Last year about this time I was dabbling on the Web, searching for video related to brain functioning, when I stumbled across fascinating research called Brain Computer Interface. Unfortunately I can’t now locate the site I studied back then (although there is downloadable video at TCTS Lab—requires divx codex), but the idea was to have computers interpret brainwaves. The goal of this particular project was to help paraplegics gain functional movement. The subjects imagined movement in their mind (such as picking up a glass) and a computer interpreted those thoughts and guided robotic devices attached to subjects’ arms. I was struck at the time by how such experiments are further blurring the concept of “objective” reality and what little we know about the potential power of our thoughts.
I then started wondering how thoughts (and view of reality) influence the effectiveness of our digital communications. To what extent do an audience member’s concepts, perceptions, and assumptions dictate what he or she takes away from a live presentation? Apparently such psychological components are enormously important. As presenters, the visuals we use can have impact beyond their obvious intent, especially in the context of interactive presentation.
For example, I have a slide in my Presentation Network containing logos for all the companies or institutions I’ve worked with. I use it as a switchboard to showcase projects during training workshops. Sometimes after using this switchboard a couple of times, I quiz the trainees. I ask, “who made the assumption I’ve worked with all of the entities shown here?” Almost invariably, all hands go up. I could have put any (or as many) logos on that slide as I wanted to and my audience would automatically assume all represented legitimate projects.
More and more I’m discovering intriguing visual tricks and optical illusions we can use to our advantage as speakers, even while using PowerPoint. In a workshop last week, in fact, I’ll admit I had a delightful time playing with attendees’ minds. Doing so was necessary to show how a savvy presenter can employ an understanding of the human mind to great advantage.
I encourage all presenters and presentation professionals to join me in exploring the psychological implications of live presentation. As far as I can tell, far too little research or experimentation has been done in this arena. The power of thought is only beginning to be tapped.
Posted by Robert Lane at 9:07 AM .
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“Presentations are as much about slides as poetry is about handwriting.”
~Doc Searls in his 1998 classic “It’s the Story, Stupid: Don’t Let Presentation Software Keep You From Getting Your Story Across”.
Posted by Lee Potts at 10:32 PM .
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7% – 38% – 55%
How many of you know the significance of these three percentages?
Anyone who has ever attended a seminar or course on presentation skills has undoubtedly heard them. When communicating, we are told, only 7% of our message is communicated through the words we use… 38% is communicated through vocal tone… and a whopping 55% is communicated through facial expression.
I was thinking about this during a trip I took this spring to Prague in the Czech Republic. Czech is a very difficult language to learn (for me anyway). But according to the 7-38-55 theory, I really shouldn’t need to learn Czech at all…. I should be able to understand 93% of a Czech conversation through tone and facial expressions alone. Suffice it to say, the 7-38-55 concept did not work for me that well. Without understanding the words I was pretty clueless!
So what exactly is going on here? Where do these percentages come from?
Albert Mehrabian, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA. In 1967 Mehrabian conducted a pair of studies with some colleagues. The first study, “Decoding of Inconsistent Communications” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The second was called “Inference of Attitudes from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels” and was published in the Journal of Consulting Psychology. Together, these two small studies are the origin of the 7-38-55 percentages which are used exstensively in presentation skills coaching. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Robert Befus at 9:19 AM .
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Jeffrey Veen asks an important question for Presentation Professionals who are working with presenters today. As audiences increasingly have the option of being online during a presentation, are they listening… or are they predominately distracted with IM, email and Web browsing? If the first step in the persuasion process involves gaining the audience’s attention, are live presenters in for an increasingly tough time just like Web presenters?
Read Veen’s post here.
Perhaps these folks at MIT will come up with a version of their Jerk-o-Meter for audiences.
Posted by Robert Befus at 7:38 PM .
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This year, the Befus family set sail for our first ever attempt at cruising. All six of us set sail on Royal Carribean’s “Sovereign of the Seas” for a four night cruise to the Bahamas. Although internet is available, it is .50 per minute! (This will be a short post).
