In the past few months, I have watched a few webinars on structural engineering topics and have come away wondering why I wasted my time. It wasn’t so much the technical content per se or the knowledge or earnestness of the presenters but the poor quality of the presentations themselves disturbed me so much that I couldn’t focus on the content. The words just became “blah, blah, blah,” I tuned out and became a movie critic with running commentary. Many of you might already be thinking that if I am such a presentation hotshot, why I don’t do them myself and show us how it is done. Hence this article.
I do not have a formal educational background in communications. But I have a wealth of practical experience and, as a consumer of information, feel compelled to share some thoughts on how engineers can do better. This article addresses presentations one might give in an in-house business setting, at a client presentation, an interview for a potential project, or a webinar.
Tell an Overarching Interesting Story
This is the most important takeaway I can offer. In preparing for a presentation, give considerable thought to the audience: what they know and don’t know, what is and is not of interest to them, and what you think they want to learn from you. If you aren’t sure about any of this, then ask someone who is. I can’t count the number of presentations I attended when the topic was something that most of the audience wasn’t particularly interested in or had seen before – to some extent, a rerun, you might say. I wish the presenters had asked other people about the proposed content and their thoughts. It would have saved everyone a lot of time, and more important topics could have been discussed. I highly recommend that an appropriate amount of time be spent putting together the presentation, so it doesn’t come across as poorly planned or thrown together at the last minute.
Once you have this basic information down, craft an overarching story woven together with the information you want to convey and present it in a manner that the audience will find interesting. Everyone likes a good story.
It’s okay to keep things simple. You don’t need to explain every facet of a topic to your audience
Like any good movie, your presentation needs to start strongly. Start with what you are going to tell them. This engages them and grabs your audience’s attention. I love the opening scene of the original Top Gun movie. When the blast detectors flip up, the music gets louder, the afterburners ignite, and the pilot salutes the carrier deck crew, I know I am in for a good time.
Then tell them. Have a reasonable number of important topics you want the audience to take away. Something like three or four. If you get to the end and the audience can’t remember the first few things you mentioned, you have too many topics. It is important to stay on point and stick to the script. If you start wandering, your audience’s attention will begin wandering too. And there is always the need to finish on time.
Then tell them what you told them. This is executive summary time. It is not time to repeat the entire presentation. You need to repeat the three or four main topics and why they are important to the audience.
Takeaway: Make an interesting presentation so that the audience feels it was a good use of their time.
Use Easily Understandable Examples
When explaining technical topics, provide a broad framework, and then move on to simple examples that allow the audience to understand the main points. Add bells and whistles if necessary. This approach lets the audience ramp up to the “same page” as the presenter. Going straight into highly technical issues will leave the audience scrambling to catch up, generate lots of questions, or worse, likely tuning out altogether.
A recent webinar I watched dealt with the design of lateral bracing elements for steel buildings. Rather than start with an example building that was symmetrically square or rectangular, the example building had a plan irregularity (re-entrant corners) and had torsion (due to the location of the braces relative to the center of mass). The building code requires so much additional computation for the design of irregular buildings that the lesson on how to design the bracing elements was obscured.
An analogy comes to mind. Beginning pilots start by learning how to fly simple, one-engine planes. This is so that they can focus on learning how to fly. After they master that skill, they graduate to two-engine planes, which I understand are significantly more complex and harder to fly. The extra difficulty is not so much the flying part but because there are so many other things that can go wrong, like losing an engine during takeoff. Engineers who try to learn how to design a highly complex system before they understand the basics will forever follow an example they saw in a book without really understanding what they are doing or why. Crashing hurts.
Takeaway: It’s okay to keep things simple. You don’t need to explain every facet of a topic to your audience.
Graphics
Graphics need to add information that mere words cannot convey. Use your graphics to present visual information that supplements the spoken word, not repeat the words the presenter will speak. The audience can either listen to you or read your slides, but they can’t do both simultaneously.
Too often, presentations contain graphics that could be in almost any presentation since they basically all look the same, are too small in scale for anyone that doesn’t have the eyesight of a military pilot to read, or are of a nature that the viewer can’t immediately recognize what they are seeing.
