Techniques for designing better presentations (before you get to the delivery stage!)
I do my best to make this blog a resource for presenters - not pro-speakers, but real people who need to make presentations as part of their 'day job'. If there's something you really want to know about, just email me and I'll see what I can do (no promises except that I'll read your email - use simon@ and you can guess the rest of my address. :) )
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This month's most popular (and useful?) blog posts are:
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Content and structure are the Cinderellas of presentations. Everyone fusses about Delivery but that’s not where the bread-and-butter of presenting happens. The real magic lies in knowing what to say and what order to say it in. So here’s a simple-but-powerful tool that’s going to make your presentation structure… well… better. It’s about a five minute …
There’s a lot of crap presentations training around at the moment saying “tell stories”… just “tell stores”. That’s about as much use as saying “be tall” to someone struggling because they can’t reach the top shelf. I used to have a problem with Nike’s slogan of “just do it” because I feared it encouraged people …
Read more “How to use stories in your presentations: a story matrix and using them the right way”
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about interacting with the slides themselves (that’s a different blog). I’m talking about interacting with your audience when your presentation uses slides. After all, one of the big things that Prezi claims is that it allows you to jump around your presentation in a non-linear way, making for …
This one has been nagging at the back of my head for a long time and I might piss a few slick, professional presenters off. I’m braced… but it needs to be said for the sake of audiences and presenters. Here’s the big message – there’s a bit difference between what I’m going to call …
Great delivery can’t save rubbish content. We often forget that there are three key parts to an outstanding presentation… it’s not just (or even mainly) about how well you present in the room
“Starting my presentation” is a very common answer to my question “What bugs you most about presenting?”. I mentioned recently that I starting a presentation with ‘a little about me’ is a mistake because it wastes the audience’s attention. I gave a few ideas of what to do instead. It’s probably a good idea to …
Tips for better presentations are everywhere. What we need is a way to use those tips to make better presentations – a framework for presentations.
Let’s talk about your presentation’s impact. (Oh, and if you’d rather watch video than read, skip to the bottom of this blog – I’ve recorded to very short ones for you.) I wanna differentiate between first, second and third-order impacts – so let’s start with some definitions. Stay with me – it gets interesting later! …
You might have heard of the VAK model – the idea that people are either Visual Learners, Aural Learners or Kinesthetic Learners. It’s largely tosh and what you should be doing is matching the medium (V, A or K) to the message, of course. I rant about it here when I suggest you don’t need …
The StoryMaking System is the result of reading (in mind-numbing detail) over 400 peer-reviewed research papers, dozens of books, thousands of ours of observational research and blood sweat and tears!
It's the framework for designing a presentation which gives you the fastest way to getting something is (almost) guaranteed to work. It gives your audience what they need - and only what they need - to be impacted.
The key elements are:
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