December 12, 2017 at 13:57Pounding a mammoth into a pit: how to make a presentation so that you are heard and remembered
Many of us attended IT conferences. And if you haven’t been, then you probably watched the broadcasts, records, or read the transcripts of reports on Habré. Do you know what reports become hits even at the most-most hardcore events? The insides of sophisticated technology? Not. DevOps? Not at all. Most often, the so-called keynote reports, the presentations of people who are not necessarily connected with IT, take the prize of audience sympathy. The point is not a beautiful presentation or even the speaker’s charisma, but the fact that these guys know the secret of SUCCES. No, we did not seal.
Source: Duran
Presentations in the modern IT world are faced by techies, sellers, and top management. This can be a short pitch to investors, a new product presentation or a long training lecture. Now imagine how many presentations are for internal and external students, clients, students, etc. conducted by a company of such a scale as LANIT. Obviously, we have come a long way (to be honest, it feels like we ran a marathon more) and gathered a lot of cones before we learned how to make presentations that hit the mark and do what they should do: train, sell, inform. And, most importantly, the audience remembers them. We were lucky - on this way we had a real guru of preparing and conducting presentations - Dmitry Izmestiev, vice president of innovative projects LANIT (by the way,his great interview on innovation ).
There are only six principles, following which you can make the best presentation in the world. Everything that you said will listen and remember you. We took Dmitry’s training seminar as a basis (2 hours and 15 minutes), clarified some information, added some ideas and experience, and prepared for you a detailed interpretation of the word SUCCES, written with a typo. Let's spell it right.
Simplicity is the first principle of presentation that needs attention. The childhood illness of the majority of the presentation is a large amount of content and the author’s inability to answer the question: “What is the main idea of this presentation?”
This is precisely the principle of simplicity. Nobody calls you to speak only in simple words or remove complex schemes from the presentation, especially in the same IT sphere, simplification is often impossible. But the presentation should have a simple, clearly formulated idea that you must convey to the audience so that it is heard and accepted.
Do not try to shove all your experience into the presentation. There are certain recommendations for the speeches: for example, if you have only 15 minutes, then it is better to convey to the audience only one idea (in the most critical situation - a maximum of three). But this does not mean at all that in 2 hours you can broadcast 24 theses. The maximum is 7-8, the audience simply will not accept more.
Here is a great example of how to present very complex information is very simple. What could be more difficult than the nucleation and development of a new man and the accompanying hormonal changes in a woman’s body? But the "tidy" gives a simple and clear answer: pregnant or not. By the way, this simplicity is especially important at this very moment, usually associated with stress, worries, difficulties.
Making it easy is insanely difficult. How to throw at least a line from a native and tortured presentation? Therefore, our advice is to first do everything as you conceived, outline a plan or text, prepare slides, and after that mercilessly cut off everything unnecessary. Do not be afraid - even a diamond loses part of its mass during cutting. As a result, there should be simple, distinct, clearly formulated information.
You have experience and information, create masterpieces from them, cutting off the excess.
There are other ways to convey a complex concept simply and intelligibly. For example, explaining new unfamiliar concepts through analogies and metaphors.
Rather than give complex explanations, it is better to build an analogy with information already known to the audience. It will be clearer and clearer.
So, the first rule: to cut off all that is superfluous in the presentation and on the slides, to do it is simple, but not primitive. And no more than 1-3 main ideas for a 15-minute presentation.
It is surprises, shakes that are usually not enough in the speeches of novice speakers. A consistent logical presentation is the worst thing you can do to get your audience’s attention. Imagine if the detectives told the same sequence and logically from the moment of the murder to the moment the crime was solved. No, the best authors always use a secret, an intrigue that forces us to turn pages and not go to bed until you finish reading the book.
