Is it all about the audience?

One of the more common half-truths regarding public speaking is that it’s not about you, it’s about your audience. Mary Darling used it for the title of an article posted on a Psychology Today blog on March 5: How to Give a Presentation, Part 1: It's not about you. She said that:

“….The bottom line is: It's not about you - it's about your audience.”

Similarly, in a blog post on February 25 Lisa Braithwaite said that:

“….It's ALWAYS about the audience. It's not about you.”

Last April in a CIO magazine article on how to Conquer Your Fear of Public Speaking Maryfran Johnson also said that:

“…your focus needs to be in one place only—on your audience. It's not about you. It's all about them.”

Is this the whole truth?, Well, not exactly (as some Hertz car rental ads used to say). Without the presenter there would be no presentation, and the audience would not be sitting there listening. However, the statement is intended to wake the speaker from narcissism and the commonly held opposite viewpoint that it’s all about me. For a hilarious illustration, see this Savage Chickens cartoon about cell phone users.

A speech is a two-way communication. There is a transmitter (mostly the speaker), and receivers (mostly members of the audience). Information is being transferred, like the painting shown below, with some of the contents of a bucket being poured into a vase or jar. If things go well there is a focus on the audience, and the vase doesn’t get overfilled.

Audience-centered speaking is not a new idea. In his 1936 book on How to Win Friends and Influence People Dale Carnegie said to:

"Talk in terms of the other person's interests."

In the February 1938 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, the Denver writer and novelist Marian Castle lamented that:

“….I am tired of the Gimme school of oratory. I beg that every speaker who is about to take from his hearers their only irreplaceable possession - time – be required first to spend five minutes in silent meditation examining his motives to see whether his speech is being given for the good of his hearers, or only for the good of his own soul.”

The Wikimania audience photo is by Joi Ito.

Why less is more – or even less

On March 7th Bob Malloney posted an article titled Public Speaking - Why Less Is More. He began by lamenting that most business presentations he heard suffered from information overload. They could have been improved by presenting less information. Cut your presentation down until it is simple and powerful, with just a few main points.

The aphorism of minimalism that “less is more” is commonly associated with the German-American architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who lived from 1886 to 1969.

Stephen D. Boyd also said it about speech writing for public speaking with a few more words:

“…follow the proverb, ‘Less is better than more.’ Never use three words when you can say it in two.”

Similarly, the chief engineer of Douglas Aircraft, Ed Heinemann, said to:

“Simplicate, and add lightness.”

Heinemann was particularly famous as the designer of the agile, little, delta-winged A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft. If you saw the movie Top Gun, then you saw the instructors in their Skyhawks merrily harassing the bigger, faster F-14 Tomcats. (For 13 seasons the Navy’s aerobatic team, the Blue Angels, flew Skyhawks).

Minimalism in all kinds of design involves an optimum, so “less is more” is a half-truth. It really calls for cutting out the fat while leaving the meat. You cannot keep cutting and expect that a design with zero content would be infinitely effective. Instead it probably would be completely ineffective. So, really less is more – until it is less.

Half-truths and public speaking

Don’t you hate hearing half-truths? I do! It doesn’t matter whether you think the glass is half-full or half-empty. Either way you are getting an incomplete story. In the next couple of posts I’m going to look at these two half-truths:

“Less is more!” and “It’s all about the audience!”

Stay tuned for more.

Storytelling Know-How

Most public speakers can learn about gestures, vocal variety, and body language by watching storytellers. I just saw a recent DVD video by Rick Sowash about Storytelling Know-How for Teachers, Preachers, and Speech-ifiers. The Boise Public Library has a copy. He observes that most of us need to add more expression, to quit talking like we are on the telephone. You can download the accompanying discussion guide here.

Mr. Sowash is an Ohio character, mostly a composer and book author. In a newspaper interview he said:

"I've been a radio broadcaster, theater manager, innkeeper and a county commissioner in Richland County, Mansfield. I think I'm the only composer of classical music elected to public office in America."

You can view him presenting to a school audience from his Heroes of Ohio program here.

Joy of Getting to the PowerPoint

We had a trifecta this week at our Capitol Club Toastmasters meeting - all three speakers used PowerPoint and they all used it effectively.

PowerPoint has a plethora of defaults and options. For his first presentation a newcomer may start with some ineffective defaults. For the second presentation he might add options like clip art, or using all the possible slide transitions. The result could be almost completely ineffective. Eventually he will settle down and deliver a clear presentation with his own personal style.


















