Public speaking

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After a disastrous half-hour melt-down in front of a very patient and forgiving crowd, some lessons learned about public speaking:

Say more not less

If you are anything like the JC (4,568 articles and counting, right?) you will have too much you want say, and too many smart-arse jokes, knowing cultural references and complicated arguments. Unless you are embarking on some kind of Soviet-style five-hour oration with an audience at gunpoint, you will never get through it, you will lose your thread, and you will lose the audience. Keep it simple. Your audience won’t remember much of what you say anyway, and they certainly won’t remember a blizzard of facts and figures you want through at a gallop

Structure

Now you have a really simple point, tell the audience you’re going to make it, then make it, then tell them you’re going to make it.

Engage the audience

Everyone will have a phone with them and most will be scrolling Twitter, unless you give them a reason not to: You can do that two ways: one, deliberately, by engaging the audience. For example, asking their opinion — a show of hands is a way to do that.

The other one is freezing on stage because you don’t know what you are meant to be saying.

They will be transfixed if you do that. You will be praying for some portion of the audience to be scrolling Twitter, but no-one will. The fascination of seeing a colleague up on stage making a total arse of himself is electrifying.

Consider a conversation

A way of engaging the audience is by way of a conversation. Dialogues are much easier than monologues. They’re easier to do, and easier to follow. They are the natural form of human conversation. If you are nervous about your presentation, consider doing it as a question-and-answer session with an accomplice. Then all you need is a set of nice open questions, and you carry on until your time is allotted. You needn’t worry about timing, or losing your thread, because the questions don’t need to be in a linear narrative.

There is a reason so many podcasts take the form of a conversation. Monologuing is hard, takes way more scripting and preparation, requires an argument, and can easily go wrong.

Prepare for technological failure

Prepare your presentation the old-fashioned way, in words, without reference to slides. Have an argument — a simple one, per the above — and stick to it. If you want slides, prepare them afterwards. That way if the projector craps out of your slides go missing, you can box on more or less as you planned to.

Speaking to slides well, involves a lot of preparation, and also triangulation between your notes, the slides and what you end up saying. It also commits you to a “push” communication — and having prepared it in ignorance of who the audience will turn out to be, you are presenting a carefully structured argument to the void, whether the audience is receptive to it, or even interested in it, or not.

There is nothing wrong with doing this, but it is hard, and — unless you propose to read out your slides — requires a good deal of rehearsal and execution chops.

See also

• Law firm seminar