are not beholden to an IT Establishment who poo-poos the Mac as only being for the arty types, and who care about doing it differently, without fear of hide-bound criticism from their conservative Boards.

Got some comments to make? Use the comments section, but please, this is not about Powerpoint versus Keynote per se: it's about a style of presenting, of sharing knowledge.

And finally, I am soon moving my presentation ideas to its own blog. Blogwavestudio (what you're seeing now) doesn't play nice with Leopard. And in preparation for my presentation on Keynote at Macworld January 2008, it really needs its own space on the web.

Slideshare.net's "World's Best Presentation" competition, sponsored by Microsoft: Keynote slideshows to be submitted only in PDF. So who are they trying to kid? Some lessons you won't learn about presenting from this dufus competition

Date Created: 25 Mar, 2007, 02:22 AM

I gave a Keynote presentation last Thursday week which was in fact a keynote, one at the Annual General Meeting of psychologists who also happen to be Careers and School Counsellors in some of Melbourne top private schools.

I was there to present for an hour on "Web 2.0" and other technological shifts impacting on their students, whom I called Generation M, where the M stands not just for Mobile, but for Media. The psychologists perceived there to be a real gulf between themselves and their digitally native clientbase, and they wanted some assistance to understand how to close that gulf.

Now I could have stood there for an hour and shown and demonstrated all the latest connectivity brands and ideas and startups, from early Web 2.0 efforts like Amazon.com and Flickr, through to the more recent such as Twitter and MySpace.

Seen below is one of the slides I used towards the end of my talk showing the logos of some of these new startups, from the web2logo.com website.

In fact, I showed four consecutive slides filled with such logos, slowly transitioning vertically (using Keynote's Push transition) to give the effect of a long credit sequence as you may see at the end of a movie. I talked over the slides without necessarily naming them. The intended effect was to see the growth of such startups.

I had started the Keynote, after the usual thankyous, with a discussion of the place of technology in human history. This is my way of contextualising my presentation, and deliver one of my main "take home" messages: That while technology may appear to be changing so rapidly as to make our heads spin, in fact we humans change quite slowly. What the psychologists had learnt about adolescent behaviour was not out of date by any means, but needed to be understood and applied in newly developing contexts.

This was my way of allaying some of their fears of change which can intrude in their coming to grips with the changing technologies themselves.

To reinforce that story (I only ever tell stories in my presentations, and NEVER work from a script - what my friend Garr Reynolds would call a naked presentation, and I refer to as Walking the Presentation tightrope without a net), I asked the audience to consider where I might choose to start to describe the story of technology.

I used one of my slides from a presentation I give on Clinical Applications of Virtual Reality (below) to suggest that this cave drawing, perhaps one of the oldest permanent drawings still in existence and discovered at the end of the 19th century, was one very early form of human technology.

I then skipped many thousands of years to about the time when these cave drawings were found, and showed a picture of the famous American March composer, John Philip Sousa.

His music is much better known to American audiences since it is so often used in military and school settings, so I played a snippet of "Stars and Stripes Forever" using an m4a file embedded in the Keynote slide. I obtained the original file from Wikipedia, and it was from an original Edison recording of 1906.

This then allowed me to introduce a picture of Edison, his phonograph of 1878, and I asked the audience to contemplate what it must have been like for 19th century inhabitants to hear themselves for the first time, or hear the sounds of others recorded away in time and distance. Something we take for granted, and more so by Generation M.

The connection is more than the use of Edison's phonograph to record the Sousa band in 1906, a hundred years ago. In 1909, Sousa went to the US Congress and complained about the phonograph, wanting the nascent recording "industry" put out of business.

To which I asked the assembled audience to contemplate why he would do such a thing.

After a few moment's thought when it was clear that by my not rushing to give them an answer (that's Naked Presenting - allowing silence to fill a hall) I expected a response from them, one person sparked up by stating it would be putting musicians out of business.

