When reviewing someone else’s presentation, use these lists to help.
Last night I coached a young woman who was being interviewed later this week for a $250,000 full ride scholarship to the college of her choice. She was tasked to give a 15 minute presentation and answer questions to an unknown panel. The challenge she faced is that the organizers from the admissions office gave her no guidance on what questions they wanted answered.
So she prepped a 12 minute demonstration of her robotic arm that won her all sorts of science olympiad awards and consequentially, admission into this prestigious engineering school (just the quarter-million-gulp-dollar-scholarship was on the line). The outcome of the review was that we worked hard to make her opening and closing about the college (not about her), to weave in her key message points about being creative and a problem solver, and found a few ways to interject an equally as impressive career in choir with a personal passion she had in rescuing cats. We walked away with a bit more humanism while not losing the intense technical jargon she believed they wanted to hear about her complicated robotic arm (all of which was way over my head, but I was not the intended audience, so I nodded and smiled during those minutes).
But as I listened to her talk, it brought me back to a training I did in content framing a few weeks ago for a large insurance company. My clients who sponsored the training are tasked daily with reviewing other people’s presentations and making giving them important feedback toward improvement.
But reviewing and giving feedback are hard to break down sometimes when you are busy. So I present here my definitive content review question guide – the critical questions you need to make sure are answered as you are reviewing any presentation.
As Atul Gwande taught us in the Checklist Manifesto, there are some checklists meant to be used before a task, and others, after. To that end, I have presented a “before” and “after” list for your use.
A jump start “before” list – top 5 questions to get a new presentation started:
Who is the audience you are presenting to?
What is the question on their mind?
What did they know about the topic beforehand? / What context do they need?
What is your bottom line answer?
What do you want them to do with the information after the presentation? (the goal!)
A review “after” list – what to look for after you’ve seen a presentation
Did I follow you? Did you tell me where you were headed in the first 2 minutes? Did you wander?
Do I know you / your story and why you have license to deliver the message (appropriate for new hires)?
Can I repeat your key challenge (problem) and answer to the challenge (solution)?
Did I know what you want me to do with the information?
Did each slide (if they were used) have a concluding idea, clearly stated in the header?
Did you give me anything to feel about the topic? Should I be scared? Excited? Moved to immediate action?
And lastly, do I see the intended audience inside the message? In other words, did you make the audience the central character of your story? (as opposed to the presenter being the central character).
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As I think about the student pitching for the scholarship, the most important improvement we made was in having her ask for the scholarship, “Choose me for this scholarship and I will bring my passion and creativity to four years of academic excellence on your campus.” In the “before” version, she never stated her goal. In the “after” there was no doubt – she was not just there to share her robotic arm. She was there to be chosen and most simply, to win.
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Feedback without a License.
Wow, what a way to start the year.
I didn’t take my own advice.
Mid way through a recent assignment (an event featuring 5 different talks from the same company), I was told that I offended an executive by what I thought was a simple suggestion.
The suggestion was, “Have you ever recorded yourself?”
I love the recording devices on our phones. I’ve blogged about it here what a powerful Gestalt-like tool they can be for identifying your own problems in your speech, story or talk. You are more likely to correct the mistakes you identify versus those anyone tells you about.
And they are also great timing tools.
Sure you can use a clock, but that doesn’t help you identify where you may have gone long (or short) since you can’t hear yourself back.
His response to me was “I’ve done this a thousand times. I don’t need to record myself.” I just said, “I don’t need to hear it, but you can use it just to make sure your own timing is good.” After all, there were 5 speakers – if each of them went over 5 minutes, that’s nearly a half hour over their intended timeline. That kind of schedule oversight makes people like me batty, let alone the hundreds of folks in the audience.
So. In looking back, I ask myself: What went wrong? Was it really my suggestion? Was it the fact that he’s new to the job and doesn’t want to be questioned or appear vulnerable? Was it that I didn’t appreciate the fact he’d done it “thousands of times?” Was it that he doesn’t like feedback.
Maybe all or some of those applied, but a higher problem emerged.
He really didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know my story. He didn’t trust my advice or know that I have license to deliver it.
