Back in 2006 there was a 100-page ebook by Andy Goodman titled Why Bad Presentations Happen To Good Causes, which you can download from the Goodman Center. I blogged about it on August 10, 2008 in a post titled Free e-book on presentations, with a great story.
An appendix in that ebook describes an online survey done beginning on January 5, 2005 which had 2,501 responses. It listed 16 problems that can affect presentations, and asked both how frequent and how harmful that was. Frequency was reported on a scale from 1 = Never to 5 = Always, and harmfulness on a scale from 1 = Not harmful at all to 5 = Extremely harmful. Answers were reported on pages 84 and 85 as tables of percentages for each of those five levels (plus Don’t know). But it is not obvious how to compare those percentages between questions.
On October 30, 2015 I blogged about how According to the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, adults are less than Afraid of federal government Corruption and only Slightly Afraid of Public Speaking. That post showed how to calculate a Fear Score from their survey results. These results can be summarized by a Harmfulness Score (or a Frequency Score) similarly calculated by a linear formula and reported on a scale from 1 to 5):
Harmfulness Score = [1*(Level 1 %) + 2*(Leve1 2 %)
+ 3*(Leve1 3 %) + 4*(Leve1 4 %) + 5*(Leve1 5%)]/100
Based on harmfulness 13 of 16 problems were ranked above 3 (middle of the scale), but based on frequency just 2 of 16 were. Harmfulness Scores and rankings for the sixteen problems [and Frequency Scores and their rankings] are as follows:
01) The speaker was not well prepared: 4.18 [2.43 #13]
02) The speaker did not connect with the audience: 4.04 [2.91 #3]
03) The material was poorly organized: 3.89 [2.72 #7]
04) The objective was not made relevant to the audience’s concerns: 3.86 [2.72 #8]
05) The overall objective of the talk was not clear to the audience: 3.81 [2.56 #11]
06) The presentation ran too long: 3.5 [3.21 #2]
07) Time was not allocated to ask questions or engage the presenter in a discussion: 3.44 [2.87 #4]
08) The presentation duplicated the content of the slides and/or handouts without adding anything significant: 3.44 [3.40 #1]
09) The amount of material presented was overwhelming: 3.39 [2.81 #6]
10) Technical problems (e.g. poor sound system, malfunctioning projector) disrupted the presentation: 3.37 [2.60 #10]
11) The material was overly complex: 3.34 [2.39 #14]
12) Sufficient time was not allowed for the presenter to cover all the material: 3.22 [2.84 #5]
13) There was not enough information to help the audience make a decision or reach a conclusion: 3.21 [2.49 #12]
14) The presentation was not tailored to the size of the audience: 2.89 [2.38 #15]
15) Translating the material into PowerPoint templates (e.g. bullet lists) made it more difficult to understand, less interesting, or both 2.84 [2.64 #9]
16) The speaker was too nervous: 2.82 [2.18, #16]
Note that The speaker was too nervous ranked #16 based on both harmfulness and frequency. So novice speakers (like new Toastmasters) shouldn’t sweat over that.
Bar charts for both scales are shown above.
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