At a recent YOW! Night, Damian Conway gave an excellent presentation on “Instantly Better Presentations”. His notes are online and the video of the presentation is below.

My notes from the session:

• if you need to give the audience bad news, give it first
• instantly does not mean effortlessly

1. Talk about your passion

• to feel more confident, you need competence – talk about subjects you genuinely understand
• seeing someone who is excited… is exciting
• energy, enthusiasm and passion through your actions and speech will translate to your audience
• find something in the required topic that gives you passion – even if you loathe the topic or have been forced by your boss to present it

2. Tell them a story

• our memory is very volatile – stays for 8-10 seconds unless we do something with it
• 7+/- 2 is horribly optimistic and not backed by research, real number is 4 +/- 1
• stories are our oldest information processing tool
• stories have a flow to assist acquisition and memorisation (all our memories are reconstructed from a storyline), have a hierarchy to assist comprehension and recollection
• tell the historical story or the story of what happened, process or funny anecdotes
• story is for your benefit to get the sequence and content right – audience don’t necessarily need to know
• stories make complexity comprehensible, structure recognisable, information easy to remember, make audiences feel more comfortable

3. Don’t search for content, select it

• what should I say is the wrong question, question you should start with is what could I say
• humans are good at recognising important stuff rather than recalling important stuff
• start with a blank sheet and write down everything you know about the topic that you might want to say – stream of consciousness
• whittle down to 3-5 most relevant and important topics to talk about
• these 5 points becomes the chapters, so go looking for the narrative that connects them – they may not connect so look for a couple of lesser topics that better connect the 5 important things
• competency – think about the questions you were asking when you were learning

4. Simplify your slides

• tools encourage a bad job
• content matters but not as much as style
• content is your payload to explode the audiences brains
• style – the stuff the audience doesn’t see that prevents them seeing what they should see
• bad style – anything that prevents the audience seeing what they should see
• a wall of text – technical audience will read everything, regardless of whether it is relevant or not
• Apple is good at presentations – simple but effective
• big words – people at the back can still read them
• slide numbers turn your presentation into a death march – get rid of background, name and title on every slide, get rid of the logos (audience sees salesperson)
• slide deck is to focus audience on the presentation – if they need context give them a separate PDF or notes
• each message is a different slide
• cluttered is overwhelming and as a result they switch off the attention channel as they are trying to read everything
• show less on more slides

5. Manage the questions

• a presentation should always be for the benefit of the audience – give them what they need
• have an explicit questions policy – hold to the end of each topic, end of the talk, or interactive through the talk (can however affect the flow)
• always be keen to take questions – shows you care
• make the questions fit in with your question – “that’s a really good question” makes others more comfortable to ask question

6. Animate code simulations

• explain code temporally, not spatially
• use animations to reveal information one thing at a time
• walk through code as an animation and highlighting
• low tech animations – use the same slide over and over – cell animation
• don’t export your slides – notes
• live coding – synthesise, automate or have a partner – need to keep contact with the audience

7. Deliver your message fearlessly

• use your nervousness – turn fear into energy
• never give a presentation for the first time – practice it live at least 3 times
• use an audience image on a big screen