When we first met a few weeks earlier, I was limited to an introduction of this length:
“Hi, I’m Ruth Milligan, and I’m an executive speech coach.”
Anything more would have been frowned upon by the other 15 people in the room who had a big agenda to follow. And it was clear, at this moment of ‘said offense,’ that no one had ever shared with him what my true passion is, how I do it all day every day, how I lead with love and want everyone to reach their potential.
When we were in that script review meeting, it was to review a script (that is a story for another post). So to him, I was a writer. Or at least, if knew I was a coach, he had no ounce of willingness to be coached by me. I could have been introduced more thoroughly, surely, but the ultimate responsibility is mine.
As I have told my clients and classes for years, if people don’t know who you are, how can they trust you? And if you don’t tell them your story, how will they know the real you?
I was really looking forward to giving this executive some further feedback when the time was right. Sometimes, that time is just not meant to be. I wish him well. And thank him for this reminder that at the heart of my work, my clients have to want the feedback first, no matter how I am introduced.
Make the Voice Memo your friend.
In Columbus, we have an awesome business (mainly tech) accelerator called 10x. I was invited to help these 10 companies prepare their final presentations/ demonstrations pitches to investors at the end of their, yep you guessed it, 10th week.
Below is advice I sent to each of them as the entered the final stretch and needed some help really refining their delivery. It’s one of my signature coaching approaches and most people find it exceptionally helpful and borrows from the Gestalt philosophy: identify your own mistakes / barriers / challenges and then lean into correcting them. Here’s the advice:
When you have finalized the content of your talk and/or your presentation slides/decks, the final step is practice.
Practice.
Practice.
Here is one way to practice that may help you self-correct and improve more quickly before your presentation day.
– Find the “voice memo” function on your smart phone (a voice recording device)
– Get your deck ready to advance (if you don’t have a remote clicker, get one- they are invaluable for good practice)
– Begin to talk out your talk into your recorder
– Practice section by section until you can record the whole talk.
– Listen to it for the following :
Conciseness: can you say it shorter with more impact?
Are you pausing before or after really important points?are you pausing at all?
Do you have disfluencies like uh, um, you know or ok?
Are you racing through the talk to make the 10 minute time limit? Can you take out a minute of content to be able to slow down?
Do your visuals help resonate your talk or distract from it?
Are you concluding the thought to a slide before you click to the next one?
Do you have a diversity in tone, cadence and inflection in your voice to keep the audience from getting bored?
Do your stories offer the audience a visual transport- meaning enough sensory descriptors to allow us to “be there with you.”
The best practice – if you have time – is when you record your talk and then transcribe it. Then you can see the words you used when you ‘talked it out.’ From there, you can record/ refine again into a final outline. This is instead of you writing out a script, editing long sentences, and trying to memorize it.
Remember we may talk like we write — but we rarely write like we talk.
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How Kit Kat led to TED, told ala Pecha Kucha.
So a few years ago I wrote this blog post on how I thought the Pecha Kucha (Japanese for Chit-Chat) was a fun format for an audience but a really tough one for a speaker. It dictates you deliver a talk with 20 slides on a timer for 20 seconds a slide.
So last summer when I was invited to give a PK talk, I told them I’d do it without slides. They said no : I had to use slides.
So I sent a black slide and asked them to play it 20 times. They said no : I had to show slide progression.
The dot that moved 20 times.
So I sent a slide that looked like this and had the dot rotate around the circle — one dot movement per each of the 20 slides. And they said yes: finally.
My motivation was that I wanted to tell a very personal story as the guidelines are pretty loose on what content you can bring forward as long as it shows your passion. I didn’t feel that slides would augment my story, in fact, I thought they would distract. And I didn’t ever want to turn my back to the audience to check if I was on the right slide (Rule #1 of public speaking) which is what happens when the slides are on a timer.
So now that I’m watching the video (posted below, don’t judge the quality!), I see that they may have had a confidence monitor (at my feet). A confidence monitor is what we call the screen facing a speaker to demonstrate the slides playing to the audience. True fact: I never saw the monitor as I am apt to look at the audience, not the floor. And it didn’t matter, since I timed my talk to be 6:40 (the time of 20 slides x 20 seconds) and just let it rip. It wasn’t until about 5 minutes in that I even remembered I had slides because I never practiced with them or needed them to prompt my story.
