Prometheus at the Disco Bowl

How to Prepare and Give a Presentation

Anxiety

When I lived in Tokyo, my friends and I would go to “box” karaoke, where you sing in a private room, but when work colleagues visited, we’d usually take them to “stage” karaoke where you sing in front of an audience of strangers.

One fall a colleague (also named Robert) came to visit from our London office and we took him to stage karaoke in Shibuya. He picked out “Roxanne,” but had never done karaoke before, so he asked me to sing with him.

When we were done, we went back to our seats in the audience. In front of us, five women at a birthday party were whispering to each other and looking back at us like they wanted to ask a question. Finally, one of them turned around and said, “You guys were terrible.”

I think people worry that this is how their presentations will go.

Bad Karaoke is Still Fun

I hesitate to say how many books I read on presentation skills, slide design, stand-up comedy, improv, story-telling, and marketing because I don’t want to raise excessive expectations for any future talk I give. But I did absorb enough to compile a few hundred tips (which you can browse below), and to formulate a philosophy of presentation that includes (I think) at least one original insight.

The philosophy has three parts, encapsulated in the title of this essay:

1. Define your relationship with your audience and how you will help them
2. Craft your message and eliminate obstacles to its comprehension
3. Reinforce your message through multiple communication channels

1. Wizard, Goddess, Titan, or Queen

When you are thinking about how you can help your audience, everyone will benefit if you think big. Here are four personas you can inhabit to help you stretch your imagination:

Merlin

Mentor

Prometheus

Elizabeth I

Why are these good role models?

First, these entities are important. Many presenters are nervous or apologetic about their presentation. Choosing one of these roles means unapologetically assuming responsibility for delivering a clear, engaging, potentially transformative message.

Second, they are not too important. With the exception of Elizabeth, they are not the heroes of the story — they are advisors or helpers, secondary to the main tale. It is the recipient of their advice that benefits and grows. In the Queen’s case, she is in fact the boss, but even here, unity of purpose among the audience is the goal, and that goal is more important than the leader’s status.

Finally, all of these figures provide something that benefits the audience: Whether it is advice, a spur to action, a shared vision, or a tool — the focus is on helping the listener.

If these personas seem too grandiose to channel, you can create a layer of distance by asking them for advice and thinking through their probable response.

Questions: What is my relationship to my audience? What benefit am I offering?

2. Bowl Strikes

The pins

The pins are the audience. They are far away, you have an ineffective means of reaching them, success requires focus, power, finesse, and practice. Your goal is to bowl them over, floor them, knock them down: all these violent metaphors capture the idea of transforming as many of your audience members as possible in a single shot.

Questions: Am I focusing on my audience? How will my message change my listeners?

The ball

The ball is the message. Geometrically perfect, compact, dense, and polished, it includes everything you need to communicate your message effectively and eliminates anything extraneous.

Question: Is my message simple, substantial, condensed, and polished?

The lane

All the work that went into clearing, grading, constructing, sanding, and oiling the path to the pins is a reminder of everything you can do to clear the path for your message: Make sure the audience can hear you. Avoid jargon your audience is unfamiliar with (or explain it clearly). Don’t make them calculate. Make everything you say something they can evaluate directly themselves. Don’t rush. Signpost your talk, i.e., foreshadow and reiterate your points, and make the connections explicit. Make your slides legible all the way in the back. End on time or early, especially if it’s late in the day or the next session includes food or beer.

Question: What impediments to understanding or sources of distraction can I eliminate?

The bumpers

The inflatable guides that keep the ball out of the gutters are your responses to potential objections.

In order to fully convey a concept, it’s often necessary to let your audience test its boundaries, asking, “What about…?” and “What if…?” questions. Presentations don’t naturally allow for this kind of concept boundary-testing in real time, but you can create an effective substitute by raising and answering questions yourself. This has the useful side-effect of forcing you to refine your message even more carefully.

Question: How can I anticipate and respond to important questions and objections?

3. Communicate in Chords

Even a caricature of a bad speaker conveys much more than his ostensible message. As he twists his head over his shoulder to read aloud the dense cluster of bullet points that his audience already read as soon as those bullets peppered the screen, he is leaking information through his posture, his tone, his pace, and multiple other channels. The audience converts that information into overt or subconscious judgments about the speaker’s self-confidence, preparation, credibility, and competence.

Presentations become powerful and persuasive when speakers learn to use these multiple channels consciously to focus audience members’ minds on an idea, tell a dramatic story to heighten their emotional response, then resolve the tension they’ve introduced in a memorable, maybe even humorous way.