Creating suspense in a presentation is a high class. But creating at least minimal intrigue in order to capture the attention of the audience is not such a difficult skill. If you succeed, you are guaranteed public attention. After all, attention is the door through which the speaker’s information comes. Here are some tips to achieve this:
Do you understand the principle? Standard shots familiar to military subjects do not bode anything unusual, I even want to stop watching, but suddenly everything changes.
Do you think this will happen only in advertising? Not at all, the same principle is easy to apply in a presentation. Here is a great example. What is expected of you at the presentation? Slides, right? Break this stereotype and tell the audience everything on the example of some ordinary subject. Even a boot will do. Here’s how Terry Moore did it gracefully in his speech, telling the audience that most of them just don’t know how to tie shoelaces (the video, unfortunately, is only in English):
The second rule: in order to “fill” something new with your listeners’ head, using the effect of surprise, you need to create a “gap” in their ideas about the world, to show that there is a question to which they do not know the answer. Only after that they are ready to accept new information. To apply the two principles together, formulate the main idea that you want to convey to the audience, then find something counterintuitive, trick the audience, create a “gap” in their knowledge and “fill in” your thought with it.
No business presentation will cost anything if there is no specificity in it. Moreover, this should be data of various kinds: facts, figures, diagrams, quotes from experts, etc. In principle, it’s not even necessary to clarify here, because of something — and there is enough specificity in the IT sphere.
However, you should take care of the competent visualization of the data that you have. Let's look at an example.
Art Silverman made the important discovery that popcorn can be dangerous.
How to talk about the dangers of popcorn? You can present all the numbers in the form of graphs. And you can even more clearly, showing that one serving of popcorn contains as many saturated fats as scrambled eggs with bacon, big mac and lunch with steak combined. I won’t eat popcorn anymore.
At the end of the section about each principle, we began to write how to apply all the principles together. And here an unexpected problem awaits us. As soon as the authors of presentations understand the first two principles - simplicity and unexpectedness, they leave inspired, process the presentation, it becomes beautiful sparkling, but ... usually completely loses all the specific information. In no case do not allow this!
The third principle: in addition to the main idea and unexpected twists, a good presentation always contains a lot of specific information, but it’s better to think about how to present it creatively.
The presentation should definitely inspire confidence in the audience. Here are a few things that significantly increase the level of trust in information (by the way, this applies to website design and text):
We will not put it on the list, but we will issue separately a very important element of trust for IT companies - prototypes. Now there are many programs and tools for preparing prototypes of your program or hardware for pictures in a presentation. All the same, then there will be TK, it’s all the same to redo it, but the presence of prototypes makes a truly indelible impression on the audience: it creates the feeling that the product is almost in its hands. Do not be lazy to make detailed prototypes for presentations - these are justified efforts.
We IT people are often lazy to make prototypes, but sometimes a demonstration is the best way ... to get the Nobel Prize. So, until the 1980s, it was believed that a stomach ulcer was caused by stress and malnutrition. However, pathologist Barry Marshall and his intern Robin Warren have discovered that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is to blame. What do you think, what were the chances of two unknown doctors from the distant city of Perth to convince the medical community of the whole world? None. Therefore, instead of persuasion, they resorted to a very vivid demonstration.
Another important point about trust is working with the details. Include small, precise details in your presentation and presentation. Let us explain in a textbook example from legal practice.
For the experiment, gathered two groups of jurors. Before them in the case of depriving the mother of parental rights (such a terrible case was specially chosen), the lawyer and the prosecutor spoke, who presented exactly 8 arguments. In the first case, in the speech of the lawyer, and in the second - the prosecutor there were details that had no relation to the merits of the case. For example, it was said not “the mother beat the child”, but “when he brushed his teeth with his tiny brush with Mickey Mouse on the morning of August 5, she attacked him with fists.” And the jury made a decision in favor of the defense or the prosecution - depending on who was currently setting out the situation with the exact details. Human freedom depended only on the amount of detail in a lawyer's speech.
