Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes - The Goodman ...

The Sorry State of the Art
Why the Average Presentation Earns a Below-Average Grade
The word “presentation” can mean different things to different people. When we first
began designing our survey, we consulted with colleagues who asked questions such as,
“Are you including an impromptu five-minute talk at a staff meeting?” “Are speeches
presentations?” “What about day-long workshops?”
We wanted to keep the definition fairly broad in order to help a wide range of
presenters, so we used the first few questions in our survey to let respondents set the
parameters themselves. For better or worse, here are the specifications they provided for
the average public interest presentation:
The Average Presentation Defined
length
audience size
use of visuals
use of handouts
interaction between
speaker & audience
interaction between
audience members
10–60 minutes (with most running approx. 20 minutes)
10–50 people
62% of presentations use visuals of some sort, with
PowerPoint being the visual application of choice.
60% of presenters provide handouts to their audience.
24% of presentations feature interaction between
speaker and audience beyond traditional Q&A
(e.g., speaker circulates among audience during breakouts).
8% of presenters ask audience members to interact with
each other in the course of a presentation.
Of particular note here are the exceptionally low percentages reported for the last two
categories. As you will see in the results that follow, audience members want to interact
with the people in the room. They appreciate opportunities to draw upon the expertise
of presenters (beyond what the typical question-and-answer session offers), but they
see such opportunities as rare. They also consider their fellow audience members to be
potential resources, but opportunities to interact with them are viewed as even fewer and
farther between.
Even though these first few questions were intended to elicit a neutral picture of the
average presentation, the responses were already pointing up areas of deficiency. And that,
as they say, was just for starters.
pg. 9