Wednesday, August 4th. 10AM. The Aeronautics Student Forum.

My lab is lined up in the front row, fidgeting, exchanging nervous glances. We trade seats between the other students’ presentations, taking turns with the laptop to read over the half-done powerpoint.

The motion tracking camera system is set up (we were in the building until 10pm the previous night, testing our hardware and software, ensuring it’d all be ready to demo). One of the cameras lurks beside the white screen, ominous, a constant reminder that it’s our turn in an hour, and like or not, we don’t have our finalized slides and some of us don’t even know for sure whether we’ll be speaking.

It was nerve-wracking.

It was also remarkably exciting.

Presentations, preparation, control

I usually plan presentations out to the last sentence. I know I’m not an improv whiz, so I practice my talk out loud over and over. Any slides I have, they’re done at least two nights ahead of time. Practice, preparation, organization. No need to worry because I have everything under control.

This presentation at the aero forum was the opposite.

The previous week, to the relief of my labmates, I’d tried to organize everything (the slides, the talks, the demo). But our mentor, Garry, told us not to worry about any of it. He kept repeating that: don’t worry. It’s just a presentation.

None of us were convinced.

It wasn’t until Garry sat down with me and explained what he had in mind–how he was going to help compile photos and diagrams into a logical order–that I trusted he was right. No need to worry. He had given scores of presentations. He had good ideas. He frequently pulled things together last-minute. It’d be okay.

In short, when he explained that, I consciously relinquished control. I mentioned control (and the lack thereof) in the context of volleyball games with my lab. The same idea comes into play here: Setting perfectionism aside, trusting that someone else is competent enough to get the job done. Teamwork. All that good stuff.

Coming together last-minute

Garry showed up not long after 10AM, printed copies of the finalized powerpoint in hand. As our time slot approached, my labmates and I shuffled discretely through the slides, still worried, still anxious.

Our turn came. We trooped up to the podium, all nine of us. We spoke. Twenty minutes, all told (not too long, really), plus the demo. We explained our newly established Autonomous Vehicle Lab, its capabilities, and what the audience would see in the demo. We flew our quadcopter. We demonstrated object tracking and obstacle avoidance.

It went well. It went better than well: our presentation was splendid.

Everyone knew what to say. Everyone was clear, concise, and comprehensible. Perhaps it was because we were not prepared that we were prepared: rehearsing, in our minds, coherent sentences about our parts of the project. Recapitulating our work with the quadcopters, the DGPS system, the Vicon cameras, the many vehicles and pieces of software. Unsure of what we would need to say, and thus, preparing for the worst.

If not for Garry’s persistent “don’t worry about it”s, I would never have experienced a presentation this way. I’d have planned out that talk and every one after, never daring take a chance on not preparing enough and not practicing enough. Now I know. Our aero forum talk was proof: Things can come together last-minute.

That said, I think I still like having my slides done more than an hour before the presentation. As engrossing an adventure as it was, last-minute isn’t going to become my style.

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.

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].