Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere There were actually two other riders who also rode that famous night with Paul Revere. William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott. The riders were supposed to warn Boston, Lexington and Concord, but an interesting thing happened on their way to the warning. Stay tuned for the rest of the story. I love Boston. I came here with my father-in-law, a fellow history buff, a number of years before his death and we fell in love with the revolutionary war memorials, artifacts and sites. What better place than Boston than to call for another revolution? How many of you remember walking into a presentation and the presenter starts with his or her resume, or a knock off of it, and begins by impressing us with his or her credentials? I have to ask “is there anything more boring than that? Or, how many of you remember walking into a presentation and the presenter puts up a screen of bullet points with a string of words out beside each bullet point and then turns to the slide and begins reading his or her slides to us? I have to ask, “how amazingly disrespectful was that?” How many of you remember walking into a presentation and the presenter puts up a slide of an Excel spreadsheet replete with thousands of numbers and states “I know you in the back can’t see this…” And the “back” starts at the second row? I have to ask “why waste our time?” Today is a day I am calling for a revolution. I call this revolution my stop it revolution, so Listen my children and you shall hear…what you shall hear is my call to action. If you’re ever in a presentation like the preceding, or you’re in a presentation and the facilitator, not presenter, is putting you into a reluctant coma, the revolutionary response is to demand this behavior be stopped. CLICK

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We have 3 things we want to discuss today: First, we sort of want to see what we’re doing; Second, we sort of want to see what we should be doing; Third, we want to ground all of this in science. What is most interesting is how often we violate the science in the way we currently do things. So, I’d like you to open your little handout on your desk. You’ll see an image of an hour glass. I’d like you to work with the person or two next to you, or, and I know this is asking a lot, move to a place where there are people. The first step is to introduce yourself, if you don’t know each other, and then the second step is I’d like you to come up with a number of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks or whatever you think we have to grab our audience’s attention when we first start a presentation. Answer: Can anyone share what number their team came up with? According to John Medina in his wonderful book Brain Rules, which by the way I list all my references on that sheet of paper in front of you and there’s a hyperlinked version available for free, without spam, at my personal wordpress blogsite. In his book Dr. Medina tells us we have 30 seconds. That’s not very long and the downside is if we fail to grab our audience in those 30 seconds, our audience may never come back to us. Now beside the hour glass is an artist and her pallet. I’d like you to draw the slide you most remember from any presentation you’ve ever seen, but preferably not one from this CONNECT 2013. CLICK

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Why did I start this presentation the way I did? First, people understand the concept of three—call them three acts—I’m going to cover how to improve in presentation, the science and tools. Second, and this is very critical, we have 30 second to grab our audience’s attention and then we have ten minutes to hold them. We’ll be doing exercises like this throughout this presentation. The reason for that is to break the presentation up into 10 minute blocks? So I didn’t start by getting up behind the podium and saying “Hi, I’m Rex Castle and I work with blah, de blah, de blah, de blah. Instead I sort of freaked a few people out and started by talking about how cool this was going to be and introducing a revolution. Let’s move on to some other techniques, some other tools. CLICK

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How many of you have ever gone the site ted.com? Ted.com is an amazing site. At this site there are thousands of presentations that a whole bunch of incredible people do. Although there is on occasion someone who violates the rule, no presentation is supposed to be longer than 18 minutes. What’s really cool about ted.com is all the ideas these people have about improving our world, but what’s equally as cool is all the ideas you can glean from each presenter about how to, or possibly how not to, do a presentation. Mention: Shane Koyczan: http://www.ted.com/talks/shane_koyczan_to_this_day_for_the_bullied_and_beautiful.html Luis von Ahn: http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html Sir Ken Robinson: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html Daniel H. Pink: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html Jill Bolte Taylor: http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html CLICK

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Garr Reynolds has written three magnificent books, PresentationZen, PresentationZen Design and this one, The Naked Presenter. He also has an amazing website. One of the great acronyms or perhaps mnemonics he has in The Naked Presenter is PUNCH. CLICK

