Presentation Skills - Keeping the Blackberries at Bay
Question: How do you know if an engineer is an extrovert?
Answer: He looks at your shoes when he talks to you! I am
allowed to say that, coming from a family of engineers, but it's
exactly to the point of this month's column on the art of
successful presentation design and delivery. At the heart of all
successful presentations is a presenter who maintains proper
eye-contact with members of the audience at all times.
Microsoft estimates that with over 300 million copies of
PowerPoint installed world-wide, something like 3 million
presentations are given every day. What they don't say is that
roughly 2.9 million of those are completely ineffective in
achieving true knowledge transfer, what presentations are
supposed to be about in the first place.
Knowledge transfer occurs, for the most part, when you are able
to keep every member of the audience on the same page throughout
the entire presentation. Unlike a written report, where the
intended audience has the luxury of acquiring the embedded
knowledge at his or her own pace, a presentation is actually an
event where knowledge transfer is a rather ethereal event;
information appears on the screen and is discussed for a
fleeting moment in time, and then disappears.
To understand the relationship between an on-screen presentation
and a written report (or worse - the presentation printed as a
hand-out), think billboard versus magazine ad.
Look me in the eye
To keep the audience together, you first must start with a
presentation that allows you to stay engaged with the audience,
as opposed to either the screen or your notes. When you lose
engagement in business presentations today, you invite audience
members to wander, and that's when the Blackberries blossom.
A key element to successful engagement involves learning proper
eye contact, which requires you to hold contact with individuals
for anywhere between 3-7 seconds, or until you have completed
one thought. At which point, you pause and move to another
person and do the same. Most presenters look at one person no
more than