Pitch, volume, and tone of voice; posture, position, and movement across a stage; exposition, dialogue, physical and facial responses; humor, emotion, mystery, and surprise; and visuals like slides or props are all channels of communication that you can learn to use not just to convey an idea, but to clarify, amplify, and reinforce it.

Like an experienced carpenter who sets a nail with a tap, then drives it home with a bang, you can make a point through one channel of communication, then bang it home with the others.

So practice

Many presenters are playing Chopsticks, a hesitant two-note combination of speech and visuals that consumes their full attention. If you can practice enough to internalize your message, you will gain back some mental bandwidth that you can use to pay attention to your audience and gauge how well your message is coming across. Making eye contact becomes an integral part of your delivery, rather than a checklist item to tick off if you can remember; you end up talking more naturally and engagingly, like you’re in a conversation and your partner’s responses matter; and you get a chance to practice using your expressions, voice, gestures, and visuals to make your message clearer and more persuasive.

Communicating in chords is the “disco” part of the Prometheus metaphor: part of what makes a karaoke venue or a dance-flavored bowling lane fun are the lights, the music, a singer’s impromptu choreography, or a bowler’s body english and minor dance of triumph as the ball knocks down the pins — it’s fun to see people fully engage in something. Once you start to conduct the complete orchestra of communication possibilities, you will see how much speaking advice is just some concrete instantiation of this meta-advice to fully engage by communicating across multiple channels.

Question: How can I use multiple communication channels to clarify, amplify, and reinforce my message?

Summary x 3

I originally wanted to get better at presenting because I thought the tool itself was a dull knife that I should sharpen a little to avoid injury. Now, as the slightly corrupted epigraph from Thoreau at the head of this essay suggests, I think that a presentation can in fact be a very fine tool, and I just need to improve as a craftsman.

The more you work to improve your presentation skills, the more good advice you will collect. I hope this image of Prometheus at the Disco Bowl will give you a simple framework for connecting what you learn so you can use it fluently and effectively. I also hope that the idea itself represents the spirit of a good presentation and can help you make your next speech surprising, meaningful, and fun.

Here are three summaries of this advice framework, so you can use whichever resonates with you:

The metaphor: Prometheus at the Disco Bowl

• Choose Wizard, Goddess, Titan, or Queen: Define your relationship with your audience and how you will help them
• Bowl fiery strikes: Craft your message and eliminate obstacles to its comprehension
• Communicate in chords: Reinforce your message through multiple communication channels

The questions

• What is my relationship to my audience? What benefit am I offering?
• Am I focusing on my audience? How will my message change my listeners?
• Is my message simple, substantial, condensed, and polished?
• What impediments to understanding or sources of distraction can I eliminate?
• How can I anticipate and respond to important questions and objections?
• How can I use multiple communication channels to clarify, amplify, and reinforce my message?

Robert's 7 R’s

• Research your audience and their needs
• Choose how you will Relate to your audience
• Refine the message and...
• Reduce it to its core
• Reify your message (alternatively, choose a Representation that is concrete and memorable)
• Reveal your message to your audience as you...
• Reinforce it through multiple channels

All the Advice

Below I’ve compiled a few hundred recommendations for becoming a better speaker. Warning: This is a pretty long list and I haven't tried to make it entertaining.

My approach to creating a new talk is to use the simple Prometheus structure above as my primary guide, then to dive into the relevant section of the detailed advice if I need to solve a particular communication challenge. I’ve organized the advice by the phases and activities involved in preparing a presentation to make this easier.

I’ve extracted these lessons from the books and videos listed in the References section, from presentation coaches who have generously shared their expertise (thanks, Alan!), from my own experience addressing clients and work audiences, and from practice sessions with my colleagues (hi Hengni, Wenyu, Jay!).

Jump to Section

• Know your Audience
• Presentation Mindset
• How to Find your Theme
• Make your Message Simple, Clear, and Engaging
• Practice
• Logistics: Preparation
• Deliver your Message
• Visuals
• Logistics: Q&A
• Logistics: Follow-through
• Acronyms
• References

Know your Audience

• Who will you be talking to? It’s easier to influence people if you know and understand them.
• Are they peers you are trying to persuade to see the world differently?
• Is it a skeptical prospect or CEO who will use the time to interrogate you?
• Are they students you are trying to teach something?
• Are they colleagues on another team whose help you need to deliver a project?
• What does your audience need?
• What are their jobs and processes?
• What are their goals?
• What are their pains or worries?
• How can you help them transform, improve, grow?
• Some needs are universal
• Be clear and simple in your communication; make it easy for audience to understand
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• What is the best way to communicate with your audience? Give them what they need in a way they can understand
• If you are on a stage, you can tell a story with hundreds of quick-paced slides
• By contrast, if you are in the CEO’s office, you might have just one page of conclusions and a supporting document with data
• Anticipate and remove objections
• Don’t limit your creativity: A salesperson I worked with was trying to pitch a prospect who would not return her calls; she bought a phone, added her details as the only contact, then express-mailed it to him — he called the next day.

