How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

… Learning to drive a car.

Over the many years I have been teaching English here in Korea, I have learnt that learning a foreign language is like learning to drive a car.

First you need to learn the basics. In the case of learning a language, you need to learn the structure and some basic words and phrases. To learn to drive you need to learn how to turn the car engine on and select a gear. Without learning either of these things you are going to go nowhere.

Learning the Highway Code, is where you learn the rules of driving, just like learning from English textbooks, you learn how to use the phrases, expressions and words you learn.

Just like when you learn English, your driving instructor cannot do the driving for you. You have to do that. All a driving instructor can do is tell you when you do something wrong and explain to you how to correct the mistake. Likewise, your English teacher cannot do the speaking for you, that is up to you. All an English teacher can do is to show you where you are going wrong and how to correct the mistake.

My father always told me that you only really begin to learn to drive once you have passed your driving test and you are out there on the road, alone. You have to make the decisions on what to do, where to turn and whether you car will fit into the tight parking space. Again as in English, you are never really going to improve your English if you need your English teacher with you all the time. You will only begin to really improve your English once you get out there and begin using it for real in real situations.

Of course whether you are a newly qualified driver or beginning your first job with a foreign company, you are going to make a few mistakes. Some of these will be big mistakes and perhaps involve an accident. Getting upset and blaming your driving instructor or English teacher is the wrong way to go about this. You need to learn from the mistake, get advice, correct it yourself and move on.

Finally, to become a good driver you need to drive. The more driving you do, the better driver you become. It is as simple as that. I have never met anyone who would disagree with that statement. As you do more driving you naturally improve your decision making, you drive more automatically and your brain interprets road and traffic conditions in a way that helps you to make the right decisions. When you have a ‘bad driving day’ you don’t go home, read your Highway Code book and go back to the driving instructor, you just get back out there the next day and, having learnt from your mistakes, you make sure you don’t make them again.

When learning a foreign language the same thing happens. The more you use your new language, the better at using that language you become. From time to time you will have a difficult day, but that is not a huge problem. You just go back the next day determined to do a better job.

Sadly, it is at this stage where many people go wrong. They have a bad day with their English and immediately think they have to go out and buy new textbooks and enrol on a course at a language institute. As these institutes are just regurgitating what you learnt in school, you don’t improve your English and instead you end up losing any remnant of confidence you had.

NO! that is not the answer.

Once you have developed enough skill to have a basic conversation in English, then you need to get out there and develop that skill in the real world. You need to get out on the highway of speaking English and just drive yourself down the road. The further down the road you go the better and more natural your English will become and your confidence will grow.

Learning a language or learning to drive a car is no different. Once you have the basics, the answer to improving your skill is not contained in a book. The answer to improving your language or driving skill is in practice. The more you do it, the better you become.

One final observation on this analogy. When you find yourself driving in the snow for the first time and you turn the steering wheel and the car continues in a straight line and does not turn, you learn pretty quickly how useful the handbrake / emergency brake can be. This is something that you can read about as often as you like, but are never going to be any good at it until you are in the situation where you have no choice if you want to avoid hitting the tree at the side of the road. Likewise with any new language, you are frequently going to find yourself in a situation where you are going to have to express yourself as best you can. You can read as many dialogues as you like, but you are never going to be any good in that situation until you have been in it. Then you learn pretty quickly.

Get out and practice.

I don’t like them. I think they are useless and are a product of the 1990s.

Presentations have a bad name. When people are told they “have to” attend a presentation, the image in their minds is of being sat in a room, listening to an unprepared presenter reading slides about a subject that is boring, full of jargon, has no story and no point.

So, as a presenter you are beginning your presentation with an audience full of preconceived, negative ideas about what you are going to talk about. if you begin your presentation in a way that confirms their expectations, you will already have lost your audience.

To overcome this you need to begin your presentation in an unexpected way. That is why the use of a contents slide only confirms to your audience that your presentation is going to be boring. Instead, eliminate the contents slide completely. All you need is an introduction slide with the title of your presentation. That slide should be on when your audience arrive. Then, once you get started you are straight in to your presentation.

This is a simple change to the ‘standard format’, but it can make a huge difference to the way your audience views your presentation.

Managing your audience’s expectations is one part of your presentation that is increasingly becoming more important. Audiences’ attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter and keeping your audience’s attention focussed on your presentation is becoming increasingly difficult. Today, you have to think like a movie director. To have to think about what will grab your audience’s attention and what will keep your audience’s attention. Following tried and tested formats for a presentation is just not going to do that today.

Product Launches.

First there was Qualcomm at CES with their ‘crazy’ show. Then there was Sony launching their Play Station 4 with no Play Station, no price and no launch date. Now there is Samsung with its highly sexist launch show For their Galaxy S4 phone. 2013 is turning out to have an unusually high number of presentation fails.

What I don’t understand is why companies with very creative, professional and intelligent employees should make such basic errors. Of course being different is important. It would be a very boring world if every company launched their products the same way. But what Qualcomm, Sony and now Samsung have failed to do is to let their new products speak for themselves and be the ‘star of the show’. That should always be the highest priority.

Qualcomm’s mistake was they put so much effort into their ‘show’ they forgot about the reason they were doing a show in the first place. Read the blog accounts afterwards and all you see written is about the show and little or nothing about the product. CESS was in January, now, just two months later nobody remembers anything about the product or products Qualcomm were trying to show off.