To summarize, after you have inserted all the necessary information into your presentation, do an audit again and make sure that all the facts you have stated do not “hang in the air”, but are stated in such a way that they inspire confidence in the audience.
Try to evoke emotions in the audience, work on the emotional background. The simplest emotion is, of course, laughter. Look for funny quotes, jokes, suitable jokes (intellectual or not very - according to the situation) and add them to the story. So you defuse the situation and attract the audience on an emotional level.
The strongest and most difficult to achieve emotions are fear and tears. And if tears are more likely to apply in the social sphere or in art, then fear is quite suitable for a story in a business environment. Of course, it’s not worth reporting that two snipers are working in the hall during a speech, but telling business owners about cost overruns or security holes can be very emotional. And it will definitely work.
However, brilliant presentations are always made a little “on the edge”. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Bill Gates’s presentation on the importance of fighting malaria:
Are you interested in the fight against malaria? If you do not live in the tropics and are not an extreme traveler, then I doubt it very much. If you are too lazy to watch all the videos, rewind to 4:54 and see how Bill Gates made everyone in the audience instantly “turn on” and think about the danger of this disease.
Bottom line: evoking emotions in people is not easy, but if you manage to bring them into the presentation, then you will definitely go to the next level of interaction with the audience. Start with jokes, and then you can experiment with more complex emotions.
True Story Little Red Riding Hood infographic.
Be sure to tell stories. People adore them. Just tell the audience: “Let's take a break, and I will tell you the story that happened to me.” Take a look at this moment into the hall, all eyes will be fixed on you in anticipation and expectation.
However, do not try to be too creative. So, an analysis of the Academy Award-winning films shows that only 11 types of stories take awards. And people simply don’t perceive too unusual stories. But here you can tell a story in a standard scenario in a thousand different ways. And here your storyteller talent will certainly come in handy.
By the way, the famous writer Kurt Vonnegut considered his greatest achievement not his famous books, but the way to visualize typical stories, here are 4 such examples.
This is the last of our principles: if you can insert life stories into your presentation, the audience will have fun and better understand the essence of your message. And as you now know, if the story contains one important thought, elements of surprise, concrete facts, and the audience trusts your words, then the audience is yours.
If at least 2-3 principles are fulfilled in your presentation, you have already overtaken competitors and driven the mammoth into a hole (interested in a client or investor, won the attention of listeners, etc.), the rest depends on you and the usefulness of your information. The important thing is that the audience will remember you. By the way, did you notice that the described principles are good not only for any public speaking, but also for creating an article or report?
Usually Dmitry Izmestyev ends his presentation presentation by showing an illustration for mnemonic memorization of how the word SUCCES has been formed with an error.
It's a shame for the last little S, right?
But while listening to him, we found the last letter s - and we recommend that everyone definitely use this seventh principle of successful presentation.
S - Smile - Smile.
PS: Chip and Dan Heath's book “Made to Stick” helped Dmitry in his discoveries and in our knowledge (why some ideas live, while others die). Be sure to find and read. Unfortunately, it has not yet been translated into Russian, but this is another reason to finish learning English. Duplicate the title of the book in English: Chip & Dan Heath "Made to stick".
Presentations in the modern IT world are faced by techies, sellers, and top management. This can be a short pitch to investors, a new product presentation or a long training lecture. Now imagine how many presentations are for internal and external students, clients, students, etc. conducted by a company of such a scale as LANIT. Obviously, we have come a long way (to be honest, it feels like we ran a marathon more) and gathered a lot of cones before we learned how to make presentations that hit the mark and do what they should do: train, sell, inform. And, most importantly, the audience remembers them. We were lucky - on this way we had a real guru of preparing and conducting presentations - Dmitry Izmestiev, vice president of innovative projects LANIT (by the way,his great interview on innovation ).
There are only six principles, following which you can make the best presentation in the world. Everything that you said will listen and remember you. We took Dmitry’s training seminar as a basis (2 hours and 15 minutes), clarified some information, added some ideas and experience, and prepared for you a detailed interpretation of the word SUCCES, written with a typo. Let's spell it right.
