Imagine if your job was to sell a product to a market that doesn’t want it but is forced by law to buy it. I’d be stumped but Dan Meyer’s found a way to work around it somehow. Watch him talk about his plans to create a world of patient problem solvers.
I must say, Dan does everything right in this presentation and here are three good takeaways worth spreading:
1. Kick off your presentation with a question that engages your audience
Most people would start off by introducing themselves and their topic. Hi I’m Jimmy Khoo and I’m the Lead Developer on Project Shmoject…bla bla bla. Although there’s nothing wrong with a basic introduction like that, it’s just a waste of a great opportunity to make an impactful first impression on your audience. The first few seconds are when your audience are trying to size you up. So, if there’s a way to connect with them in those few precious seconds, you should. One good way would be to ask them a question that gets them thinking.
Kathy Sierra creator of the Creating Passionate Users blog writes about beginning your presentation with a question the listener wants to have answered.
Begin with a question. A question the listener wants to have answered
It doesn’t have to be a literal question, just something they want to find out. In a good movie or novel, you find yourself thinking, “Who is this guy? Why is he in this situation? Will he get out of it? What’s this secret thing they keep referring to?” Make them curious. Curiosity is seduction. I’m astonished by how often we suck the life out of technical topics, when they could be fascinating. Find the passion. If YOU don’t care about the answer, why should they?
Just make sure you ask the right question! Not random questions about how they got to the venue or what they thought about the weather. The answer to the question that you ask should give you a chance to smoothly transition to the topic of your presentation.
2. Highlight key terms, cells or areas when explaining your visuals
I know Seth Godin says not to have more than 6 words per slide. But sometimes, you might need to share a chart or a part of a spreadsheet, or a block of text within which you have an item that you’d like to talk about. A lazy presenter would simply place the entire block of text or a full sized chart on the slide and talk through it. The danger in this however is that the audience may not be listening to you because they are looking at all the information that has suddenly become available to them on the screen. This dillutes any point that you are trying to make at the time. To avoid this it would be best to find a way to highlight the areas that are of interest, and grey out or dim out the areas that aren’t important.
For example, in Dan’s presentation he shares some average textbook math questions. Some of these questions are pretty wordy. But rather than just copying an image of the question and popping it onto his presentation, he went a step further and greyed out the text that didn’t need to be read. He gave the audience a specific visual cue to look at only certain parts of the text – which he highlighted in white.
Full block of text
Audience knows exactly what to look at
3. Break down complex points into easy steps so that your audience can follow you easily
Its easy to forget sometimes that our audience may not have the same level of understanding that we do – on the topic that we’re talking about. I’ve attended many presentations where the speaker runs off with a tough concept losing the audience at hello. Instead, the right way to do this is to break down a concept into digestible parts and then bring your audience on a journey through each of these parts. Powerpoint Ninja calls this technique content staging.
When you’re presenting your slide content, the last thing you want to do is overwhelm your audience with too much information on any one slide. If you find that you have too much content on one slide, you can divide it up and spread it over several slides. However, sometimes it’s not about simply breaking the content apart across multiple slides but about displaying the information more effectively in bit-size, digestible chunks in one slide.
For example, when explaining the concept of how to transform a conventional math problem into one that encourages patient problem solving, Dan breaks his process into four parts. First, he separates the visual layer from the math problem. Next, he separates out the question layer. On top of that, he places the structure layer, and finally the steps layer. As he talks about each layer he displays them on the screen one by one. This way, the audience can easily keep up with his explanation.
Dan also makes great use of stories and video in his presentation. All in all, a very entertaining and insightful talk. I’m quite confident that he’s well on his way to creating the patient problem solving society he talks about.
You can follow Dan on Twitter (@ddMeyer) or read more about his work on his blog.
