Good Talk
What makes a good talk? I’m hardly in a position to give lectures on, well, giving lectures. My own talks are hardly outstanding, and, on one slightly soul-destroying occasion, hardly attended. That said, I’ve given, and received, enough variety of talks, in enough variety of situations, with enough variety of audiences, to have the beginnings of A Theory. And everyone who knows me knows I like a nice Theory; a Theory being, in this case as in all others, short-hand for A Collection of Arrogant Opinions I Hold, That I’ve Decided Are Just About Coherent Enough to Inflict on Others.
Some of these opinions were crystallised recently, whilst attending the excellent Konstantinos Dimopoulos’ fascinating presentation on Digital Urban Design at Develop earlier, other, less flattering opinions, have been formed earlier in life whilst attending substantially less enlightening talks...and those people shall remain nameless. But, generally speaking, I feel like a good formula for giving a talk goes something like this. The content should aim:
60% to Inform, 30% to Entertain and 10% to Endear.
These may not have been the ratios you were expecting, but there is method in my madness.
A talk is intended, most people would agree, to impart information, to inform. Yet, if a talk is 100% informative, it is also likely to be utterly, soul-sucking boring. A person standing in front of a spreadsheet, reciting the values of each cell in monotone “...A1: 50%, A2: 75%, A3: 2.5%...” is technically informing you of the contents of his presentation, but you’re unlikely to remember anything he told you, or why it was important, or why you were supposed to care in the first place. And though it seems like a ridiculous example, a lot of internal corporate presentations do seem to take this form – someone stands up, and quite literally narrates a spreadsheet, or a sales report, or a graph. “As you can see from the x axis here…” No, thank-you. And you cannot magically make dull content interesting just by using every single PowerPoint animation you can find. You should have learned not to do that in Secondary school, not when presenting to a boardroom meeting, or worse to a lecture theatre full of industry peers. Nobody thinks your graphs are cool because they spin.
Stop it.
Even if you’re horrible stage-shy, and want to disappear through the floor the second you've finished speaking, the fact is that if they don’t remember what you look like and at least one half of your name, you might as well have not bothered turning up to speak at all. A diligent searcher, with a bag full of money they are just aching to give you, if only the could find you, will get reasonably far with two out of four of “first name” +/- “last name” +/- “topic of talk” +/- “current job title,” but just whacking “Katherine, or possibly Catherine? The designer(?) of the...thing...” into Google or LinkedIn will get them precisely nowhere. So, a vital part of informing your audience is not just to make sure they come away with a solid understanding of your content, but also making sure you put your name up somewhere they can see it. Write your name and the topic of your talk in massive letters on your first and last slides, and say and spell your name for anyone who cannot, for any reason, see the slide deck.
Talks should be informative, but in order to transmit information effectively, they should also be entertainingly presented. But this is not the opportunity to whip out your clown nose, or tell that hilarious story you do about your mate who got his head stuck in a bucket. It also doesn't mean using every single colour and font you can find in PowerPoint’s effects, and using them all on every page. Again, like the animations thing, this should have been beaten out of you in Secondary School. Instead, pepper your talk with brief anecdotes that illuminate the point you are trying to make, or explain the data in an unusual way. Draw analogies, or measure things in units more accessible to your audience. Football fields are an old favourite, but if you can think of something more appropriate for your audience, use that instead. Saying that map size of GTAV is larger than GTA 4, GTA San Andreas and Red Dead Redemption all put together is a meaningful comparison because it is a visual, experiential analogy, rather than a purely numerical one. Measure the new cafeteria in company branded pens, or talk about how many marbles you can fit in it. Make things real to your audience by giving them concepts they can wrap their heads, or even better, their hands, around.
Do not ever tell jokes. You can be entertaining by being witty witty, but one-liners distract the audience from your talk, as the half that got the punchline sit and feel smug about themselves, and the half that didn't worry amongst themselves that they are stupid, or worse, resent you for making them feel that way. And it’s hard to be endearing to an audience when you've deliberately excluded them with your niche 80s arcade game references. Avoid technical language and acronyms unless you are sure they are appropriate to your audience, and periodically restate an acronym in long-form (“so we all remember that a CSS, or Cascading Style Sheet…”) in case anyone has forgotten what it stood for.
But why do you want to endear yourself to the audience? You’re already telling them what they need to know, and trying to do so in a way that doesn't put them to sleep, why do you also have to do the emotional legwork of making them like you too? There’s a good reason. You've told them things, you've done your best to help them absorb and remember those things, but how are you going to help them remember you? You, the clever person who knows this stuff, and who would perhaps quite like a job doing it full-time, or a consultancy gig helping to implement it, or sell another copy of the book you wrote about it?
Help them to like you, and to remember you in the future. Mention a time you made a mistake, and how you fixed it, and how you’d recommend people avoided doing something similar themselves, to make your content more personal to them. Tell a story from your own life, but keep it short. Your ambitions to be a ballet dancer at age five are probably not as relevant as you think. Speak clearly, a fraction louder than you feel comfortable with, and in the most neutral accent you can manage, to help audience members who may be English second-language or using transcription software or hearing loops. Pause between sections to allow people to digest what you've said. Don’t pause after every sentence, it will make it seem like you are on the verge of being sick, or are struggling to hold in nervous flatulence. Most audiences are kind, and will forgive the occasional stumble or stutter. If you give them the impression you are a nice person, trying your best, they will afford you a great deal of goodwill. An arsehole on a stage with a microphone giving a highly polished talk will only succeed in convincing a larger crowd that he is an arsehole than he could achieve without a microphone, and they will all leave reminding themselves to avoid him like the plague if he ever comes up on the speaker roster again.
So, make yourself easy to like. Make your slides uncluttered and easy to read, even from the back of the room. Think twice before putting in video content.
In fact, just do not have video content on your slides. It never works – the phrase “we appear to be having some technical difficulties” sets my teeth on edge - and I’ve never encountered a video in a presentation that wasn't just essentially a glossy cinematic brochure that simultaneously proclaimed two, and only two messages, “we paid loads of money for this” and also “the presenter has run out of interesting things to say and so will now just stand around awkwardly for three minutes like a bag of lemons in a skin-tight designer dress/shiny suit/branded T-Shirt of Smugness.” The only exception to this rule are safety videos, as they allow you to show things like nuclear power plant evacuation procedures and how to safely disembark an aeroplane that’s being eaten by Godzilla without actually having to demonstrate it live. If you absolutely must have a film, decide what you are going to do with yourself whilst it plays. Watching your own video, eyes rapturously glued to the screen and grinning like a loon, is a bit weird, but so is glaring out over your audience like you’re minding a detention class. Try to strike a balance.
And finally, never mock or draw attention of any kind to people who came in late. If they bothered to turn up to your talk: be grateful. Maybe they got lost, or they had to take a phone-call telling them their cat has just died, or maybe they are meant to be in another part of the event but snuck off to come to your talk because they really wanted to hear what you had to say, and love you, and are your biggest fan. And then you pointed out that they were late, and humiliated them in front of the whole crowd.
You dick.
Hint: Don’t be an dick.
Do be informative. Give the audience some new stuff to learn.
Do be entertaining. Give the audience interesting ways to engage with what you want them to learn.
Do be endearing. Give the audience a reason to remember you fondly, to think of you as an expert on the topic you taught them about and to have a positive impression of you, such that they feel emboldened to reach out and offer you opportunities in the future.
And if you have a slide entitled “My Journey” or “My Story,” then get in the sea.