S - Simple. Simply
Simplicity is the first principle of presentation that needs attention. The childhood illness of the majority of the presentation is a large amount of content and the author’s inability to answer the question: “What is the main idea of this presentation?”
This is precisely the principle of simplicity. Nobody calls you to speak only in simple words or remove complex schemes from the presentation, especially in the same IT sphere, simplification is often impossible. But the presentation should have a simple, clearly formulated idea that you must convey to the audience so that it is heard and accepted.
Do not try to shove all your experience into the presentation. There are certain recommendations for the speeches: for example, if you have only 15 minutes, then it is better to convey to the audience only one idea (in the most critical situation - a maximum of three). But this does not mean at all that in 2 hours you can broadcast 24 theses. The maximum is 7-8, the audience simply will not accept more.
Here is a great example of how to present very complex information is very simple. What could be more difficult than the nucleation and development of a new man and the accompanying hormonal changes in a woman’s body? But the "tidy" gives a simple and clear answer: pregnant or not. By the way, this simplicity is especially important at this very moment, usually associated with stress, worries, difficulties.
Making it easy is insanely difficult. How to throw at least a line from a native and tortured presentation? Therefore, our advice is to first do everything as you conceived, outline a plan or text, prepare slides, and after that mercilessly cut off everything unnecessary. Do not be afraid - even a diamond loses part of its mass during cutting. As a result, there should be simple, distinct, clearly formulated information.
You have experience and information, create masterpieces from them, cutting off the excess.
There are other ways to convey a complex concept simply and intelligibly. For example, explaining new unfamiliar concepts through analogies and metaphors.
Rather than give complex explanations, it is better to build an analogy with information already known to the audience. It will be clearer and clearer.
So, the first rule: to cut off all that is superfluous in the presentation and on the slides, to do it is simple, but not primitive. And no more than 1-3 main ideas for a 15-minute presentation.
U - Unexpected - Unexpected
It is surprises, shakes that are usually not enough in the speeches of novice speakers. A consistent logical presentation is the worst thing you can do to get your audience’s attention. Imagine if the detectives told the same sequence and logically from the moment of the murder to the moment the crime was solved. No, the best authors always use a secret, an intrigue that forces us to turn pages and not go to bed until you finish reading the book.
Creating suspense in a presentation is a high class. But creating at least minimal intrigue in order to capture the attention of the audience is not such a difficult skill. If you succeed, you are guaranteed public attention. After all, attention is the door through which the speaker’s information comes. Here are some tips to achieve this:
- Ask the audience a question. This simple, at first glance, method is very effective. But even he has several nuances. Try to ask a question so that the audience can somehow answer it, engage the audience. (For example, “Raise your hands, who believes that C ++ is cooler than Java?” That's all, you caused an internal revolt among both sishniks and Javists). But avoid questions that listeners won’t find the answer to (for example, ask salespeople if they had contact with Kernel Panic in Debian). If there are no options, rhetorical questions are also suitable, although it is better to provoke the public to active answers and votes. After the question, the listeners will again join the thread of the narration and will listen with much greater interest. Indeed, in their head this question remained unanswered, and they will look for it in your speech.
- Fool the audience with a break template. Take advantage of the fact that your listeners have a lot of patterns in their heads, and start acting in accordance with them, calming their vigilance. And then suddenly do something completely out of this ordinary pattern. Here's a great video demonstrating the unexpected template scrapping:
Do you understand the principle? Standard shots familiar to military subjects do not bode anything unusual, I even want to stop watching, but suddenly everything changes.
