Preparing to present: reading notes, winging it, or what?

Experienced product leader Thomas To had a presentation coming up to a large audience, and wondered how others usually prepared to present new topics to new audiences. Did they script their talks? If so, did it help? What alternative ways might help to get ready?

He posted the question on a good place for thoughtful advice, the members-only forum of Cedric Chin’s Commoncog. He tagged me in, because he’s a member of my site, and thought I might have some tips to share.

I ended up sharing 2,107 words worth of tips on preparing a presentation. Probably too much for a forum post (though some people found it useful, along with other good replies). About right for a short article though, so here we are: some thoughts from a decade and a half of presenting and helping others to present.

Presentations are nothing like normal speaking

The main drawback of writing everything beforehand is that the talk tends to “sound scripted”. What’s wrong with that? Well — it goes against some audience expectations for the strange phenomenon that is public speaking.

The biggest cognitive dissonance about public speaking is that it looks like any other kind of speaking, where you open your mouth and words come out. We do it all the time, sometimes in our sleep.

But public speaking isn’t at all like that. It’s only “speaking” in the sense that hiking a narrow path next to a sheer drop is “walking”.

Two factors make public speaking very different from regular conversation:

1. Jeopardy — the risk if you mess up

I had already had eight years’ experience of frequent public speaking, when I had to do a talk that made me really nervous again. It was in front of 500-ish customers, co-presenting with the CEO.

An hour before the talk, my boss saw how nervous I was, and offered to skip a meeting to let me practice in front of him. I started to rehearse, and messed up my message badly. Then he got nervous too! (The talk itself went fine by the way — the preparation factors I mention later came to the rescue.)

Speaking coaches often say that the risk is less than you think. They’re mostly right, but there actually is some risk. Audiences are humans, and if you completely freeze up and forget what you were saying, some of them might think you don’t know what you’re talking about.

2. Poor feedback loop (compared to conversation)

Real conversation is actually a kind of improvisation between two people, constantly checking and negotiating meaning, nudging towards agreement.

If the other person doesn’t understand, you can often see that and try to express your point in other ways. If the other person doesn’t agree, you can bring in different arguments, or you can find yourself modifying your own argument on the fly. Changing your point of view in 1:1 conversation inflicts less damage on the ego, compared to public speaking. And also in conversation you don’t have a bunch of slides that press home your original point.

(Also, from the listener’s point of view, it would be a boring conversation partner who talked at us for 45 minutes and then asked “Any questions?” Public talks need some kind of performance or entertainment factor to keep attention; more on this later.)

But public speaking is supposed to come across like regular speaking

In current public speaking, we try to remove barriers between ourselves and the audience. It makes total sense — the first communication we ever have as kids is in the stance of “joint attention” — two people talking about something they see. “Look at the doggy!” It feels natural and focuses on the subject, not anything in between.

For most people*, a script would get in the way. And so we don’t often hear people reading directly from one. TED-talkers have clearly rehearsed so much that they could do it in their sleep. Actors memorize their lines, then get completely into the role. Even politicians make reading from their notes sound like regular speech (or at least a regular angry rant).

What should we do, then, for conference talks? Memorizing our whole talk would take a lot of time, and would probably still sound a bit scripted (because we’re still reciting from our mental script). But we need something to keep us on point during our state of heightened anxiety while presenting, when our brain isn’t relaxed enough to let us improvise around the topic.

We need to build up to it. There are supporting activities, and then the things we have available during the talk itself. In order:

(Supporting activities)

0. Know the area well

Some people don’t mind talking about things they have not much experience of. For the rest of us, it helps our confidence enormously to be very familiar with our subject matter — not just one story about the subject but the way that things work in that specific niche.

I presented a couple of weeks ago to a big audience who had high expectations. The conference organizers put me in the “plenum”, which I found out on the morning of the talk meant the big room with the main track of talks. My nerves were OK though, and the talk came across conversationally, because I had been living the topic for the last year. (Also I was able to answer the questions at the end convincingly — one of the key bits of a talk.)

1. Build a decent story

To me this process feels like kind of bouncing back and forth between the points and the delivery.

a) You jot down the general points you want to make. Write them in sentences, not just nouns. That makes you think through what you’re actually saying — what the concept means to your argument and to the audience.

b) Then you really think hard about the audience. What are they expecting, both topic-wise and format-wise?

c) Then back to your points. With the audience needs in mind, where do they start and where do you want to take them to? What are the necessary points on the way?

d) Back to the audience needs. They need to be engaged in your talk, with some sense of anticipation. What is the key underlying drama in your topic? (For inspiration on finding drama in seemingly dry topics, see this post I wrote about a semiconductor engineering manager, who got stuck writing a white paper until he saw the underlying drama in the topic.

e) …and so you play about with a story flow until it feels good. Whiteboards and sticky notes and scratchpads are all good for that. PowerPoint/Keynote, not so much, because they distract you from the raw ideas. And because they are less physical. We sometimes think best with our bodies.