A good friend wrote on my Facebook page that he thought my slides were on the fritz…until the end. So watch for yourself and see how I gave a Pecha Kucha talk “without” slides. Which allowed me to focus on the thing that did matter: my passion and my story.
How I found my Kit Kat. from Articulation on Vimeo.
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Bringing closure to the year, and your talk.
As we close out 2012, I have produced another ‘best clips’ video (you may remember the first one on opening hooks), this time, on great closings. As a speechwriter friend of mine told me once, the hardest part for her clients was “Getting into and getting out of the talk.” So here’s some inspiration to bring your great ideas to a close.
How to close a great talk. from Articulation on Vimeo.
No CommentsLive from San Diego
Dr. Kaweh Mansouri at rehearsal for TEDxSanDiego, practicing to show his contact lens that will detect glaucoma.
Last weekend I assisted with prepping some of the speakers for TEDxSanDiego, a wonderful TEDx run by Jack Abbott, a longtime marketing executive in the area. Jack invited me to work with four specific speakers in preparing their talks and then to the rehearsal to help gently guide any other speakers in need of help.
I got handed the four speakers who were dealing in “chips.” Technologies that are almost science fiction-like, but are being tested and refined to go to market in the very near future. They included:
– Thought Controlled Computing: Using a headband that reads your brainwaves and then allows you to control various devices (and or/other behaviors) just by thinking.
– Single blood test for all cancers: That’s right, one drop of blood they hope will screen for all cancers.
– Contact lenses to detect glaucoma: To date, the only test for glaucoma is the “puff” test you get once a year. These new lenses send a wireless signal to capture the data around eye pressure, which is the indicator of glaucoma onset.
– Epidermal Electronic Tattoos: No more wires on preemies or on their mother’s belly before they are born. Monitoring and scanning patches that affix to your skin and that allow you to capture (again, wirelessly, see the trend?) data without being connected to any wires.
These scientists, Ariel Garten, Raj Krishan, Kaweh Mansouri and Todd Coleman didn’t know each other at all. But they all shared a few commonalities on how they were preparing for their big talks:
– They were armed with incredible data about their discoveries, but each had to work extra hard to incorporate stories to bring them to life.
– Each had to really carve out time to work on their talks — most of them ended up using weekends to write, edit and rehearse.
– Speaking of rehearsal, it was a make-or-break time for each of them. One had never used a confidence monitor before (the screen that sits in front of you that projects your slides) and so he spent most of his time looking backwards (yikes!); two of them had technically challenging demonstrations that took a team of folks and extra effort to work out; and all of them greatly benefited from me recording them (just on my iPhone) and playing back the “tape” to see where improvements could be made.
I’m personally grateful for the opportunity that Jack and his awesome team at TEDxSanDiego gave me to work with these massively talented researchers. Nothing like a good dose of intense science, technology and sun to kick off the holiday season!
1 CommentThe Ruthies.
As the co-host and lead curator for TEDxColumbus, I’m supposed to act as an information waitress. I help select and then introduce the talks to people who are hungry for their curiosity to be fed. My job is to present the ideas (as authored by our speakers) without judgment so the audience can come to their own conclusions.
However, as a coach to nearly all of these presenters and speakers, I can’t help have a bias in not only what feats they overcame to make it to the TEDxColumbus stage, but what lessons they leave us beyond their stimulating, provocative and challenging ideas. So I’d like to introduce The Ruthies.
The Ruthies are my personal awards from my point of view on the style and delivery, sequence and organization, preparation and planning ‘wins’ that emerged from this year’s TEDxColumbus talks, as heard originally at COSI on October 5. And like pee wee soccer, everyone wins a trophy. Because everyone put an extraordinary effort into their talk and we see a unique attribute in each from which we all can learn. Here we go.