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Each of the letters in PUNCH stands for a word, hence the reason we call this an acronym or possibly a mnemonic as it also aids in retention. Let’s talk about each of these letters, but also realize two things: First, Garr doesn’t suggest we use every single letter in order, but rather we use as many as make sense and the more we use the better, generally speaking. Second, Garr suggests PUNCH is very effective at the beginning of our presentation. He doesn’t suggest it cannot be used throughout, but that it’s very effective at our start. CLICK

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The first letter in PUNCH, the P, stands for Personal. What we’re suggesting is we do something personal. Maybe tell a personal story, or tie our point back to a personal experience. Or maybe it’s something as simple as the way we dress, or how we set the room. Simply we try to bring something personal into our opening. CLICK

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The second letter in PUNCH is of course the U. It stands for Unexpected. What can we do that’s unexpected. And what we’re wanting our audience to do is remember some thing from our presentation, a main point. We’re not wanting to remember that “really weird thing Rex did.” So strange and weird is not what we’re going for. We’re seeking unexpected and memorable. Perhaps my handout would be an example as most of you probably expected a manual. Perhaps my slides are a tad bit unexpected as they’re not covered with blue and logos and copyrights and bubbles. CLICK

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The N in PUNCH stands for Novel. We’re not suggesting we hand our audience a book and have them read it. We’re suggesting we do something novel, something unique. If we have a product like the iPhone, or the iPod, or the iPad, one would think novel is easy. If you want to watch some great presentations, however, go google and watch how Steve Jobs introduced these products: “A thousand songs in your pocket,” or pulling the iPad out of an interoffice envelope. Novel. CLICK

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The C in PUNCH stands for Challenge. Try to challenge your audience. Give them a call to action. “I want to start a revolution.” Provide for them a mystery that must be solved, “I’ll tell you the rest of this story at the end of this presentation.” Get them comfortably on the edge of their seats. CLICK

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The H in PUNCH is my double-edged sword today and stands for Humor. PAUSE TO ALLOW AUDIENCE TO READ For most of us in this room this slide is not particularly funny. When I present this at Tyler I have a lot of our IT folks and all those people associated with computers smile at this slide. They smile because this is an IP home address and so they get it. But if we have to explain a slide and why its funny, well, it’s not very funny at that point. Sort of like when you’ve had someone tell a really stupid joke and the funny part of the joke is when he or she sits and explains it—humor loses something when it must be explained. CLICK

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PAUSE AGAIN FOR READING This slide is probably funnier. We should never make fun of an audience member or our audience. We should never use inappropriate or offensive humor and sometimes we can offend without really trying. I find self-deprecating humor to be pretty effective, but we should not make fun of areas of weakness we have, only areas of strength. Bank tellers being told not be thieves. CLICK

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Now I want to talk about a specific slide in that deck. Do you remember the slide for the C? What did it stand for? CLICK

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How many of you when you have a presentation open PowerPoint and start typing, or maybe get on google and look for a couple of images to use, or start thinking about what your background should look like? I do the same thing. Then I close PowerPoint and sketch out my ideas. I put them on sticky notes and then I can rearrange them. Then I get into slide design. I’m still not in PowerPoint. CLICK

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On a sheet of paper, or my sticky note, I draw a tic-tac-toe game. The reason I do this is because this gives me a slide’s power grid. It shows me where the most powerful areas of my slide are. In America we read left to right, so naturally, where would you assume to be the most powerful square on this slide? CLICK

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Yes, the most powerful spot is the top left hand corner. What’s interesting then is the next most powerful spots fall underneath that one and not to the right. And, as I talk about this, it’s not to suggest if you go from the number 1 block to the block to the right of it your audience will quit looking, but it is to suggest the number 1 position is the first place people look and then their eyes tend to go down. CLICK

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What’s interesting again is the next most powerful block of squares on a slide are down the right hand side. Now this doesn’t mean start a sentence in block one and then put the next word in block four and then the next in block two. Hopefully, someone is not presenting sentences because if they are they have a bigger problem than where they’re putting them on a slide. What this suggests is again our eyes sort of go to locations we perhaps would not expect. CLICK

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The seventh position jumps back to the middle column at the top of a slide. CLICK