Sony’s mistake was they had no product. Putting on a product launch with no product is just plane stupid. Particularly as this is a games console product. The media want to play with the new product, they want to get their hands on it and see if what you are saying is true. Sadly in Sony’s case all people now remember is that there was no product.

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 launch should have been the best product launch the company had ever done. Instead we got a Broadway show. Then Samsung essentially went about upsetting every modern thinking woman in the world by showing stereotypical images of women. Sexy Brazilian girls, girls waiting for their nail varnish to dry and getting excited when a gardener takes his shirt off. And nobody has any idea how much the phones will cost.

These companies have no excuse. They have the money and the resources to put on a proper launch presentation. Instead, they focus so much on being different, they forget that the reason they are there is to launch a product. The product needs to be up front and centre with no silly, gimmicky distractions.

So, for all companies out there who are planning on doing a presentation for a product launch here is the formula:

Product + Available date + Price (+ Hands-on Demonstration) = Successful product launch

How you put those elements into your presentation and in what order is up to you and your creativity. But they need to be there. Without these elements, you are going to fail in your product launch because you have not shown your audience what they came to see.

The product is the star, not the MC or presenter. Your goal is the have people talking about your product, not about the ‘show’

Samsung were lucky, they are the media’s current golden company. They can do no wrong. But your company might not be so lucky. So make sure you have all the elements, and if you don’t, delay the launch event until you have.

Often when we have to do a regular business presentation, we have to present data in the form of a chart. These charts are typically filled with either text or numbers. Because of the nature of many charts, these words or numbers are usually squeezed into small boxes in the slides and most of the audience cannot read the small text.

The question I am often asked is: how do I make these charts more audience friendly?

The thing to remember is that a presentation is never for the convenience of the presenter. A presentation is always for the convenience of the audience. Because of this you, the presenter, have a duty to make your slides more friendly for your audience and therefore you have a lot of work to do so your audience doesn’t have to.

Let us look at a couple of different examples of showing charts using Stephen Covey’s Time Matrix chart:

This first example is the way 90% of bad presenters would show this chart. Everything placed into one slide, whereupon the audience will inevitably begin reading the whole slide from left to right immediately it appears on the screen. The audience stops listening to you, and they just read. A completely useless way to explain or demostrate this chart.Alternative 1

Rather than showing all the data at once, bring in each item one by one. The downside to this method is time. It will take quite a few minutes to go through each item and explain it. If you are on a tight time schedule this method will probably take too long. However, if this chart is the main point of your presentation, it is probably worth taking the time to explain it in detail.

Alternative 2

Fade out the areas of the chart you are not talking about and only leave the area you are focussing on highlighted. This method would overcome the issue of time and allow you to go through each section step by step. The advantage of this method is that it keeps your audience’s attention on the part of the chart you are discussing.

Alternative 3

Zoom in the area you are speaking about so that it fills the slide. At the same time fade out the rest of the chart so that it is almost hidden away in the background. This is really a matter of aethetics rather substance and is essentially just a variation of alternative 2, but it does give you an idea of another way to show data in a chart.

Alternative 4

You could introduce the full chart briefly at the beginning of this part of your presentation, then as you introduce each part you move on to the next slide which only shows one of the boxes. This would then allow you to introduce each part line by line. At the end of the fourth box, you show the full chart again, but longer to allow your audience to absorb the full data. Again, the issue of time would come up, but it is another alternative of showing this data in a way your audience can follow.

The take away of this is that when you are presenting charts you need to avoid putting too much data up there on the screen at once. Charts and slides with too much text cause your audience to turn off their attention on you, and place their attention elsewhere. The best case scenario is they stop listening and start reading, the worst case, and often the most common case, they just simply stop listening to your presentation altogether. Your job as the presenter is to keep your audience’s attention on you. These alternatives can help you to do that.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the need to make sure that the images you use in your presentation are relevant to the subject matter you are talking about. Linked to that is an excuse I often hear given for poor quality and boring presentations: “But we are different”

This excuse is usually given after someone has explained to me that they know using images and less text is important, but their business or their subject matter does not allow using clear, relevant images and few words on a slide. Frankly, it is possibly the worst excuse I have ever heard! The worst because if they know using less text and more visuals makes a better presentation, then why do they insist on boring their audiences time and time again? Do they not understand that it is their duty to find a better way to present their message?

The simple truth is that slides full of text will be immediately forgettable. Not only have you wasted your time, but more worryingly you have wasted the time of your audience as well. And that, as a presenter, is unforgivable!

And yes, all of you in the world of academia and medicine – listen up – You are not exempt either. Just because your subject matter is complex and technical does not mean you have an excuse to fill your slides with boring text that is too small to read. You are NOT different. (see here for an excellent post by Dr Simon Raybould about medical presentations)

A great presentation is not about deciding what to put in, it is about what to take out. Your audience does not have the capacity to remember everything you say, so you have to keep your message simple and memorable and to do that you have to keep your words and points to the minimum, not the maximum. Relevant and clear images are much easier to remember than row after row of bullet-pointed words.

There is no excuse for slides filled with unreadable text, no matter what you are presenting about. So stop doing it. The next presentation you create focus on taking out and not putting in.