Business Presentation Revolution outlines the five stages of the Presentation SCORE Method, or pSCORE, giving you a simple, proven process to follow to prepare and deliver successful presentations every time.
In this extract from Business Presentation Revolution, author Phil Waknell outlines the vital first stage: Foundation.
If you build a house on sand, it will not be stable; likewise, if you start to prepare a presentation without understanding its context or its audience, you will be setting yourself up for failure.
In this extract from Business Presentation Revolution, published on July 14th 2021, I answer the important question: how do you prepare yourself before a big presentation?
Before you take the stage, you need to be comfortable. Audiences don’t appreciate speakers who haven’t prepared properly, don’t know their presentation well enough, and are visibly worrying about what to say next.
There are several simple actions you can take before your presentation to maximize your own comfort and help you to deliver a better talk.
I’m not a motor mechanic. I don’t play with my car’s engine, hoping to make it run better, because I don’t understand how it works in detail. I leave that to experts who are professionally trained and experienced.
The human brain is far more complex than an engine, and we know far less about how it works. Trying to present without learning a little about how the brain works is like throwing a spanner into a car and hoping it will fix the brakes.
TED has provided us all with a welcome relief from Death by PowerPoint. Shorter, more personal, more visual and more memorable, we now have thousands of talks to choose from providing us with a learning platform as awesome as Wikipedia. Business has benefited from it in miraculous ways. Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, once coined a great phrase: the ‘Ted-ification of business presentations’. Thanks in part to TED, but also to a certain extent to the original presentations of Steve Jobs, we all benefit from simpler, clearer, more original, more relevant and dare I say it more entertaining business presentations.
There is no such thing as a perfect presentation. You should of course prepare and rehearse it enough so you know it well, and so your messages come from the heart, not the head. If you can focus on delivering not just the syllables of your words, but the meaning behind them, then you are ready to present. Do not overdo the rehearsals, though. Your audience does not expect absolute perfection, and if you can create a strong connection with them, they will accept your imperfections, and see you as more human.
The success of PowerPoint in taking over corporate communication has led to one major problem: it is now the default way people present. If your boss asks you: “Have you prepared your presentation?” what she really means is: “Have you prepared your PowerPoint® slides?”
This means that presenters automatically assume that they will use PowerPoint® slides, and do not even consider that there may be other possibilities.
Ask yourself, for each point in your presentation: does my audience really need any visual aids?
Believe it or not, all American movies rely on the same formula; that formula is so sacred that scripts will get rejected if they stray from it. Whether it’s a psychological drama like American Beauty, a sci-fi movie like Star Wars or an action movie like Mission: Impossible, the same structure, plot points and character development techniques are used. I’ll just take one as an example: the hero, the main protagonist, is always an orphan, literally or figuratively, or experienced a personal drama; it is supposed to give the character more likeness.
Slides can be an extremely powerful way of making your messages clearer and more memorable – yet all too often they are an obstacle to communication.
Humans can’t listen and read different things simultaneously: we can only process one linguistic input at a time. So if a slide features a lot of text and detail, it might make a useful reference document, but a terrible visual aid. On the other hand, if you keep your slides simple, with only a few words, they’ll be good visual aids but worthless as handouts.
