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Excellent Presentations in the 21. Century

Presentations are nowadays different from those of the past. To convince and inspire your audience, you have to meet completely different expectations today than 20 years ago. Nowadays, personality is key, as is combining numbers, data and facts with short stories and anecdotes that provide new context for the audience. By the way: Instead of frontal lectures in which information is hammered into our audience, the focus today is on infotainment. Information comes along with entertainment. This is what makes presentations much more effective. The use of new media adds to this. We should never underestimate one thing: The personality of the speaker decides whether his message actually reaches the audience. Read more

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A really good high-quality presentation

A source of good and often inspiring lectures are certainly the TED Talks and their independent TEDx Talks. One of the speeches that has inspired me in recent years is the talk “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek. Of course, we can discuss whether his performance could be further optimized: There are only a few laughs in the audience, the eye contact between speaker and audience is not optimal and the speaker often takes his glasses (exactly 22 times) – to name just three examples.

Nevertheless, why is his 2009 TEDx talk the third most seen of about 3 000 TED talks worldwide? Why has his presentation, which he held live in front of just 50 listeners, been clicked more than 42 million times on ted.com and a good 15 million times on YouTube to date? So what did Simon Sinek do right?

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Stories make science exciting again

“Sometime they’ll give a presentation and nobody will come.” I experienced that again and again while I was a student and researcher. There are conference sessions in which just three people sit in the audience listening to a presentation that is at most mediocre. Only three, because the topic is extremely special and because many presentations recite a bunch of numbers, data and facts.

As students, we can learn a lot of undoubtedly interesting stuff – otherwise we would not have decided to study a particular subject. But most professors do not give much thought to how this material is taught. No wonder with the continuous pressure of publications, project proposals and the day-to-day administrative stuff. The unloved teaching is only the odd one out. But without preparation and training only natural talents may succeed with both instructive and exciting lectures. Unfortunately, this happens far too rarely.

 

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The Science Story: Highlights in midst of the speech

Simon is a PhD student and is currently preparing his conference presentation. He has already improved his start after a meeting with his mentor Sarah. Now he asks himself: How can I present the results of my study concisely? What details are my audience interested in and what new insights do they gain? How does the transition between the individual sections work?

 

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Research and emotions

Sarah’s presentation was easily understandable and entertaining. In the discussion she gained new ideas and insights. At the coffee break she is approached by other people who want to learn more about her project. Simon is a PhD student at the symposium and listened to the presentation with interest. He wants to know how Sarah prepared her successful speech.

 

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