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And then finally we have the eight position. And I say “finally” purposefully because you’ll notice I haven’t defined the center of the slide. The center of the slide is indeed a special place. You’ve probably noticed, or perhaps not, I don’t have much of importance in the center of my screens. Why is that? Most of us center everything. Because if we don’t center things our mom yells at us, or someone is upset because we’re coloring outside the lines. CLICK

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In fact, I avoid the center of a slide because it is the Dead Zone. It’s where subject matter, ideas and important things go to die. It’s the most boring part of the slide, and a centered presentation is a boring presentation. So we try to hang out in 1, or 2, or 3, and we can easily shift to 4, or 5, or 6, but we should probably avoid centering stuff as much as possible. CLICK

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I’d like you take a look at your handy dandy handout again. I’d like you to look at the picture under the hour glass representing this sunrise video. Here’s the question I’d like you and your partner or team to answer. How long after training do we have before our audience has lost at least 50% of the training they’ve received? How many second, minutes, hours, days or whatever. slide advances automatically.

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Hermann Ebbinghaus, born 1850 and died early 1900’s did the first research. It’s been replicated hundreds if not thousands of times. What Hermann found in his studies was our audience will lost 50% or more of training within hours of the training if (1) there is no repetition and (2) there is no actual use of the concepts presented in the training. And probably every fourth or fifth new person in a graduate school psychology program since has replicated the results of this experiment. What we also know is that within a month, we lose around 90% of training, so critically important to all this presentation stuff is people actually using, rather immediately, what they have learned. By a show of hands how many of you have ever experienced this science being violated? Pretty much a violated all the time. To the right of this image on the hand dandy handout are some light bulbs. What I’d like you to do is list any ideas you remember from any of the presentations you’ve ever seen and just to make it tough, let’s not list ideas from CONNECT 2013. CLICK

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Chip & Dan Heath have written 3 magnificent books: Switch Decisive and Made to Stick Made to Stick is about making ideas sticky. I can think of a lot of things we as facilitators would like to accomplish, but I think a big one would be to make our ideas sticky. Made to Stick is essentially about their acronym or mnemonic, SUCCES. Again, each letter stands for some word. CLICK

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S of course is the first letter in SUCCES. It stands for Simple. You may have noticed my slides aren’t very complex. Simple slides add to engagement. They also help to turn the focus of a presentation back to the facilitator. We don’t want people staring at our slides and trying to read them or understand some intricate detail. If we have that sort of stuff, we should post them at a website or email them to participants. CLICK

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We’ve already covered the U, Unexpected, when we discussed Garr Reynolds and his mnemonic, PUNCH. Let’s move on. CLICK

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We need to try and use concrete ideas rather than abstract or theoretical. For example if I say they were so in love and ask “what do I mean by ‘love’” I bet I would get a number of different definitions. If I say instead “the couple came together and shared a warm embrace” and asked what I meant by embrace almost everyone would come up with something similar. Embrace is concrete; love is abstract. CLICK

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We need to establish credibility. We can do this by citing the author, Chip and Dan Heath, or maybe citing the researcher, Hermann Ebbinghaus. Or, I could present a slide at the beginning of my presentation with my credentials on it and lose my entire audience in that critical first 30 seconds by reciting my titles, although mine wouldn’t last near that long, but that would be a big mistake. I could give a presentation on presentation and by my presentation build my credibility or lose it. In other words I could tell, an abstraction, everyone how to be a better presenter or I could show my audience, a concrete example, thus establishing by my presentation my credibility…or lack thereof. CLICK

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I graduated late from Texas Tech because for about six or seven years after high school I was too smart for college. Then, I had an opportunity and remarkably took it. I went to work for the university. In the first week of my employment I had a 2-day orientation. The first day about 150 of us went into a room and sat down and a man in a grey suit, with a red tie, carrying a 3-inch, 3-ring white spiral binder walked across the stage, plopped the binder on the podium and began… If we are not pumped up and excited about our subject matter we should not expect our audience to walk out thinking “that was so cool.” Audiences are a lot smarter than that. CLICK