Do you think this will happen only in advertising? Not at all, the same principle is easy to apply in a presentation. Here is a great example. What is expected of you at the presentation? Slides, right? Break this stereotype and tell the audience everything on the example of some ordinary subject. Even a boot will do. Here’s how Terry Moore did it gracefully in his speech, telling the audience that most of them just don’t know how to tie shoelaces (the video, unfortunately, is only in English):
- Tell the presentation as a detective. Those. not from beginning to end, but vice versa - from the very end, from intrigue, unraveling it in the course of the story. If you think that serious information cannot be conveyed in this way, you are wrong. The famous psychologist Robert Cialdini investigated a huge number of popular science publications that talk about serious scientific problems, and showed that the best of them were written precisely according to the laws of the detective.
The second rule: in order to “fill” something new with your listeners’ head, using the effect of surprise, you need to create a “gap” in their ideas about the world, to show that there is a question to which they do not know the answer. Only after that they are ready to accept new information. To apply the two principles together, formulate the main idea that you want to convey to the audience, then find something counterintuitive, trick the audience, create a “gap” in their knowledge and “fill in” your thought with it.
C - Concrete - Concrete
No business presentation will cost anything if there is no specificity in it. Moreover, this should be data of various kinds: facts, figures, diagrams, quotes from experts, etc. In principle, it’s not even necessary to clarify here, because of something — and there is enough specificity in the IT sphere.
However, you should take care of the competent visualization of the data that you have. Let's look at an example.
Art Silverman made the important discovery that popcorn can be dangerous.
How to talk about the dangers of popcorn? You can present all the numbers in the form of graphs. And you can even more clearly, showing that one serving of popcorn contains as many saturated fats as scrambled eggs with bacon, big mac and lunch with steak combined. I won’t eat popcorn anymore.
At the end of the section about each principle, we began to write how to apply all the principles together. And here an unexpected problem awaits us. As soon as the authors of presentations understand the first two principles - simplicity and unexpectedness, they leave inspired, process the presentation, it becomes beautiful sparkling, but ... usually completely loses all the specific information. In no case do not allow this!
The third principle: in addition to the main idea and unexpected twists, a good presentation always contains a lot of specific information, but it’s better to think about how to present it creatively.
C - Credible - Trust
The presentation should definitely inspire confidence in the audience. Here are a few things that significantly increase the level of trust in information (by the way, this applies to website design and text):
- numbers - bring useful statistics, analytical data, confirm theses with numbers;
- experts - provide expert comments on the subject of the presentation, demonstrate expert opinions;
- examples - be sure to tell examples, cases, success stories (for example, if you are talking about software - tell us how and how successfully it was implemented in N);
- sources - always refer to sources of information and choose the most trustworthy, reputationally clean and serious (you must admit that information about how a broker works with securities on the exchange is much more reliably perceived on the Moscow Exchange website than on the website of another Forex office), be lazy to search for primary sources;
- logos of well-known brands - if you were mentioned by some well-known media or you are a supplier / partner of some brands, indicate their logos, this will increase both the credibility and conversion of the presentation.
We will not put it on the list, but we will issue separately a very important element of trust for IT companies - prototypes. Now there are many programs and tools for preparing prototypes of your program or hardware for pictures in a presentation. All the same, then there will be TK, it’s all the same to redo it, but the presence of prototypes makes a truly indelible impression on the audience: it creates the feeling that the product is almost in its hands. Do not be lazy to make detailed prototypes for presentations - these are justified efforts.
We IT people are often lazy to make prototypes, but sometimes a demonstration is the best way ... to get the Nobel Prize. So, until the 1980s, it was believed that a stomach ulcer was caused by stress and malnutrition. However, pathologist Barry Marshall and his intern Robin Warren have discovered that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is to blame. What do you think, what were the chances of two unknown doctors from the distant city of Perth to convince the medical community of the whole world? None. Therefore, instead of persuasion, they resorted to a very vivid demonstration.
Another important point about trust is working with the details. Include small, precise details in your presentation and presentation. Let us explain in a textbook example from legal practice.
