At Work Newswire

By Lisa A. Sisco

Over the past 20 years I have sat through thousands of presentations, many that have been terribly boring. Unlike most rhetorical situations in which audiences are too polite and professional to say so, I am not shy about admitting I am bored or confused. In many ways I act as an audience advocate, making sure that the presenter addresses audience needs, since it is quite easy to give a bland presentation which gets the information out there, but which does not hold anyone’s attention.

Of course, if I say to someone “You’re boring me,” or “Why should I care about this?” I then have a responsibility to help that speaker make the presentation more interesting and engaging to the audience. How do we do that?

I’ll explain through an example. I once sat through a very dry overview of strategies for promoting tourist destinations, a presentation based on an academic article. The first draft of the presentation was almost a verbatim repetition of the information in the article. It was correct, well organized and clearly explained, but not very interesting. The PowerPoint slides were long, bulleted lists of academic information without much relevance or context.

The information was correct; the delivery was competent; but I was not engaged in the material. So I asked the presenter why she had chosen to discuss this particular topic and why the information was important to her and her audience, because there was no evidence of either in the presentation.

It turned out that the student was involved in promoting tourism in Thailand after the devastating tsunami and that the academic information was clearly important to the tourist industry’s efforts to rejuvenate traveler interest in Thailand.

Once we discussed this personal connection, it was clear that the speaker did have a compelling reason to speak and a concern for the needs of her audience, but neither was evident in her presentation. We discussed these issues and the revised presentation, delivered several days later, was entirely different.

Of course, the relevant information was still communicated, but the entire framework of the presentation had changed. It began with a personal story about the tsunami and its impact on tourism in Thailand; it included breathtaking before and after photographs of the resort areas and the generic academic content was applied to the specific situation.

A second layer, which had not existed in the earlier draft of the presentation, was added. As a result, the basic, raw information was transformed into compelling and relevant content.

Interestingly, once the content of the presentation was revised, the speaker’s delivery style changed dramatically as well without much conscious effort on her part. Since the speaker had already gathered informative content, once she thought more consciously about why this information was important and relevant to her, she had much more of a personal connection to the material, which came through to the audience

She was more energetic, more engaged and more excited to talk about how the information related to her interest in Thailand, which also was her home. The speaker gained credibility as a result and the audience enjoyed a more dynamic presentation.

Content can be the key

In fact, a renewed focus on content is, in many instances, the solution to problems with presentation delivery skills. If a presenter is nervous, inexperienced or unsure of his speaking abilities, these insecurities can negatively impact the presentation delivery. Typically, this is a result of self-consciousness.

But shifting that intense focus from one’s physical self to an intense focus on the message being delivered (transferring self-consciousness into other-consciousness) frequently helps minimize nervousness. A speaker is much less likely to be distracted by self-consciousness if she is expertly prepared, full of excitement about her topic and dying to share her information with her audience.

Imagine, for example, that you had just won $1 million dollars in the lottery and you were dying to tell everyone about your good fortune—how likely is it that you’d be concerned about your delivery skills?

I have seen this phenomenon countless times: a professional chef who gives a serious, academic discussion about the benefits of fat-free food, but whose personality and delivery blossoms the minute she brings out the fat-free, blueberry torte she has created to provide evidence of her claims. Same person, same situation, same topic, but the pride and excitement she felt upon sharing her torte with her audience transformed the presentation.

This article is adapted from Lisa A. Sisco’s “Strategic Communication: Persuasion at Work” (MindEdge 2006). Sisco is a Professor in the Alan Shawn Feinstein Graduate School at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island where she teaches courses in written and oral communications in the MBA program with an emphasis on effective business writing.

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Copyright © 2006-2007 Lisa A. Sisco

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