When Nancy Duarte (2009) outlined the five key principles for effective presentations, I was at first shocked that they were so simple.  Yet, I was also shocked at how bad most presentations are.  Over the last two decades, I’ve had a chance to attend some truly world class presentations from expert speakers.  Among others, I’ve heard Sal Khan, Sugata Mitra, and even Steve Wozniak!  All three of those presenters were exciting, energetic, and engaging with their audience.  The Woz even rode into the room on a Segway before taking the stage and beginning his presentation!!

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many more very poorly executed presentations in those same number of years.  Sadly, I’ve delivered many of them myself.  When I think about what Sal Khan and the others did that really set them apart from the bad presentations, it was hard to pinpoint exactly what that was until reviewing Duarte’s list.  All of them used slides of some sort, all of them had some sort of message to deliver, and all of them had a room full of people who came to hear what they were saying.  The difference was the engagement with the audience.

When Duarte talked about treating your audience as king, that’s exactly what all of these presenters did.  The Woz rode around the floor on a Segway giving high-fives and fist bumps to everyone he could reach.  It didn’t matter what was in his presentation at that point, he engaged directly with us and we were hooked.  Duarte also talked about spreading simple ideas and moving people. If you’ve ever heard Sugata Mitra’s TED talk about the hole-in-the-wall computer, that is such an incredibly moving and powerful story.  Finally, the Duarte talked about practicing design instead of decoration.  That’s exactly what Sal Khan did with his presentations.  No fluff, no fancy graphics, just him literally drawing on a light board!  He kept the message simple without unnecessary frills, and he focused on the content that was important in a way that was engaging for his audience.

Each of these presenters found a way to cultivate a relationship with all of the people in their audience.  Each of them used slides as digital scenery for the story they were telling or the information they were conveying.  Each of them put very little information on each slide, or broke up the presentation with short videos, or interesting quotes.  In a way, each of them presented to me like I was just a guy they knew and were telling me a story about something that interested them.  It wouldn’t have mattered if there were 50 people in the room or 50,000 people in an auditorium.  It was this familiarity with the audience that helped me have the courage to engage in small talk with a million-dollar TED Prize winner who happened to sit down next to me at some slot machines in Las Vegas.

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