Presentation Mindset

• You should present more
• Communicating well is one of the highest leverage things you can do
• You will learn more and become more valuable
• You will make friends and uncover or create opportunities
• Giving a presentation is a creative act; it can enrich your life like other forms of art
• You’re already good at public speaking, you do it daily
• The audience wants you to succeed
• Everyone is reserving judgment, you can ease in
• The more you do it, the better you will get, and the more fun you will have
• As much as you can, focus on your audience, not yourself
• Your audience will adopt your view of mistakes — play through any errors
• You don’t have to be perfect
• Try not to be critical of yourself or self-deprecating
• Try not to apologize
• If you are nervous, you can try to recast it as “excited”
• “What’s in it for them?” is more important than your background or credentials
• Who has the power? You share it...[Duarte]
• You have the stage, the microphone, control of the pace, a time slot; seats are oriented toward you
• Your audience has the power to spread your message, to give or withhold attention, so filter your message through their desires and agenda

How to Find your Theme

• Your message will be at the intersection of your audience’s needs, your relationship to them, and your expertise
• Map out the transformation you want to facilitate from start to end, like a character arc in fiction
• Sketching can help you clarify your message; most problems are multidimensional, so hard to represent linearly
• Brainstorm in analog (i.e., away from presentation software) to avoid being locked into linear thinking
• If working with a group, brainstorm alone first, then in a group, then alone again to avoid groupthink and to hear from less vocal contributors
• Brainstorming on index cards or Post-Its can help you keep your points simple and clear
• Get lots of ideas; reject the first handful as they are likely to be clichés
• Constraints or restrictions can stimulate creativity (e.g., PechaKucha)

Make your Message Simple, Clear, and Engaging

• Distill your message: reduce it to its essence; aim for the simplicity, clarity, and memorability of a proverb
• Refine your message: remove everything from your presentation that does not support your distilled message
• Ring metaphor: Think of your message as a precious stone and your presentation as the setting — the setting is tailored to the message; it enhances and complements the stone; it makes it useful (wearable); it doesn’t distract from or compete with it
• Pick a quotable, forwardable, evocative title; be a marketing copywriter, invite sharing
• Make titles concrete and evocative, not general/generic
• Eliminate jargon or define it clearly if it is essential
• Reveal the organic interest and humor that already exists in your theme; work at this — don’t borrow humor or stick it on as an afterthought
• After outlining your message, explicitly consider its emotional appeal: benefits, stories, metaphors, questions, mysteries, resonance with your audience’s existing interests

Practice

• A presentation is a performance — often, you are literally on stage; performers practice
• “Don’t memorize, internalize” [Duarte]
• Many presentation “rules” become unnecessary if you practice:
• You won’t need to read your slides
• You’ll make eye contact
• You’ll observe your audience’s reactions and respond to them
• You’ll have cognitive bandwidth to handle the unexpected
• You’ll be able to continue even if your slides disappear
• You’ll be calm and confident, which will also make you more persuasive
• You can also practice for your Q&A: anticipate questions and prepare (pithy, funny, helpful) responses in advance
• When you practice your presentation you also practice the skill of presenting

Logistics: Preparation

• Have two ending points in case you start late or need to end early
• Plan to end a little early even if nothing goes wrong
• End even earlier if you are presenting late in the day
• End still earlier if the next event involves food or alcohol
• Print out your notes just in case
• Back up presentations to paper, USB drive, and the cloud
• Record demos; avoid live demos unless a crucial part of your message is signalling that you can pull this off successfully
• If you are being recorded, talk to the camera
• If you are being recorded, agree on distribution rights in advance
• Learn who is before you or in the same time slot/competing
• Test equipment, bring backups
• Play all media, test every slide and animation
• Consider the needs of remote attendees
• Plan to use a mic if your audience has more than 30 people
• Get to the venue early to set up and rehearse; wander around the room so you get used to it and feel safe
• Sit in the audience to see how it looks from their perspective; talk to audience members to make friends
• Refined: Use painter’s tape to mark where light beam is and avoid it
• Refined: Sync tweets/social media posts to points in your talk
• “Dress better than your audience” [David Sedaris]
• Let people know where they can find your notes after the talk (I use a short link, e.g., sch.us/p [p for presentation or prometheus])

