Have you inflicted one of these presentations on your audience? According to presentation trainer Olivia Mitchell, these seven types are all a result of a lack of planning or the wrong sort of planning. Do you recognize yourself here? If you do, don’t beat yourself up over it, but resolve not to do it again! Visit Olivia's website for more presentation tips.
Click through for seven presentation types you should avoid as identified by presentation trainer Olivia Mitchell.
This presenter is in love with their topic and wants to share it all with you – every nuance, every subtlety, every story. Their passion and enthusiasm is great, but it’s not tempered with any discipline, which results in information overload for the audience.
A presentation should be a taster for what you have to share and raise awareness of your topic.
The “grab bag” presentation is one where the presenter has a miscellany of points that are only loosely related to each other and appear in no structured order. Olivia has seen highly experienced, professional speakers fall into the trap of the “grab bag” presentation.
The solution to the grab bag presentation is to plan your presentation around a key message. That provides you with a focus.
This presentation contains point, after point, after point. Often presented as bullet-point slide after bullet-point slide after bullet-point slide. It’s deadly dull. There’s no variety, no light and shade. It may be organized but it lacks any evidence: stories, case studies, endorsements, metaphors or analogies.
The antidote to the shopping list presentation is to include evidence to back up each of your points. Olivia has analyzed speeches from Al Gore, Seth Godin, and Malcolm Gladwell, and 60 to 70 percent of their speeches were composed of evidence.
This is the opposite of the shopping list presentation. The presentation is chock full of stories, anecdotes, jokes, shocking statistics and metaphors. It’s highly entertaining and engaging – but an hour later when you try and work out what you learned – there’s a void.
To avoid this, plan your presentation using a solid three-part structure. Clothe your structure with your stories and anecdotes.
This presentation might be well-planned and have a good balance of points and evidence, but the presenter hasn’t rehearsed and timed it. Pretty soon, they become aware they’re not going to have enough time to cover everything they planned, and the race is on! Every two minutes they say things like: “I’ll just cover this quickly,” “If I have enough time, I’ll let you know about X,” or “I wish I had more time to tell you about this.”
Simple solution: rehearse and time your presentation.
This is the presentation where the presenter holds back the most important point till the end – like a whodunnit. Sometimes this can work but it needs to be carefully planned. More often, the “mystery novel” presentation happens because the presenter didn’t think about the needs of the audience and simply followed their own train of thought, which resulted in a conclusion at the end.
Olivia recommends that you start with your conclusion, but as with everything there are exceptions to that rule.
Consider a presentation to be like an airplane journey. The ideal presentation gets you in the air quickly. But some presentations spend so long on “background,” “methodology,” and “who we are” that they never get into the air. The audience never gets taken anywhere.
Limit the introductory information and get to the core of your message as quickly as possible.