"Yes, well done" was my reply and thus began a brief discussion on the recording industry whose products continue to occupy so much of Generation M's attention. Again, this reinforces that while technology may change how we do things, the "why" changes very slowly.

But I went a little further.

Look at one of the slides I used (below) offering another picture of Sousa (obtained from Wikipedia with its Creative Commons licensing for media), and some of the words Sousa is said to have used in his appearance before Congress in 1909.

What you see is part of a quote dissing Edison's 1878 Phonograph, but like so many adults who wish to influence the politicians of the day, citing negative consequences on the youth of the day is usually a good bet.

By the way, this is the only time I will read a slide aloud: when it's a short direct quote.

My very next slide (below) took us straight into 2007, a hundred years later, and this picture from the New York Times of February 2007, where New York politicians were wanting to ban iPods from Manhattan intersections.

Interestingly, I didn't have to explain what the white earbuds respresented. All in the audience had seen them before, in response to my asking if they knew what they were... look how iconic has the iPod become in 5 years.

From here I began to talk about the promise of technology to change our lives, whether that promise had been achieved, and what might be the consequence of an "always on, always available", economy of abundance Generation M was growing up with, in contrast to previous generations.

Eventually, I introduced the group to the concept of the Long Tail, as described by Wired Editor, Chris Anderson.

The Long Tail phenomenon is quite familiar to psychologists, but in an utterly different context. One learns about "tails" of distributions in Psychology 101, when exposed to statistical concepts. Of supreme importance is the concept of a Normal or Gaussian, distribution, because this forms the foundations of psychological testing for IQ, personality, brain injury and psychopathology.

The long tail, as discussed by Anderson, is really just a form of positive skewness.

Here, the bulk of that being measured is pushed to the left of the graph, called the head, while the long tail moves to the right. A good example would be the frequency of earthquakes (X-Axis) charted against their power (Y-Axis). There are few very powerful earthquakes, but many of small to negligent power.

From here I spoke of Anderson's descriptions of how Hollywood and mainstream media have for decades made their money from creating a "demand" for hits ("The Hit Parade"), and how modern digital technologies are dismantling this model. It is doing so, according to Anderson's Long Tail ideas, because storage of media is no longer a question of real estate (how many vinyl records can a record store keep on the shelf at any one time), but that of availability of "whatever you want, whenever and however you want it" (the Economy of Abundance) which Generation M has always known (in contrast to their parents).

It is this point that I suggested that this phenomenon was something new, as for millenia our models of economics had worked on an Economics of Scarcity: things have value not because they are intrinsically useful, but because of how rare they are.

So while industrial diamonds have great practical utility, those diamonds that fetch more per carat serve no useful purpose other than decoration, affording its wearer status. De Beer's and others closely control the price of diamonds by how many they release to market.

The same used to go for the recording industry, but as Anderson tells us, the huge hits are becoming fewer and fewer, whether that be for music or films or TV. It was here I was able to discuss iTunes, the AppleTV, and User Generated Content. It's also where I had planned to show the cover of last year's Christmas edition of Time Magazine, featuring its Person of the Year - You.

But, I didn't get around to it... With all that and some chitchat during the presentation, my hour was up, and we spent some question time in general discussion. It looks like the group will ask me back for a more workshop-style "what do we do next" following this rather more "heads-up" presentation.

What was most important for the group to come away with was the sense of feeling empowered that they knew much of what they needed to know to do their jobs, and not to let the technology and new terminologies get in the way.

The second important aspect - important to me - was two-fold. First was the delivery of technology-based information to a group of peers who know a little, but just enough to know what they don't know. It was a good test of my ability to take information and bend it, shape it, and portray it in ways to make it both understandable and interesting for an audience eager to become more comfortable with it.

The second one was the confirmation of two important qualities in presenting to diverse audiences. These are passion (or enthusiasm if that word is too strong) and story-telling.