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The final S in SUCCES is the most powerful letter I can give you today and it stands for Story. I know “we’re in government,” and “it’s a professional environment,” and “we can’t tell stories as we’re not kids,” but stories are our most powerful vehicle for not only sharing an idea, but making it stick. Here’s what I bet. Come back to CONNECT next year and I bet you’ll remember the emotionless guy in the grey suit and red tie who tromped across the stage for my new hire orientation. I bet, too, you’ll remember emotion is an important element to presentation. That’s the power of story. CLICK

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I’m going to present a slide that’s 180 degrees the opposite of anything else I have presented so far. I simply wanted to warn you it is coming. When it appears think about it for a moment. Ask yourself “what’s the core message?” CLICK

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This slide is a classic example. It’s a slide used by the U.S. military to do something, but I don’t know what. What’s its core message. Let’s talk about slide clutter. Slide clutter is anything on a slide that does not promote our core message. Anything. With this slide defining the core message may be a problem, so defining what is clutter may be as well, but let’s look at a real example. CLICK

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And, this exercise is not to suggest that our slides are not artwork as they are. And, this exercise is not to suggest that there was massive creativity that went into our CONNNECT slides because “massive creativity” is a gross understatement. What I want you to do working with your partner or your team is to turn your hand dandy handout over and I’d like you to circle any elements on this slide that are NOT slide clutter. NOT slide clutter. Now let’s go through it. How many of you know you are at CONNECT 2013? How many of you know I work, well at least until after this presentation, with Tyler Technologies? You don’t have to raise your hands, but how many of you are convicted felons? Here are the things I think of as NOT slide clutter on this slide.

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I want to shift gears on you one last time again. I want to give you the science at the foundation of all this stuff. I share this because I believe in the proverb “give a man [or woman] a fish, feed him [or her] for a day; teach him [or her] how to fish; feed him [or her] for a lifetime. It’s time to learn how to fish. We have three memories we’re dealing with when conveying information. The first is sensory; the second is working (short-term) and the third is the holy grail, long-term. Get stuff into long-term and we’ve accomplished the ultimate in communication. But we have all this stuff out here in sensory memory trying to get into long-term and trying to get in not by opening some floodgate, but by slipping through the eye-of-a-needle, CLICK. To complicate things we only have two channels running through the eye-of-a-needle. Visual and Verbal, CLICK. When they’re full, the message gets garbled. If we have a complicated slide with bullets and text and maybe a graph or two and we’re reading the slide or talking about it, the wonder is not that people can remember so little, but that they can remember so much. We simply must begin to understand that our brains, as big and powerful as they are, cannot absorb the volume of information we ask them to absorb. Cut out anything that is NOT absolutely essential and fails to contribute to the message. Become the presentation. PowerPoint is a tool, but we are the presentation. Folks should be listening to us, watching us and learning from us. That’s the science of presentation. It’s the science we violate almost every time we get up to do this presentation thing. CLICK

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Before we get to the end, I want to ask you all if you have any questions for me. I owe you an explanation for this video and I owe you my rest of the story, but before we get to that is there anyone out there with a burning, or not so burning question? SLIDE SELF-ADVANCES

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I want you to take just a moment and think about it, but how long do you think it takes to get a relatively complex idea from working memory to long-term memory? Just write a number down and then put seconds, minutes, hours whatever beside it. Now the final thing I’d like you to do with your hand dandy handout is I’d like you to think about all the presentations you’ve seen since you were a baby until right now and I’d like you as exactly as you can write down every bullet point you remember from any presentation you’ve ever seen. CLICK

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Years. Years is the answer. It can take years for a relatively complex idea to get from working memory to long-term memory. Years. Wow. We have to capture attention in 30 seconds. We have to ensure people are using our training within hours. And then it may take years for it to be stored somewhere we can go retrieve it from. Wow. You all, too, drew a slide, and listed ideas and except for a very small percentage of us few us can ever remember a bullet point we see. See bullet points in a live presentation tell our brains to shut off. “This is not important” a bullet point suggests; “it’s another PowerPoint lecture.” “Let’s get out of here.” If you all do nothing else with all the information you received today, do me this favor: Never, ever use anything resembling a bullet point again. CLICK

