The Pleasures and Perils of Presentations

It's Friday and my colleagues are pestering me to go out tonight. But unfortunately I have a customer event to prepare for tomorrow morning at the Dharmawangsa Hotel. I still have some presentation slides to finish up.

Presentations can sometimes be fun if the topic is to your liking. I normally like to create my own slides rather than than mix and match from those downloaded from the company intranet. I have no love for marketing propaganda filled with neat soundbites and pompous taglines.

Despite having done presentations in front of audiences large and small for more than a decade, I still don't consider myself a good presenter. Often I attempt to do too much and end up confusing the audience. There's also the challenge of gauging the audience's level of knowledge: If you make it too difficult, you could end up losing the audience or worse still, put them to sleep. And if you make it too simplistic, you run the risk of insulting their intelligence.

Although it is more daunting presenting in a public seminar in a large hall packed with people, the overall task is actually easier because the audience will usually be too shy to ask questions. The toughest presentations are those done for the customer in the presence of "consultants" who are supposedly there to advise them. These "consultants" will always attempt to find ways to make you look bad so that they themselves look smart in front of their client (to justify their worth).

I realise that it is often better to limit the number of messages you want to convey in one presentation session. The audience usually remembers a very general impression of what you are trying to say, so one must be very clear of what one wants to convey and convey them well.

I also try not to linger too long on one slide. Attention span of the audience is short. They are always eager to see the next slide. Pacing, buildup and climax is important. So I compose my presentations like music videos--fast cuts with only one key message for every slide through a combination of words, images and animation. The color scheme and overall "mood" of the presentation is also important.

Thinking of presentations in terms of music videos helps to make the task more creative and fun. And these days, fun is not something I experience often from work.