NullPointerFactory

For a while now I thought that after a few more years as an engineer I’d try to become an instructor or an evangelist of some kind. At every class, symposium, or product launch I attended, I kept thinking how great it must be to be one of those people on the other side of the podium. Traveling around, meeting new people… it all seems like a bright contrast to coming into the same cubicle and the same people every day, however great those people and that cubicle may be. Besides, I adore PowerPoint with a burning passion… it’s a love affair I carry since junior high… I always got a kick out of doing presentations ever since I stopped sweating from stage fright in front of a classroom. As of three days ago, a shadow of doubt overcast this ambition.

This past Thursday I did a presentation in front of a group of complete strangers. To be sure, I made many mistakes that I will not repeat:

• Taking a presentation designed for one audience and transposing it onto a different audience without adjusting for the difference in the audience’s background and context. A critical step in the preparation of any human-oriented deliverable, be it a presentation, a document, or even a piece of software, is to become one with the audience: to learn what the audience knows, and to forget what it doesn’t know.
   
• Failure to pre-designate “martyrs”. A “martyr” is what I call a topic area that will be sacrificed if the presentation becomes slowed due to audience participation or the need to dwell on or clarify another point. Once identified, martyr topics together with martyr slides must be moved toward the end of the presentation while, hopefully, maintaining some semblance of a coherent narrative.

• Failure to wrap quickly when I noticed the audience interest wavering. Some nugget of information at the end just seemed to interesting to chop it off. It’s a challenging balance between wanting to end with a bang, and slipping the martyrs toward the end where they can be quickly done away with.

But there’s one truth that will remain in spite of how good a presenter I become… At work, I have a very warm, jovial relationship with all of my colleagues. Anyone who’s known me for longer than five minutes knows that I have no qualms about sacrificing my dignity to elicit a laugh, and so in a familiar environment all sorts of little gags and self-deprecating kernels of insanity are allowed and welcome… that’s what makes it fun. In front of strangers, however, this just does not work… they can’t tell if I’m goofing off or if I should be taken away by men in white suits… In a technical presentation, people expect distilled technical content - everything else, is a distraction. That took some air out of me.

There are exceptions, I think. Keynotes and meta-technical presentations allow room for some occasional frolic. When audience members don’t exactly know what they came to hear, they’ll grant much more leeway. Also, I noted earlier my failure to develop more common ground with the audience in advance of the talk. Perhaps on that common ground, some seeds of amusement may blossom. In the meanwhile, the only answer is to try again…