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Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Paul Revere and his cohorts warned our fellow countrymen the British were coming. How many of you know that Paul Revere never finished the ride. Paul Revere and the other two were stopped by a British patrol on their way to Concord. The other two riders, Dawes and Prescott, escaped. Dawes got lost in the dark and never made it to Concord (the ultimate destination)(I imagine it’s really dark out without street and car headlights) . Prescott also escaped and finished the ride and warned the Americans in Concord of the British. Revere escaped as well (must not have been much of a British patrol), but he escaped without his horse and walked back to Lexington. That’s the rest of the story. I could think of no better place than Boston to ask you to join me on another revolution. How do we go about doing that? The next time you’re in a presentation and provided an opportunity to complete an evaluation and really not very good is “1” and Wow is “5” and then there’s several numbers in-between, if the presentation isn’t Wow it’s a 1. And on either end of that continuum write comments. What went right? What went wrong? Go into every presentation asking those two questions and taking notes. Let’s fix this not only at things like CONNECT, but in our schools for our kids and in our workplaces. Let’s demand WOW! And the next time you are giving a presentation, reach for the spectacular, reach for WOW!

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Rex’s personal website: http://hrhiring.wordpress.com

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Rex’s personal website: http://hrhiring.wordpress.com

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Rex’s personal website http://hrhiring.wordpress.com/

Rex’s personal website:

http://hrhiring.wordpress.com

Resources—Why Not WOW?

Ted.com

Shane Koyczan (http://www.shanekoyczan.com/), “To This Day” … for the bullied and beautiful

http://www.ted.com/talks/shane_koyczan_to_this_day_for_the_bullied_and_beautiful.html

Luis von Ahn (http://vonahn.blogspot.com/), Massive-scale online collaboration

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html

Sir Ken Robinson (http://sirkenrobinson.com/) says schools kill creativity

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Jill Bolte Taylor’s (http://drjilltaylor.com/) stroke of insight

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Books

Cliff Atkinson (http://www.cliffatkinson.com/), Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® PowerPoint® to Create Presentations that

Inform, Motivate, and Inspire (http://beyondbulletpoints.com/; http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Bullet-Points-PowerPoint-

Presentations/dp/0735627355/ref=sr_ 1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365435609&sr=8-1&keywords=cliff+atkinson)

Rex Castle (http://hrhiring.wordpress.com/), Why Not WOW?: Reaching for the Spectacular Presentation

(http://www.amazon.com/Why-Not-WOW-Spectacular-Presentation/dp/147825596X/ ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=

1365435555&sr=8-1&keywords=rex+castle+why+not+wow)

Nancy Duarte (http://www.duarte.com/), Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences

(http://www.amazon.com/Resonate-Present-Stories-Transform-Audiences/dp/0470632011/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=

1365435647&sr=8-1&keywords=nancy+duarte)

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations (http://www.amazon.com/slide-ology-Science-Creating-

Presentations/dp/0596522347/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1365435685& sr=8-4&keywords=nancy+duarte)

Carmin Gallo (http://www.carminegallo.com/), The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any

Audience (http://www.amazon.com/The-Presentation-Secrets-Steve-Jobs/dp/0071636080/ref=sr_1_1?ie=

UTF8&qid=1365435751&sr=8-1&keywords=carmine+gallo)

Chip & Dan Heath (http://heathbrothers.com/), Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

(http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=

1365435786&sr=1-4&keywords=chip+heath)

John Medina (http://brainrules.net/), Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

(http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Rules-Principles-Surviving-Thriving/dp/0979777747/ref=sr_1_1?ie= UTF8&qid=1365438682&sr=8-

1&keywords=brain+rules)

Garr Reynolds (http://www.garrreynolds.com/), The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides

(http:// www.amazon.com/Naked-Presenter-Delivering-Powerful-Presentations/dp/0321704452/ref= sr_1_

3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365435819&sr=1-3&keywords=garr+reynolds)

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Design-

Delivery/dp/0321811984/ref=sr_1_1?s= books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365435819&sr=11&keywords= garr+reynolds)

Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations

(http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Design-Principles-Presentations/dp/0321668790/ref=sr_1_4?s=

books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365435819&sr=1-4&keywords=garr+reynolds)