I bust my brain each time I present to find a new innovative way to begin a presentation. This is especially so if I'm invited back to present to the same crowd within a year. Because audiences remember. No, not the exact content but they remember your passion and story-telling if not your stories.

But they don't remember the text on your slides. And this is what I teach in my Presentation Skills Workshops. I learnt this a long term ago when I first started doing interviews as a psychologist in radio and television. Friends and colleagues would approach me months after and say they'd remembered me on TV. At the time I was doing interviews quite often, so would usually ask which piece to air they saw.

Almost to a person, they could not recall the content of the interview, but clearly remembered how I'd carried myself: "You sounded professional" or "You looked the part" or "You seemed to know what you were talking about."

So when I present to audiences on Presentation Skills, I offer them the dilemma of presenting:

Do you want your talk to be remembered in such a way that if you present annually at conferences, intending audience members say to each other,

"Hey, Bill is presenting again!"
"Really, is it an interesting subject?"
"Doesn't really matter... he does great presentations even if you don't really know the subject."

Or:

"Hey, Bill is presenting again!"
"Really, did you get much out of it last year?"
"Yes, it was really dense with information, and he's dry as a bone as a presenter. But if you look past that and read his notes after, you'll find some real gems of useful data."

I'm thinking good presenters might be happy to live with one or the other.

But great presenters want both to happen: their presentation is memorable and their content sticks.

Maybe it's my work as a therapist that also informs my presentation skills workshops (as much as my formal training in Knowledge Management), but I am constantly weaving into my training the desire for workshop-goers to be able to take what they have learnt today and apply it tonight, and then tomorrow.

I have two pieces of feedback that tell me when I'm on the ball: In one (and this actually happened) an attendee comes up at the end of the workshop and swears at me, saying, "You rotten bastard! I've got this presentation to do at a World Congress in a few weeks, and now I have to go back and change all my slides."

Now if this came from an inexperienced presenter, I would implore them to make any changes gently. But in the example I have, this was said to me by a very experienced presenter who simply bought my pitch. Coming from an evidence-based scientific field, she could not deny the evidence I had put before her in our three hours together. That evidence was interactive, such that she participated in her own learning of new ideas, which had nowhere to go but be assimilated into her existing knowledge base.

The second piece of feedback came when a few months after an initial presentation workshop a member came back for a second turn, and presented her own slides. What a change! Not perfect, but she clearly had thought much more deeply about how she wanted her slides to affect her audience. She didn't just want them to learn facts, she wanted to get at their emotions and she succeeded by applying some of the principles displayed in my first workshop.

Her slides were visual and impactful, with large text kept simple and appropriate. There was no movement or animation, but it wasn't necessary.

So you want to hold a "World's best presentation contest"?

Thinking about last week's presentation and how to best convey ideas and concepts using slideware (eg., Powerpoint, Keynote, etc.) brings me to share some thoughts about Slideshare.net's World's best presentation contest.

My friend Shawn Callahan has entered a deck, utilising a slide I gave him, and my mate Garr Reynolds is one of the judges.

You might recall some time back that Apple also held a presentation contest for Keynote (when it was still in V1.0). That it held a competition gave weight to the idea that Apple was not orphaning Keynote as there was a long gap between V1.0 and V2.0.

Apple was very clear that the slide show was a stand alone presentation, and not necessarily accompanying a talk, nor was it a "left behind" set of notes. It really was a contest to showcase Keynote's capabilities, given its feature set was signficantly less than the Powerpoint of the day. This forced competitors to focus on the creativity-eliciting qualities of Keynote, and so transitions and movement were very much to the fore plus Keynote's clean design principles.

Apple called its competition "Present your Passion". Keep that thought in mind, and you can read my blog entry about its winner, Meg Spoto, here (November, 2004 - all Apple.com links out of date).