2. Think how you’re going to perform the story

Presenting is very unlike having a conversation, and yet most presentations come across best if they’re a bit conversional. That already counts as performing. But it’s a performance in other ways too.

A conversation partner would only listen to you ranting on for 45 minutes if you were interesting enough to listen to. If you talked in a monotone, with hardly a breathing space, they’d probably escape to the other end of the pub. So you have to vary your tone, and leave spaces to allow your points to come through (and for you to actually breathe properly, which makes you sound nicer anyway).

How to vary your tone? Make it work with the actual story you’re telling. Make it louder at the points of tension. Leave space before you resolve the tension by giving the result/solution. That kind of thing. It doesn’t have to be too dramatic, and indeed some people present successfully without varying their tone too much. But at least remember to pause and breathe sometimes, and let the audience catch up. Especially if you have a visual for them to take in…

… on which, visuals are part of the performance too. Really, they need to strengthen your points, not just decorate. Or to provide information that only comes across visually, like a table. If the expectation is to have a slide per point anyway, keep those other slides as simple as possible — maybe just a sentence header, which then needs you to talk through what that really means.

People used to give talks without visuals a lot more, which sometimes worked great! And I think you already know that it doesn’t work that well to have slides of bullets that just echo the points you’re making verbally. The audience tends to read through the bullets quickly and miss what you’re saying.

3 Practice a whole load

To pull these things together, you need to practice with an audience. That is, your points, your argument, your ideas on how to dramatize the argument, all need to be rehearsed in front of someone. That in itself can be scary.

The audience can be anyone capable of understanding the broad concepts — it doesn’t matter if they’re not in your exact niche. But it should be someone who’s prepared to ask questions about things that don’t tie together. That will help you enormously.

Every time I have a major new topic to talk about, I do at least one dry run with a colleague, and I always find there are points that I haven’t explained clearly, or flowed clearly from the previous points, or maybe haven’t even fully understood! Of course whenever this happens, you need to go back afterwards and fill in the gaps, or improve the story.

The more you practice, the more confident you’ll be. Actually, the more you mess up at this stage, the better!

The practice sessions don’t all have to have an audience. Later ones can be to a voice recorder / camera if you like. That is a good way to practice some of the timing and performance aspects.

Especially practice the beginning and ending. Despite what I said about scripts, it can help your presentation if the beginning and ending are a little more scripted. Starting that way can ease your nerves and grab the audience with well-chosen words. Ending that way can also make your points stick better.

What to do in the actual presentation?

You’ll want to have at least some notes, or the slide notes view, or maybe you’ll get by with the bullet points on slides. I did actually do a more traditional bullets-on-slides presentation to that tech comms audience a couple of weeks ago (the organizers expected a traditional presentation deck). But it still worked because the bullets were minimal and just led in to what I was saying.

Apart from that, the classic advice works:

• Try to talk to some of the audience members before you start. You might hear what they’re particularly interested in, or perhaps you pick up some point you can mention in the talk. But mostly, you talk to them because having done so helps you see the audience as humans during the talk itself; not as an intimidating mass.
• During the talk, try to pick out a couple of interested faces from the audience (at different locations in the hall), and then look at them while you’re talking. Again it helps you connect at a human level.

It all gets easier

All of this — the domain knowledge and the building of it into performable stories — gets way easier as you do more of it. Also, the ability to improvise and talk around a topic gets easier. (My major jump forward with that was when I was in a quasi-sales role as a consultant. I learned a lot from my boss at the time, and found myself less tongue-tied after that. Now, perhaps some people would prefer that I tied my tongue a bit more.)

It’s possible to get to a plateau, where you’re reasonably comfortable telling the same kind of stories in the same way. Then it’s good to raise the discomfort level again, for example by relying less on visuals, or by putting more effort into the performance side, or by speaking in more ambitious situations.

That’s something worth mentioning, by the way: comfort in public speaking isn’t a straight line. Depending on the jeopardy of the situation, my nerves can still go way up, and that’s when I have to fall back on some of the more structured approaches I mentioned above.

* Some people do work well with scripts

The tips above are for most people to gain confidence in a wide variety of speaking situations, with different audiences. But one size definitely doesn’t fit all. Some people have good reasons for writing out their talks in full, and if they have refined their words by reading aloud, they can still sound quite natural.

¿What about you?

If you’re an experienced presenter, how do you prepare? If you’re newer to presenting but have a talk coming up, which of these tips sound worth trying?