Best Opening Hook
Priyank Shah said he wanted to mention that his talk would not be a data centric talk, boring people with social science research. So I told him, “Why don’t you start with a riff and scare them a bit? When you stop and shift gears, they will be delighted and want to hear your talk. ” And here’s to Priyank, he pulled it off. You could have seen the sweat on people’s brows as they listened to his first sentences…
Most Uncomfortable Moment
Laura Hill provided us with one of the most “enlightenly uncomfortable” moments of the whole day: she played a recording of her take on what it sounds like in a person’s head who suffers from anorexia while they are eating. When I first heard it at rehearsal, I wanted to tell her it wouldn’t work – the sound quality was too poor and disturbing. But that was the whole point.
Best Nervous Laughs
How could there not be? He told everyone that we needed to have one puff of pot a day and that cocaine is really no different than lard. The rest of his talk, discussing how food and drug are really the same thing, was peppered with insightful entertaining moments that resonated with everyone in the audience. Dr. Gary Wenk would also get the most prepared award – I heard a final version of this talk 5 weeks before 10/5.
Best Graphics
Her own. Jessica Hagy, a soft-spoken and modest orator, blew many folks away with her powerful Venn diagrams for which she is famous.
Best Reflection
Brian Roche, when asked what he had learned in developing his TEDxColumbus talk, said, “I never equated MY research to moving THAT needle.” He was referring to the work of finding out why chemotherapy drugs were causing cardiac disease and failure in 15% of cancer patients who survived. He was able to pull himself out of the deep dive that is his research to understand the larger implications by giving his talk. He also may get the best effort award – I saw few others transform their data into a cohesive, easy to understand talk than Brian.
Best Audience Engagement Exercise
At the end of Catherine Evans’ talk, she invited everyone to take a photo and then challenged us what choices we’d make with that image. It was a very personal way to end the talk of the journey of photography.
Most Passionate
But of course, it goes to Dr. Gordon Aubrecht. Just see for yourself.
Most Memorable Ending
Goes to Frederick. He left one of the most captivating moments in his story until the very end. While everything he said leading up to it was mesmerizing, it was his act of forgiveness and consequently being free that hit a deep chord in the last lines of his time on stage.
Best Stories
Whether it was of himself shopping at Baby Gap, or the stories of Jonathan and Xavier, Terrell Strayhorn captivated us with the illustrative language that made his talk highly resonating.
Best Audition
Jan Allen won the spot on the TEDxColumbus stage as she beat out nearly 30 other open auditioners. Her journey from a three minute talk to a 10 minute talk was not an easy one; we applaud her for the endless hours that went into both her audition and delivering a well-crafted story.
Best Recovery
And yes, that is a double entendre. Dan Stover told a bold and beautiful story of courage and overcoming fear at the TEDxYouth@Columbus event which earned him the one youth spot on the TEDxColumbus stage. But that was after a fairly unimpressive attempt at the TEDx Open Call Auditions; I was FLOORED by the effort he had put into his Youth talk since then. It goes to show you that hard work can pay off. And you’ll see from his talk, he had more notable and heroic recoveries that than one. Great work, Dan.
Best Open Process
Naomi Stanford took crowd sourcing and syndication to a new level in preparing her talk. She first posted this blog, and then practiced her talk on three different continents during her travels as a consultant. Not everyone has these opportunities, but she used them to her advantage to richen her talk.
Best Editor
There was a reason that Pecha Kucha was started for architects. The forum that engages speakers for 20 seconds for 20 slides was meant to keep their talks brief. Enter Michael Bongourino, the gregarious, lovable architect who had a “front row seat” to the concept of overlooked spaces, as informed by his 14-year old (and continuing) escapades in and with unique places. At rehearsal, Michael met the 18-minute mark with half his talk to go. Gulp. In two days, he became his own best editor for refining and massaging what became a truly delightful tour of his perspective.
Best Closer
When we accepted Doug Smith to speak, I thought his talk would be largely about his personal experience facing his own mortality being diagnosed with leukemia. And while it was at the core, he beautifully turned his story into one that made the audience the central character instead. Everyone saw themselves in his story by the end of the 18 minutes. After being tossed and turned by every other idea throughout the day, the audience was brought back to center and what matters most about being happy, his core idea and one that everyone loved as the close.
Let it go.