As an example of what doesn’t add value, I think about hysteresis loops. Showing them is essentially a waste of time. We know that laboratory testing produces such data, and the loop shapes are important in judging the test results. If one is writing for an academic journal, they need to be included, but not in most general interest presentations. Just say that the hysteresis loop is pinched or not pinched and move on. Give your audience a little credit and assume they know what you are telling them.
Graphics that only look good at a full-screen IMAX theater don’t work in a PowerPoint presentation or many other places. If you have to explain to an audience what they are looking at, then the graphic is too small.
Most engineers are not the greatest photographers. Every marketing professional that I have ever met has said in my presence, “I wish the engineers had taken some decent pictures when they were there.” Mobile phones have improved the situation when it comes to taking a picture, since the phone’s camera is smarter than the photographer. Again, if you feel the need to explain a photograph to the audience, pick another one.
Also, don’t show an image, graphic, calculation, or formula and then immediately say, “we don’t have time to go into that today.” The audience naturally then asks themselves why you bothered to show it to them in the first place. Or they wonder if the presentation they are watching is a re-run that was pruned down from a larger presentation that you have given before but were too lazy to edit for them. During one of the recent presentations that I alluded to at the outset, the presenter mentioned this four or five times.
Takeaway: A few understandable and informative graphics are far better than too many.
Presence and Speaking Style
Speak in a style and pace that conveys to your audience that you are honored for their invitation and allows them to comprehend what you are telling them. Make and hold eye contact. Don’t read from your notes. Speaking to strangers doesn’t come naturally to many people, engineers particularly, so don’t feel bad. Neither does hitting a golf ball or a 90-mile-per-hour fastball. But you can take lessons, practice, and get better. No one expects an engineer to be a good speaker, so being above average puts you in elite company.
When I was a young engineer, my employer encouraged many staff to take a two- or three-day class called Speakeasy. It was a public speaking boot camp that taught the basics and emphasized the benefits of practice, as embarrassing as that can be when you have to watch yourself on a recording. We practiced during the day, then later in front of a mirror by ourselves, and finally in front of our families in the evening after we went home. I can still picture the people and the room after over 30 years. I don’t recall that anyone really wanted to attend the class, but after we graduated, we were all happy that we did. Our families got a good laugh too. I understand that Toastmasters is also good.
Takeaway: Put in the effort if you want good results.
Practice the Presentation
I said earlier that the most important takeaway was to have a compelling overarching story. But I was wrong. The most important thing is to practice delivering the presentation. Engineers who are not fond of making presentations naturally are not fond of practicing either, but if you don’t, all is for naught. Several issues can be corrected while practicing: 1) the overall message, 2) the content, 3) the graphics, and 4) the time.
I recommend that you get an audience of two or three people to listen to the presentation. They will be able to critique your message and help you emphasize the necessary points. When you hear yourself speak, you will likely immediately self-correct your message and decide what should be left out and what to add. When you get really good, you won’t need notes. After you have practiced several times, the flow becomes more natural, and your notes become less important. This feedback is essential for webinars since the presenter will not receive visual clues from the audience.
Speakers have an idea in their heads as to what the important points are or the content they want to convey, but until the words are spoken, they really don’t know how it will come across. Your practice audience will be able to critique the words you choose, the graphics, and the points of emphasis and let you know if your message registered with them or not. If you are like me, sometimes the words leave me at a dead end that is difficult to get out of. Now is the time to fix the presentation, not during the after-presentation de-brief when all of the “I should have done this and that…” comes out.
Presenters always want to show more graphics (or words) than are necessary. The graphics supplement the spoken word. An experienced presenter knows that if there is more than one picture or slide for every two or three minutes of presentation, there are too many.
And lastly, focus on time and pace. An excellent presentation will finish on time without leaving time on the table or rushing to the end. This demonstrates respect for the audience and shows them you are committed and took the time to get everything right for them. If this is a presentation to a client for a project, this will instill confidence in them that the project will be well done too. Now is the time to do some pruning so that your actual presentation doesn’t become a race to flip through all of the slides before the clock hits 0:00 or you say, “We don’t have time to go into that today.”
Takeaway: When you think you have practiced enough, do it one more time.
In conclusion, tell an overarching story, with an explanation at the beginning of what you will tell the audience and conclude with the summary. Use easily understood examples supported by graphics that the audience can readily comprehend. Work on your speaking skills, even if you think they are adequate, and then practice, practice, practice. And then practice some more.