For the experiment, gathered two groups of jurors. Before them in the case of depriving the mother of parental rights (such a terrible case was specially chosen), the lawyer and the prosecutor spoke, who presented exactly 8 arguments. In the first case, in the speech of the lawyer, and in the second - the prosecutor there were details that had no relation to the merits of the case. For example, it was said not “the mother beat the child”, but “when he brushed his teeth with his tiny brush with Mickey Mouse on the morning of August 5, she attacked him with fists.” And the jury made a decision in favor of the defense or the prosecution - depending on who was currently setting out the situation with the exact details. Human freedom depended only on the amount of detail in a lawyer's speech.
To summarize, after you have inserted all the necessary information into your presentation, do an audit again and make sure that all the facts you have stated do not “hang in the air”, but are stated in such a way that they inspire confidence in the audience.
E - Emotions - Emotions
Try to evoke emotions in the audience, work on the emotional background. The simplest emotion is, of course, laughter. Look for funny quotes, jokes, suitable jokes (intellectual or not very - according to the situation) and add them to the story. So you defuse the situation and attract the audience on an emotional level.
The strongest and most difficult to achieve emotions are fear and tears. And if tears are more likely to apply in the social sphere or in art, then fear is quite suitable for a story in a business environment. Of course, it’s not worth reporting that two snipers are working in the hall during a speech, but telling business owners about cost overruns or security holes can be very emotional. And it will definitely work.
However, brilliant presentations are always made a little “on the edge”. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Bill Gates’s presentation on the importance of fighting malaria:
Are you interested in the fight against malaria? If you do not live in the tropics and are not an extreme traveler, then I doubt it very much. If you are too lazy to watch all the videos, rewind to 4:54 and see how Bill Gates made everyone in the audience instantly “turn on” and think about the danger of this disease.
Bottom line: evoking emotions in people is not easy, but if you manage to bring them into the presentation, then you will definitely go to the next level of interaction with the audience. Start with jokes, and then you can experiment with more complex emotions.
S - Story - History
True Story Little Red Riding Hood infographic.
Be sure to tell stories. People adore them. Just tell the audience: “Let's take a break, and I will tell you the story that happened to me.” Take a look at this moment into the hall, all eyes will be fixed on you in anticipation and expectation.
However, do not try to be too creative. So, an analysis of the Academy Award-winning films shows that only 11 types of stories take awards. And people simply don’t perceive too unusual stories. But here you can tell a story in a standard scenario in a thousand different ways. And here your storyteller talent will certainly come in handy.
By the way, the famous writer Kurt Vonnegut considered his greatest achievement not his famous books, but the way to visualize typical stories, here are 4 such examples.
This is the last of our principles: if you can insert life stories into your presentation, the audience will have fun and better understand the essence of your message. And as you now know, if the story contains one important thought, elements of surprise, concrete facts, and the audience trusts your words, then the audience is yours.
SUCCESs
If at least 2-3 principles are fulfilled in your presentation, you have already overtaken competitors and driven the mammoth into a hole (interested in a client or investor, won the attention of listeners, etc.), the rest depends on you and the usefulness of your information. The important thing is that the audience will remember you. By the way, did you notice that the described principles are good not only for any public speaking, but also for creating an article or report?
Usually Dmitry Izmestyev ends his presentation presentation by showing an illustration for mnemonic memorization of how the word SUCCES has been formed with an error.
It's a shame for the last little S, right?
But while listening to him, we found the last letter s - and we recommend that everyone definitely use this seventh principle of successful presentation.
S - Smile - Smile.
PS: Chip and Dan Heath's book “Made to Stick” helped Dmitry in his discoveries and in our knowledge (why some ideas live, while others die). Be sure to find and read. Unfortunately, it has not yet been translated into Russian, but this is another reason to finish learning English. Duplicate the title of the book in English: Chip & Dan Heath "Made to stick".
And, yes, in LANIT there are vacancies for non-IT professionals