Deliver your Message

• Have a goal
• Ask yourself, What is the best possible outcome? Something like:
Your audience understands and remembers your message, changes their lives for the better because of it, and attributes the improvement to you
• Make your audience TALL: think, act, laugh, learn [Valentine]
Delight and instruct [Horace]
• Capture and maintain your audience’s interest
• Remind your audience what’s in it for them: self-interest generates attention
• Create mystery, make them curious; save resolution for the end
• Emphasize the surprising or unexpected
• Use callbacks to reward attention and create a shared experience
• Use concrete details so the audience participates in the talk by imagining it with you
• Keep your audience’s interest with variety
• You can vary pitch, tone, volume, pacing, diction
• Add emphasis with repetition, volume, gestures, movement, physical and verbal pauses
• Acting out scenarios with dialogue engages the audience, adds variety, allows you to show reactions physically
• Use different media (video, audio, lighting, guests, audience participation/feedback)
• Silence is powerful, too
• Pause before important points to recapture attention; pause after to let your point sink in
• Don’t step on your laughs: give your audience time to react and digest
• Eliminate filler words (um, uh, etc.), just pause instead
• Help your audience maintain the thread
• Use verbal signposts or breadcrumbs: “Here’s what we just saw, here’s what that implies…”
• Use gestures or your position on stage to represent physically where you are in the narrative
• Beginning for western audiences is their left/your right
• Make your points memorable
• Tell a story: narrative and emotion make things memorable
• ...or, don’t tell the story, but *be in* the story — people remember details, give them something to remember
• Made to Stick model: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories
• 9 Cs model: Curiosity, Circumstance, Characters, Conversation (dialogue), Callback, Conflict, Cure (what did you learn?), Change, Carryout (rule or message the audience takes away)
• Use contrast, conflict, drama, dialogue, and specificity
• Specific is memorable — let audience participate by imagining; give yourself a hook
• Tie an anchor to every point to make it memorable (like setup/punch for comedians)
• 5 A’s for types of Anchor: Anecdote, Activity, Analogy, Acronym (including all X’s, like this list of A’s), Aphorism (including rhymes and alliteration)
• Use the rule of three: set up, reinforce, surprise
• Lead your audience to the insight: if they get there themselves, especially if they say it out loud, they will own it
• Make your points measurable
• Protagoras: “[Make your audience] the measure of all things.” Translate your statistics so they are directly measurable by/can be intuited by the listener
• “Don’t drop the stats off, drive them home” [Valentine] This means the same as the Protagoras note — make them measurable by the listener
• In communication, story >> stats and emotion >> logic
• Be present, make it a conversation
• Talk as if you’re talking to one person: ‘You’ not ‘Each and every one of you’
• Be human, let your personality and enthusiasm for the subject show; don’t be a robot
• Don’t start or end with logistics; use the start and end for your big points/call to action
• Know your material well enough to engage with your audience
• “People don’t fall asleep during conversations” [Duarte]
• Remember questions, laughs, and points of confusion and use them to improve your talk
• Anticipate, have sympathy for, and handle objections or resistance to change
• Resistance can be logical, emotional, or practical

