Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)
Video Killed the Radio Star…went the 1979 music video byThe Buggles. MTV used this as their first ever video in 1981, but despite the prophecy and MTV’s 40 ongoing years, radio stars aren’t dead. Radio revolutionised popular music, vinyl discs gave us today’s disc jockeys but even though technology evolves it demonstrates that the fittest will survive and not everything will be killed.
Compact cassette started to challenge vinyl in 1963. With the emergence of CDs in the mid ‘80’s, tapes eventually became old-hat. CDs were ousted by flash drives and today ubiquitous access to downloads overshadow almost everything…but vinyl and tapes aren’t altogether dead and buried. People can be branded dinosaurs but sometimes they are just nostalgic; the odd scratch can make music more of a memorable memory…as does listening to cricket or baseball or horse-racing on the radio!
But it’s not just music that’s been influenced by technology. Meetings have also been affected and, with the advent of COVID more and more of us are being exposed to on-line meetings and, of course presentations. But how effective are some presentations in blending audiovisual media, the spoken word and that most important ingredient, people.
Presentations
Presentations are not new. They’ve probably been around forever in some form or another but, in the 17th century a Czech philosopher, John Amos Comenius, used pictures as aids to his teachings and the modern ‘presentation’ may well have been born. Presentations were used for training by the US armed forces during WW II and in post-war years other militaries as well as civilian organisations adopted the technique.
But presentations are not just for training, they have become an integral part of communication in general. Within the numerous meetings that projects demand many include for a presentation, particularly status or progress meetings and stakeholder interaction. Also, for many, their meetings may revolve around previous minutes flashed on a screen in an effort to either keep people focused, save on paper copies, or possibly to avoid eye contact.
People, today, expect that everything is presented, and the medium of choice for most is .ppt even though there are others. Rolled out in the early ‘90’s PowerPoint has become ubiquitous. However successful presentations are not just about the medium of transmission but the presentation itself.
The Presentation
The purpose of a presentation is communication and is part of the process of information transmittal, reception and, hopefully, retention and understanding. As a medium it should enhance the flow of information by keeping any audience attentive and interested.
In his book, “The Forgotten Half of Change”, M. Luc De Brabandere, a former Director-General of the Brussels Stock Exchange tells us of an encounter with Bill Gates, the spiritual father of PowerPoint, who he was asked to introduce at an IT conference. Gates expected to see a copy of the presentation, but he was advised that the spoken word would not be mixed with the written and PowerPoint would not be required. However, and being diplomatic, M Brabandere capitulated and drew up a short series of some ten slides. He then made his presentation live the next day, without text, and in front of an audience of one thousand.
People have come to expect to see presentations, or ‘slides’, in advance so there are no ‘surprises’. These ‘proofs’, in the absence of any dialogue, and in order not to be misunderstood are provided with swathes of explanatory text. This brings into question the need for presenting something that has already been communicated? The practice is such that presentations can become akin to court room style depositions.
Presenting
Many people consider that a presentation is just deck of slides on a corporately acceptable background design complete with logos along with a suitable title which provides an uncompelling and innocuous border for each slide but fills 20% of the available space. The ‘body’ of the slide will contain some piece of relevant Clip Art, an image for visual stimulus, and text or table cut from an already available report.
Some presenters, rather than addressing the audience, will often stare at the screen and describe each slide and proceed to prose, possibly robotically, any text on the slide despite some members of the audience already having read it. Such an approach is far from scintillating and the engagement of the audience as part information transfer is questionable. The role of the presenter is almost superfluous unless the audience can’t read.
The audience will at the stare at the screen and possibly the presenter. Some will be interested but others, who may look but may not see or listen but not hear will not, particularly if they’ve seen it before. Others will try and stay awake and appear interested. Many will indulge in surreptitious checks of smart phones looking for more interesting communication depending on their attentiveness, distractedness, or boredom; prior preparation and preparation prevents piss poor presentations.