Slideshare.net which allows slide show creators to place their slides on the web in the style of YouTube, allowing for slide annotations and viewer comments, has divided its contest into two categories:

1. Slides which accompany a talk.

2. Slides which can stand alone, and function as handouts or downloads

Here is how Slideshare advises entrants preparing to upload their slideshows:

"While uploading the presentation file, you should tell us something about it in the description section. This will give the voters and judges some context as to your presentation. Specifically, tell us which of the below options describes how your presentation was or is meant to be used. "PowerPoint Deck as Leave Behind" OR "In Person Presentation Support" OR "Both" OR "Other".

Now I can understand that for many business and educational presentations, what may be uppermost in presenters' minds will be the supply of slides for attendees to later refer to, either downloadable in their original form, or on paper as both Powerpoint and Keynote allow.

In which case, if you give them out at the beginning of your presentation, you can be sure you will minimise interactivity with your audience, who will either be writing on your handout, or scanning ahead to see what's coming next.

You'll never see me offering such handouts.

I'd rather they have a briefing sheet or a summary sheet or even an activity sheet which I'll utilise in a workshop. I've even been known to handout CDs of PDFs and movies (where copyright allows) for later reference by the audience. That's because I heavily rely on evidence-based research to support what I have to offer in my presentations, and I want my audiences to see what I have to say and show, expressed in the original research.

So that takes care of one of the slide stacks requested for this competition.

It's the other that perplexes me, the one that supports the presenter to deliver his or her presentation.

If it's the support but not main act - that's you, the presenter - how are we to judge its success? All we get to see at the competition site are the slides. We might get a summary of what you said, given both Keynote and Powerpoint allow each slide to have notes attached to it (with Keynote going a step further and allowing a stickie to be shown in presentation mode (below).

But surely the art and science of presenting complex data or ideas using slide technologies consists of the integration of presenter and slides, and the two can't be separated without a loss of knowledge sharing.

So while I can see some purpose in having a competition for the best handouts (but on what basis are the criteria decided, and how do the judges really know what works?) I really don't get the purpose of comparing slideshows which are meant to support the speaker.

Surely a slide with one picture or one word when presented in just the right context by a superb presenter can be a more memorable one than a competing slide with plenty of fancy effects but one that doesn't hit the mark with the audience. Indeed, even if you have some terrific effects which hit the mark (ahem... I have one where I reveal Sean Connery saying "I know it when I see it" from Goldfinger [1964] when I ask workshop attendees if they can specify what it is about lousy Powerpoint that makes it... lousy) these will be impossible to upload to the contest if you use Keynote because the competition specifically asks for Keynote presentations to be converted to PDF format! Say Bye-bye to the magic of Keynote's persuasive effects... which I personally slave over so that while I work hard to construct the slide, it makes for an easier time for the audience to be held spellbound and to later remember what I demonstrated.

So what's the point?

You see, when you visit websites where you can solicit and hire professional presenters (for your company rev-up, a special workshop, executive training, AGM keynote etc.) you can see videos of the potential speakers in action via online videos. That's hardly surprising since many professional speakers charge $5000 and up. Here is the Prime Time speakers bureau website for you to view some online videos.

Indeed, having looked around the web to see if what I have to say might earn me $5000 per gig, it seems most Speakers Associations demand you send them a professional quality videotape - unedited - of a recent presentation. In fact, some organisations provide an annual service where you can attend meetings, do your shtick and have your demo video recorded for you professionally, as shown here.

Oftentimes, the criteria for the video include a view of the slides, a view of the audience, but most of the time the videocamera should be on you, the presenter.

And to me that's the way to judge "The world's best presentation". Otherwise, all you are doing is judging Powerpoint stacks for either gimmicks, simplicity, or clarity of complex idea presentation presented without passion, gusto, audience interaction and presence.

If you were going to invite someone to keynote your AGM or special event, what would you rather see?

The slides or the person in action?

Yeah, I thought so...

Articles in Presentation Skills/Keynote (Total Entries: 38)