On Presentations

Posted by Steve Hanna on February 27th, 2006 filed in Random Tags: epiphany, exploits, hooking, presentations, sigmil

I thought I would write up a quick epiphany I had the other day after a sigmil meeting. This may be a trivial point to other seasoned orators but it came as a shock to me and my fellow cochairs. First, a small back story.

Last Friday evening, we decided to give a talk about process modification and windows hooking. In an attempt to reduce the length of both talks, I shortened my talk and removed some “detail” slides, so that both talks could be given in a short time frame. Personally, my philosophy used to be to provide as much detail as possible when creating a slide. The point being, over run the audience with some amount of details in order to force them to ask questions. I thought I had the secret formula. I would provide a lot of detail and hope the audience asked me to connect the dots. I find an interactive presentation to be the most beneficial for both parties. I get to elaborate and delve into the information I am presenting to a deeper level and the audience can “connect the dots”. Everyone wins right?

I couldn’t have been more incorrect. Last Friday,I found that when I removed some crucial “detail” slides, people started to ask questions. They asked why things worked and basically the continued to ask me to “connect the dots” but now, I was explaining topics more of a macro level than micro. That experience was a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance.

What is the determining factor on what you can do to involve your audience? I don’t major in communications or speech communication, so I’ll give you my conclusions based on the fact that my experience stems solely from technical presentations.

I think that people don’t mind asking what they haven’t been told. That is, if every reasonable extrapolation of a question is answered in your slides, regardless of the clarity of the answers, people will feel less inclined to ask questions. Why do they fear asking questions? I think they fear asking questions because the answers have been provided and they have been expected to understand them. As a participant in a technical audience, I know of several occasions where I have held my tongue for fear of asking a question that the presenter had already answered. Or, in the other case, I held my tongue because I felt like because the information had already been presented, that fellow members of the audience would deem me less worthy due to the fact I asked for clarification on a topic already presented.

The simplest way I have found to solve this problem is to deliberately leave holes in the presentation. Force a response from the audience by addressing some topics with air of ambiguity. That, is be clear with one’s presentation…but try not to connect all the dots.