They have an interesting little conference center onboard with nicely equiped meeting rooms. Has anyone done speaker ready for an event on board a ship? The big theatre runs PPT intros before the nightly shows. Presentation Pros looking for work should contact Royal Carribean as the quality of these intros is very low.
Posted by Robert Befus at 8:09 AM .
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This week I was working with my young design team, ages 7 to 14, as they made preparations to present to a group of community leaders. The topic of the presentation involved a piece of public art to be installed at a playground in a fairly rough part of town.
We were well prepared: PowerPoint slides, architectural rendering, mindmaps, scale models, interviews with residents, drawings and photographs.
In preparing the group of young designers, I went over the basics of presentation skills and style: speak slowly and clearly; be enthusiastic; make purposeful gestures with your arms; hold your head high; make eye contact; and, smile!
They did great. And, there was a very noticeable shift in the room when the entire group, both presenters and audience, made the switch from “presentation” to “dialog”. I really almost started crying as these young children began to defend their decisions, explain the construction methods they intended to use, and, one-by-one address every question and concern of the community.
This is a subtle and crucial moment in the life of a public speaker. The questions takes the conversation off-script and off-road into the weeds of ideas and the thickets of complexity that can’t be easily hacked out of using tidy bullet point lists and fancy slide transitions! IN fact, the audience is well-adapted to sensing fear in a presenter, and–even more deadly–inauthenticity.
The only software that I’ve seen that can vaguely accommodate this freestyling and authentic type of dialog between subject matter expert and audience is the non-linear, java-based application, The Brain.
In allowing the user to migrate swiftly from “thoughts” to tertiary “daughter thoughts”, the presentation can mirror in visual space the same fluidity of conversational space.
Another emerging technology that holds promise is the rise of the semantic web and other applications that work with non-linear taxonomies or folkonomies, which is the practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. Basically, any type of file–a JPEG or excel spreadsheet–can be “tagged” with keywords and descriptive phrases that make searching for topics much easier and more intelligent.
The most prominent examples for visual assets include the wildly popular photo service Flickr and the lesser know app, Montage-a-Google.
The network involved with Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons have created flexible tools for gradiating copyright and usage of copyrighted material to replace the older, recalcitrant institutions of ASCAP and the US Copyright Office. As a creator of content, the user can designate levels of usage, for example whether (1) to allow commercial uses of your work; (2) to allow modifications of your work; (3) to designate a country-specific copyright, etc.
Creative Commons has made is easier to access quality music, video, graphics and photos that have been designated as “common domain”.
As these tools develop along with the ubiquity of free wireless service, the ability to access data and images in real time to aid storytelling and illumination will accelerate. Now we just have to get presenters over the age of 14 up to speed!
Posted by Peter Durand at 1:17 PM .
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Finally a compilation without going into Control Panel of the various codecs that will work with Windows XP and Media Player from MS Knowledge Base. Keep this handy if you’re doing video using an editor that doesn’t use snappy descriptions like “best quality on your machine”.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:02 PM .
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Great article in Business Week Online about the proper use of PowerPoint in conveying a message. Must reading for presentation professionals. Quotes a great authority on the topic — Dilbert.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 3:04 PM .
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As a teenager living in Sao Paulo, Brazil, I owned a machete. It had a 20-inch blade, a shiny black handle and a leather sheath decorated with beads and tassels. Now Sao Paulo was a city the size of NYC at that time… a place where machetes were seldom used for any constructive purpose. In fact, the only time I really needed my machete was during a month long trip with my dad and two older brothers into the interior of the country.
This past week however, I felt a little like I was hacking through the Brazilian underbrush again as I tried to track down the origin of a common presentation related statistic.
If I were to ask you how many PowerPoint presentations are given every day around the world… what would you say?
If you need help answering this question, you can look here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here… or in countless other electronic repositories of valuable information across our great and wonderful Worldwide Web.
The answer of course is 30 million presentations every single day. Most people apparently know this. But is it true? Where does this number come from? How was it calculated? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Robert Befus at 11:43 AM .
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“The power of illustrative anecdotes often lies not in how well they present reality, but in how well they reflect the core beliefs of their audience.”
