Agent Plus Environment

Improbability and confidence

Scene: One of those big college gyms, set up with fencing strips from wall to wall. People everywhere, fencers shouting and scoring machines buzzing, referees struggling to be heard above the din. I’m about to start my next 5-point bout. “You’ve got this!” my teammate says. An optimistic pat on my shoulder accompanies the words.

Stop right there.

I don’t “got this.” I won’t have “got this” until the score is 5-something in my favor. Sure, it may be improbable that I would lose the bout, given my opponent. My teammate was merely expressing confidence in my abilities (and I appreciate that). But the way the encouraging statement was phrased expressed an assured certainty that I personally cannot associate with future events. The outcome of a bout–the outcome of anything, really–is in no way fixed until it’s over.

Maybe that’s just semantics and a personal irritant. Expectations can, and do, go a long way toward fixing an outcome.

No harm in faking it

During a lesson with a coach last year, I was having a lot of trouble executing a particular action. He stopped the lesson. He looked me in the eye, and said, “Repeat after me: ‘Hells yeah I can do this action!’”

His intent: Increased confidence. If you expect to succeed, your chances of success improve dramatically.

I repeated the phrase, as directed. I then had to repeat it several more times before I achieved the desired level of confidence in my tone. The action I was practicing worked better after that, though. I was a little more convinced I could do it.

Of course, just being more confident won’t win a bout. Expecting to win–not doubting that you can win–still needs to be paired with good performance. If you think you’ll beat your opponents because your opponents just isn’t good enough to beat you, well, you still have to do your part and be good enough to beat them. Over-confidence sets you up for disappointment. The reverse is true, too: If you’re convinced you’ll fail, guess what, you probably will.

Another sports analogy Presentations!

We’re not all athletes here, so I have another example! Have you ever had to stand up in front of a roomful of people and talk coherently and engagingly? Presentations: the bane of our existence.

One class, three folks and I were going to give a half hour presentation. The morning of, our professor asked us if we were ready. I told him, of course! It’ll be great. “What if you stuff up?” he asked us. “What if your voice squeaks?” No, I said, it’d be fine. If my voice squeaks, my voice squeaks. I didn’t let the possibility of anything other than “this will go fine” enter my mind. “Can’t faze you, can I,” he said.

Truth was, I could be fazed. Like many people, if I stopped to think about it, I’d forget what I was saying, talk too fast, stumble over words–I have experience with that. But in this case, I was remembering all those little bits of good advice I’d been given. Hells yeah, I could do this. Or my dad’s advice: “Act like you’re supposed to be there, and no one will question you.” Act like you know what you’re doing and everyone will think you do–including yourself.

Conclusion

Confidence is good. Over-confidence is bad. Go figure.

Snapshot: Classroom

Tap tap tap. That’s your pencil hitting the edge of your desk, one rhythmic note at a time. The wood of the pencil has a little indent now from all the tapping (unless you use a mechanical pencil), but at least you’re still awake. The kid next to you has been slumped over his notebook for the past half hour. You’re pretty sure he’s snoring. He has every reason to be, though; the professor has a fantastically monotone voice. Bullet point after bullet point, slide after slide. It’s not like you have to pay attention, either–everything the professor is saying is in the lecture notes handed out at the start of class. But you feel obligated to try to stay awake.

Death by Power Point

Is this at all familiar? Most of us, at some point or another, have experienced the ultimate Boring Lecture: A droning, not-quite-loud-enough voice, reading sentences one by one off a set of elaborate PowerPoint slides. The slides look pretty, sure, but fancy formatting can’t overcome the serious lack of anything remotely engaging.

Fortunately, most lecturers aren’t that bad. But as my friend Carolyn points out, a lot of professors still rely too heavily on PowerPoint. The primary instruction, she says, needs to come from the professors, not from the text slopped across their slides.

And it’s true. A lecture is a performance, and Hubert Knoblauch’s (2008) analysis of PowerPoint presentations suggests that the use of PowerPoint serves to amplify the performance aspect. Slides should complement rather than replace the presenter’s speech. They should be used to emphasize points and help explain difficult concepts with diagrams and photos; after all, a separate sheet of lecture notes with all the text of the bullet points can be handed out later. This may sound obvious, but in practice, most of us conform to convention of cluttering up our slides with too many words and too much visual noise.

Keep it simple, stupid

How do we fix this problem and avoid death by PowerPoint? Garr Reynolds recommends a highly minimalist approach (he’s got a handout[pdf] summarizing his suggestions). Instead of lists and summaries, put just a few key words boldly in the middle of the slide. Use large images and diagrams. Turn off the projector entirely when you happen to digress from the slides. Remove excess logos and irrelevant graphics–they’re just visual noise that detract from your message.

It may take some effort to get the hang of the minimalist presentation (I certainly haven’t gotten it down, though I try), and it will certainly take some guts to be the nonconformist who doesn’t use bullet points. One of my professors at the University of Sydney told a story about a student who went minimalist and was marked down as a result: It wasn’t a proper presentation! (The audience, however, said it was one of the best presentations they had seen in a long time.)

A place for everything

That said, bullet points occasionally have their place: e.g., when the goal is to memorize facts (Kinchin & Cabot, 2007). But if the aim is to make links between concepts and gain a deeper understanding of the subject, other methods of presenting information may fare better.

I’ll open up the floor. What tips and tricks do you keep up your sleeve for making a PowerPoint engaging? Do you adhere to minimalism? Obviously, it’s not all about the slides–it’s also about delivery. Feel free to share thoughts on that, too.

References:
Knoblauch, H. (2008). The Performance of Knowledge: Pointing and Knowledge in Powerpoint Presentations. Cultural Sociology, 2(75):75-97. [PDF]

Kinchin, I., & Cabot, L. (2007). Using concept mapping principles in PowerPoint. Eur J Dent Educ, 11: 194-199. [PDF].