Back on June 16, 2008 I mentioned Don McMillan’s hilarious 4-minute comedy video on Life after Death by PowerPoint. He updated it last year to a 10-minute video called Life After Death by PowerPoint 2010. Don claims that PowerPoint caused the mortgage meltdown. He discusses SAOD (Severe Acronym Overload Disorder), which I have called DIA for Drowning in Acronyms. At 7:02 he shows a line graph of # of line graphs. (Stay tuned, because that curve shape will show up again in one of my posts). Also, at 9:10 Don refers to those almost useless 3D pie charts as cake charts.

There is an excellent recent white paper by Ellen Finkelstein called From Death by PowerPoint to Life by PowerPoint that you can download for free here.

Missing the (Power)Point

In his Manner of Speaking blog on February 25th, John Zimmer discussed Power Point Math: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. His post illustrates how to miss the point - how NOT to discuss large numbers in a presentation.

John begins by mentioning two statistics about PowerPoint presentations from the eighth slide in a BBC magazine article. These originally were that:

“Businesses globally make an estimated 30 million PowerPoint presentations each day.”

and

“The average PowerPoint session runs for 250 minutes, from startup to shutdown.”

Then he proceeds to ignore both statistics. (Why would you do that to your audience?) Instead he assumes that there are 1 million presentations given per day, and that the average presentation runs for 1 hour. He adds an additional assumption that:

“…the average PowerPoint presentation involves 15 people (audience, presenter and technicians all included).”

John multiplies, and finds that there are 15 million hours of people’s time each day spent watching PowerPoint presentations. Then he divides that number by 8760 to convert from hours to years, and arrives at a figure of 1712 years. He notes that the Roman Empire didn’t last that long.

My high school chemistry teacher used to emphasize dimensional analysis - that you always need to watch the units attached to numbers that you calculate. If we take the 15 million man-hours per day and divide by 24 (hours in a day), the result is 625,000 men. That’s more like holiday audience for the Pope than the life span of the Roman Empire!

Let’s go back to the two quoted statistics. 250 minutes (or 4.166 hours) actually is the average time spent by a man for preparing a PowerPoint presentation, so when we multiply by 30 million per day we arrive at a larger figure of 125,000,000 man hours per day. What does that really mean?

Let’s put it into a global perspective. According to the US Census bureau, the 2010 world population is about 6,831,000,000 people. Assuming that we put everybody to work for 8 hours per day, there potentially could be 54,648,000,000 man-hours available per day. So, we would only be consuming 0.23% of that global effort in preparing presentations.

Another perspective could compare how preparing PowerPoint stacks up relative to building something truly exceptional. The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza took about 1,150,100,000 man hours (or 131,200 man-years) to build, so just preparing presentations each day takes about a ninth of a Pyramid.









Still another perspective could come from converting man-hours into dollars. Back in 2003 Dave Paradi estimated that 15 million man hours per day really was just the wasted effort due to PowerPoint, or $252 million dollars per day. In a comment on John’s post I referred to Dave’s estimate. Max Atkinson also commented that he had calculated the annual waste in the UK. Shouldn’t we be more interested in the waste rather than the total?

A more complete estimate really should consider the time spent (or wasted) per day both in preparing and in watching presentations.

The Great Pyramid image on Wikimedia Commons is from Nina Aldin Thune.

Is there really a pandemic of public speaking fear?

Now that the swine flu pandemic finally seems to be dying down, I think it is time to talk about another claimed pandemic.

Mark Twain once said something like there are just two types of speakers - those that are nervous and those that are liars. Almost everyone is at least slightly nervous about speaking, but that is fear with a very small f.

However, if you uncritically believe what you read on the web from some public speaking coaches, then FEAR of public speaking is the biggest darned pandemic around! For example, according to Doug Staneart:

“Surveys show that 95% of the population admit to feeling fear of public speaking or stage fright.”

(Presumably the other 5% also are feeling that same fear, but just won’t admit it). Vincent Stevenson said 90%. Patricia Stark said 80%. Marion Claire even said 65% of us would rather die than speak in public!

If there really was that high of a level of significant fear, then by now we should be having several public service announcements, and telethons. There might also be another large celebrity group song including performances by Bono, Jimmy Buffet, Sting, and Barbara Streisand.

Those large figures, like 95%, don’t necessarily refer to a significant fear. In another article Staneart more clearly says that:

“….95% of the population has some type of fear of public speaking.”

Realistically, about 20% of the US population has a fear of public speaking. That’s a fear with a small f. About half that, or 10% has a phobia about public speaking (a FEAR with a very large F), but saying 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 isn’t as dramatic as including nearly everyone. Those much smaller numbers are less likely to get attention for promoting courses or seminars.

There really is not a pandemic. The fear is not contagious. You don’t need to cover your mouth with a handkerchief (or wear a face mask).