I just finished a six week assignment with a major health corporation in town, helping them to cascade their 10 year vision into a repeatable resonant story for their 16,000 associates to understand. The experience was a familiar one — take two years worth of strategic planning work and find a way to get it into 10 minutes. That was not the difficult part, in fact it was great fun.
The challenge was when the lead executive insisted on telling “the journey” every time he presented the material (at least when I was present). He was afraid that people wouldn’t appreciate how far, how hard, how complicated it was to get to THERE. He wouldn’t let it go.
I’ve seen this more and more lately — whether it is a mid-level data analyst or a senior strategist, the desire to relay everything about “the work” has become consistent — consistently unnecessary. We, in the audience, gingerly ask ourselves: “Who cares?”
When you think about this question: What do you want people to do with the information once they leave your presentation?, is the answer:
A. To know how hard you have worked
B.To make sure they know every step of your journey — or —
C. To take action on what you are presenting
Clearly, it is C. But our ego and self-consciousness get in the way of remembering we need to keep the audience the central character of our story – not ourselves. The fear: if we don’t display the tough journey, we won’t be acknowledge for all the effort we expended. The reality: if we don’t tell people the bottom line in a succinct way with resonating stories, all that effort will be lost.
Let it go.
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It takes both sides.
The story behind these shoes require both fact and emotion to understand them fully, just like we need the right and left to be able to walk in them (if we were so bold to try!).
Yesterday morning I delivered a keynote address on influential storytelling to 80 executives at the company DSW, headquartered in Columbus. They sell shoes and lots of them. In attempting to find the perfect metaphor to begin my talk, I made them each take off their right shoes. To a group of shoe execs, the energy in the room went from “Who is this woman and where can I get more coffee?” to “This may be fun.”
In the class and also this keynote, I always stress the importance of a balance between the objective and subjective information you should share in any talk or presentation. It is just the way our brain works. We crave to know how many people died in the plan crash before we hear one of the tragic stories. We love to hear about how sales went “through the roof” but we want to know how high with specific numbers.
So I told them to take off their right shoes and walk around a bit. I then suggested to them, after they felt the discomfort (especially the women in 5 inch wedges) that this was like giving someone data and fact only. Or better yet, selling people only the left shoe. I asked them what would happen if you only offered “lefts” in your store. One exec aptly replied “Your customers would walk out.”
Exactly. Because that’s what your audience does when you speak to only one side of the brain. Turn around and walk out.
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Winning the Business Competition
Every now and then, we get an invitation to work with a different type of client – and we love the opportunity to adapt what we do for someone new. So when Skyler Rogers, a senior at BGSU and former TEDxBGSU organizer, reached out for some help with his business competition pitch (an old concept that’s getting new energy these days), we jumped at the chance to help.
He was given 5 minutes to talk in front of an audience that would then vote for their favorite business plan. The stakes? $20,000 of cash and in-kind help for his new business called NiceShirt.org. Not bad for a guy who in a week will graduate from college.
At first, we were skeptical – how could we make a tshirt business come to life and win over the hearts of the 500 attendees who were voting on the winner? The answer became readily available to us when Skyler started sharing stories about how his shirts have helped very good causes that otherwise would have huge barriers to using apparel as a fundraising strategy.
His model was simple – if you want to sell shirts for a good cause, let us do the design, printing and distribution for you – and we’ll send you the proceeds for your cause. No more negotiating with vendors, figuring out how to distribute 5000 tshirts or what to do with $20,000 in cash (as evidenced by a case study he cited about a 16-year old kid that found himself in just that predicament).
His opponent showed a number of charts and graphs – detailing the business projections of his enterprise. Skyler told four distinct stories that demonstrated the villain (the problem) and the hero (his idea), and who would benefit (the people and their causes) and how. He didn’t show one financial graph or data chart. And as you can figure out by now -between our pride in this post and the photo above, he won.
I got a text from him after it was over, and he said “I even saw some people tearing up in the audience.” Yep, even t-shirts can make people cry. And when they cry, you’ve touched their emotions and moved them to action.
Thanks, Skyler, for working with us and congratulations! We can’t wait to hear where NiceShirt.Org takes you – or you take it!
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