Visuals

• Keep the visual channel separate — use it as a complementary mode of communication
• Maintain interest through variation and motion (but not too much animation)
• Your slides should support, complement, and reinforce your points, not just repeat them
• Don’t cram your slides full of bullets
• Save excruciating detail for a handout that you pass out after the talk (not before or during, or people will be distracted reading it; if you have them, bring more handouts than you think you need)
• Don’t read your slides
• Don’t start with an agenda slide — if you want to create a framework for the talk, be more creative
• Aim to evoke and support emotions with your slides
• Treat slides like billboards: simple, clear, big
• Your first few visual ideas are probably clichés — keep thinking
• Use repetition for consistency and repetition with variation for emphasis and interest
• Use complementary colors in a limited palette with a small number of highlights
• Keep focus on essentials by greying out less prominent points
• Direct audience attention by controlling flow, direction, contrast, white space, hierarchy, unity of objects on slides
• Find the narrative in the data
• Make the data clear; don’t make your audience calculate
• Help people visualize large numbers
• Takahashi method: One or two huge words in black and white per slide
• Turn words into schematics, diagrams, or pictures
• “Slides are free” [Godin], but one valid option for number of slides is zero
• Using more slides encourages alertness [Lessig]
• Limit detail when brainstorming; use small Post-its to make sure your slides are simple and clear
• Make your point easy to understand
• Think about information hierarchy
• Define simplicity: maximum effect with minimum means
• Not, “eliminate detail” but “focus on specific detail” [Reynolds]
• Amplification through simplification
• Signal-to-noise: subtle distinctions, like minimal pairs + Occam’s Razor
• Use empty/negative space
• Ask, What words can I replace with an image or schematic?
• Make conscious decisions about how to use design elements: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity/Grouping
• Contrast can be color, type, size, light/dark, cool/warm, near/far
• Use the minimum change to make contrast clear [Tufte]
• Remove logos from slide template
• If you use quotes, keep them short and don’t read them
• If you use people, arrange the images so the people are looking at your text
• Guide the viewer’s eye like a movie director (same advice as illustration instructor)
• Use asymmetry to introduce dynamism
• Don’t use stock photos
• Draw your own illustrations, cartoons, overlays on images
• Use a grid for consistency and position important focal points at intersections of gridlines (“power points”)
• Use rule of thirds to place visuals
• Create a visual style unique to you and identifiable by others [Orson Welles quoted in Reynolds]
• Use full-bleed images (i.e., let them exceed the margins)
• Make the screen blank when needed with ‘b’, ‘w’ or blank slide

Call to Action

• What is the one thing your audience should do next to get the benefit?
• If you are selling something, how will they be reminded of you when they take that action?
• Cost/benefit attention getter: pay attention to learn what to do to get the reward
• Twist the knife attention getter: Here's something that hurts, pay attention to learn what to do to alleviate the pain
• Then, now, and how: Show tension between what is and what could be (with this solution)

Logistics: Q&A

• Don’t begin or end your speech with logistics
• Self-introductions are a kind of logistics — you can avoid them
• Prime audience for questions — get them to prepare ahead of time
• Use “What questions do you have?” vs “Do you have any questions?”
• Set a time or question limit
• Listen empathetically for the subtext of questions — What is behind the question, why are they asking?
• Repeat questions from audience for other audience members, remote attendees, or others watching the video later
• Don’t let Q&A detract from your big finish

Logistics: Follow-through

• “Keep persuading even after you’re done” [Duarte]
• Share your presentation on social media
• Add summaries, transcripts, captions
• Post answers to questions that came up during the talk
• Post photos
• Gather feedback before, at, after event; use feedback to improve
• Don’t end with logistics!
• Thank people who invited you, helped you, and those who attended

Acronyms

• Research your audience and their needs
• Choose how you will Relate to your audience
• Refine the message and...
• Reduce it to its core
• Reify your message (alternatively, choose a Representation that is concrete and memorable)
• Reveal your message to your audience as you...
• Reinforce it through multiple channels

• Anecdote
• Activity
• Analogy
• Acronym (including all X’s, like this list)
• Aphorism (including rhyming and alliterative phrases)
• [Create an anchor for every point; an anchor is something that helps your audience remember the point.]

• Curiosity (throughout, to sustain interest)
• Circumstance
• Characters
• Conversation (dialogue)
• Callback
• Conflict
• Cure (what did the guru teach you?)
• Change
• Carryout (rule or message the audience takes away)

• Make them TALL: Think, Act, Laugh, Learn [Valentine]
• Give them a STAR: Something They’ll Always Remember [Duarte]
• PARTS of your speech: Phrase, Anchor, Reflection, Technique, Sale (of benefit): [Valentine]
• Open with a PUNCH: Personal, Unexpected, Novel, Challenging, Humorous [Valentine]
• Three Cs for inspirational stories: Challenge, Connection, Creativity [Made to Stick]
• Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional StorieS = SUCCESS [Made to Stick]

• Clarity, cogency, concision
• Emotional impact
• Memorability: Does every point have an anchor?

References

• Prometheus Brings Fire to Mankind, Heinrich Füger
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath, Dan Heath
• Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, Robert Cialdini
• HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, Nancy Duarte
• The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker
• Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, Nancy Duarte
• Presentation Zen (Google Talk), Garr Reynolds
• Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, Garr Reynolds
• Confessions of a Public Speaker, Scott Berkun
• Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need, Blake Snyder
• 52 Speaking Tips, Craig Valentine
• Presenting to Persuade, Seth Godin
• Design Is Storytelling, Ellen Lupton
• The New Comedy Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Writing and Performing Stand-Up Comedy, Judy Carter
• Impro: Improvisation And The Theater, Keith Johnstone
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward R. Tufte

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