PowerPoint makes for efficient production, but this does not equate to an effective presentation. Presenters need to prepare for the presenting not just create the inanimate elements to support it; a .ppt file is not the be-all and end-all. Other tools and techniques are all too often forgotten given the panacea that software can provide including the mechanical click option for that element of nostalgic realism.
Reception & Perception
Perception is about the way the audience receives and assimilates a presentation and includes the processing and interpretation of the information that’s been transmitted. It’s also the reason why the same message can be interpreted differently by different people despite being presented with the same information at the same time. The extent of people’s interest, uninterest or even disinterest in a presentation is one thing but for communication to be effective an audience should be engaged. No matter what the degree of interest it’s imperative that attention and attentiveness is obtained, and maintained, during presentations and the abilities of any presenter.
Outside of any charismatic qualities of the presenter and their individual style or panache, in standard communication effective transmission is achieved by reducing noise, and noise is about distraction. Distraction occurs because of unsuitable venues, and physical interruptions but also sensory perception and rates of processing. Another contributor is the makeup of an audience and any generation gaps. With a wide-ranging potential audience of Baby Boomers through to Millennials and Generations X and Y, and now Z, a ‘one-size-fits-all presentation’ is an unlikely panacea; noise may be inevitable for some generations.
Another, and almost constant source of distraction, is the ubiquitous smart phone. One study showed that users checked their smartphones on average 150 times a waking day equating to once every six-and-a-half minutes. Despite requests to turn ‘phones to silent we are all aware that habitual checking is a modern-day constant. Short attention spans are also cited as being ‘distractive’ and studies show that these are generally becoming shorter. In 2000 it was 12 and in 2013 it was 8 seconds; a goldfish’s is 9 seconds.
Reduced attention spans can lead to a loss of interest and consequent distraction because our sensory receptors and mental processing work faster than information can be presented to us. We can assimilate a picture faster than any written words can describe it. We can read the text on a slide faster than a presenter can read it out, as if an audience can’t read themselves! This reaction to presentations being on a differing frequency is unintentional but nonetheless distracting.
And then there’s the content. If there are figures then engineers in an audience will reach for their calculators to check any arithmetic, financial people will wonder about their provenance, and others may lose interest completely. In most circumstances a graph may grab attention and allow an interpretation to be provided with dialogue rather than text. Presenting, or rather recommunicating a report through a multitude of PowerPoint slides may ensure it’s been communicated but it may bore the pants off those who have already read it or didn’t want to read it in the first place.
Summary
We move with the times and are dragged along in the wake of technological evolution, but our human senses remain, for the most part, static. People’s attention spans may be shrinking as we need to cope with information overload from the onslaught of different media but, as we filter out noise our ability to focus has, necessarily, improved.
People are becoming more selective in what they wish to have communicated to them and different generations have different media of choice. Once it was the radio. In 1939 a nation of about 45 million were galvanised after listening to the 407-word ‘King’s Speech’ that took five minutes and forty-five seconds. In 1969 an estimated 600 million watched the moon landing on TV. In 2014 after Germany’s victory over Argentina during the 2014 World Cup some 618,725 tweets were sent in the 60 seconds. People select their medium of interest and seek sensory satisfaction or even stimulation rather than sensory underload from an inappropriate medium.
Presentations ‘push’ information but if an audience is not prepared to provide some ‘pull’ then any presenter may be flogging a dead horse and wasting not only their time but that of the audience too. If information is not transmitted in an interesting, thought provoking and compelling manner it may well fall on deaf ears and blind eyes despite the efficiency of the medium used. Any conclusion as to the effectiveness of any presentations can be conclusory and, as George Bernhard Shaw sagely observed, communication can be illusionary
Communication, no matter how efficient, can kill effective communication.
Bio:
Malcolm Peart is an UK Chartered Engineer & Chartered Geologist with over thirty-five years’ international experience in multicultural environments on large multidisciplinary infrastructure projects including rail, metro, hydro, airports, tunnels, roads and bridges. Skills include project management, contract administration & procurement, and design & construction management skills as Client, Consultant, and Contractor.
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