Last weekend was Canoo’s annual Continuous Improvement workshop, where we retreat to our secret Alp fortress to discuss the coming year and where we want to go as a company. My favorite memory is getting licked by a cow in a breakout session. Only in Switzerland. My second favorite was the Pecha Kucha contest.

A Pecha Kucha is a 20 slide presentation where each slide is presented for only 20 seconds. That’s 6 minutes and 20 seconds total. It’s a lot different than a normal presentation, and I’ve already blogged my “9 Beginner Mistakes” a few years ago. After watching 6 other people give Pecha Kuchas, I was struck by a couple common themes in what was working and what wasn’t.

Ditch the Bullet Points (and text too)
You have 20 seconds to say something interesting. It takes about 10 seconds to read 3 bullet points written up on a slide, so if you insist on writing bulleted slides you’ll get just 10 seconds of your audience’s attention. That’s not even enough time for a one liner. At most, put only one or two words of text on a slide. This will keep the audience’s attention on you and your message.

Introduce the Slides, not Vice Versa
Most long form presentations follow the pattern of displaying information on a slide and then spending around 3-5 minutes talking about the information. The slide content introduces the speaker and gives context to what the speaker is going to say. This doesn’t work in 20 second increments, even if you time your talk perfectly and your slide for Topic X flips up exactly exactly as you start talking about Topic X. The slides are so fast that you look behind schedule even when you aren’t. With 20 seconds you will be able to say 2 sentences. The best effect is created when you talk about Topic X before the slide appear. This way the slide will emphasize what you are saying, which is what you need.

Create Content Anchors
You cannot time it perfectly. But you can create check-in points where you can resynchronize your speech with your slides. For instance, one co-worker had several short videos to display. If he was a speaking too slowly then a video eventually came up and he was forced to be silent and recalibrate. Same with too fast. I call this a content anchor because it is a slide that must be displayed at a certain time and cannot be interrupted. It anchors the content on either side of it. You can use a self describing photograph or picture for a content anchor as well. Just try to make one slide at least that speaks for itself, that way you’ll be able to resynchronize when you need to.

Forget Powerpoint (or Keynote, or Impress)
There’s no need for fancy slideware. You don’t need bullet points or notes pages or text formatting. Photoshop and Gimp help you make a more creative session, while slideware makes it seem boring. My slides were hand drawn on the back of Canoo calling cards, then I photographed them and just flipped through the 20 pictures. This took less time than fighting with Powerpoint and was more fun for the audience. Go low tech.

Don’t Time the Slides
Nobody cares if one slide is 24 seconds and the next 16. Having the slides on a timer makes it more difficult to present but has no clear advantage to flipping the slides manually and having a general sense of the time. The timer is a distraction with no benefit. Skip it.

Tell a Story
This is true for both Pecha Kuchas and longer presentations. Tell a story. Find a way to make the topic personal. One presenter role played and pretended to be an animal specialist during an extended metaphor about large animals. I pretended that the audience was a group of customers instead of my co-workers. It created a narrative and a bit of an illusion that drew people in. Find a way to make the presentation a personal story.

That’s all for now. My Pecha Kucha will hopefully be posted here in the next few days. In the meantime, if you have other tips about presenting then be sure to leave a comment!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 19th, 2010 at 8:50 pm by Hamlet and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.