~David P. Mikkelson, creator of Snopes.com
Posted by Lee Potts at 9:31 AM .
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I took a trip down memory lane this week, attending SIGGRAPH in LA. 17 years ago this was my first computer trade show after venturing into computer graphics and I nearly fled the show floor in Las Vegas in terror. In those days, VR meant a computer the size of a room.
Now the show is mainly for the entertainment and game industry, but there are new toys to whet the appetite of presenters. My jaw dropped at Barco Simulation (which shows its projectors at InfoComm). It had two of them set up simultaneously in a virtual 3D display (yes, with the 3D glasses!) but you could enter the environment and walk around. Barco calls it a VR Workroom, and it costs a bundle. But imagine if you’re trying to sell an airplane, a building or a drug regimen, and you can take your prospects of a tour inside what you’re showing (not in the hokey QuickTime VR way, but much more photorealistically) and what if there were tools that enabled you to influence and manipulate the environment.
So I was interested in the software, and found myself in the nearby booth of Virtools. Virtools calls itself the “Behavior Company” which is pretty audacious until you look at the software. This is a work environment into which you can drop conventional 3D models and enable a user to interact with them. As a game platform development tool it can be exported to Xbox, but it also has a Web Player (plug-in). I saw a fully 3D race car that could be turned around, and then actually driven through a landscape in a web page. What about simulating a heart , an operating room or a brain?
A single license of Virtools costs about three times what it costs for 3D Studio Max. So it’s not for the casual presenter. But if you are playing for high stakes, investing in such a tool and the time to use it effectively might well give you a leg up in medical, architectural and other high end markets.
Another interesting tool, for a lot less (about $995) is Antics Pre-Viz. This is ostensibly a previsualization software for the entertainment business but it is cool for creating role playing scenarios and exploring different types of venues for training purposes (like training a staff for a trade show booth). It’s kind of like VOX Proxy on steroids because behaviors are dropped on animated characters but they’re not limited to a PowerPoint slide or your screen — you also create a complete environment in whcih they can interact. “Characters intelligently navigate around their environment, avoiding props, opening doors, and getting in cars just by clicking the mouse”.
Truthfully I didn’t stay at SIGGRAPH long. You can only watch so much 3D animation. However, I really think that these sorts of immersive tools, when they become more cost effective and user friendly, will be a key to the future of presentations.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 3:16 PM .
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Many thanks to Lynn Oppenheim of the Center for Applied Research for being kind enough to send me a copy of the original Wharton report entitled: “A Study of the Effects of the Use of Overhead Transparencies on Business Meetings” dated October, 1981. After reading this report, I can add some additional information to this post.
Read the update at the bottom of the post.
Posted by Robert Befus at 3:04 PM .
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In part 1 of this post, I briefly described the background and study design of the UM/3M research conducted by Doug Vogel in 1986. In this post, I will highlight the primary results along with some interesting information I had never heard before about a small side study Vogel did with some “extra” subjects in this study.
If you haven’t reviewed part 1 of this post, please do so because it is the excellence of the design and conduct of this study that lends credibility to the findings. Vogel intended this work to be a baseline for continuing research and in the design of this study has given us a great model of what quality research in the use of presentation visuals looks like. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Robert Befus at 6:48 PM .
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Dr. Douglas Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary offers another take on the importance of images and their affect on culture in a letter he sent to the editor of Time magazine:
Moreover, images, which dominate American and most western media, are very limited in what they can communicate concerning truth. They cannot directly convey propositions, but instead evoke emotions. Yes, some are telling and unforgettable, such as the photography of the young Vietnamese girl running naked in the streets after being napalmed. But for all their poignancy, images may mislead or overwhelm without informing or educating at a deep level. This image-saturation (if not image-mongering) has lead to the pandemic debasement of intellectual discourse in our country.
There’s a lot of very interesting material in the discussion that follows his post in its comment section. The theological focus of Dr. Groothuis’ post raises some interesting questions as well. For instance, how does one best deal with the moral dimensions implicit in a profession that has, as its focus, the enhancement of persuasive abilities?
Posted by Lee Potts at 12:05 AM .
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