Last week I attended a Creativity Symposium, which was also serving as a fundraiser. The symposium itself was quite good. But the presenter that introduced the actual facilitator unfortunately fell short relative to the overall caliber of the event.
In this case, the pre-presenter (we’ll call him Peter), was given 5-10 minutes to present information on the non-profit for which the funds were being raised. Peter is clearly a well-meaning, kind individual. English is his second language, so I cut him some slack for being brave enough to stand in front of us.
Peter’s problem was that he did not pay attention to his audience. His presentation style was the opposite of engaging; even worse, he was digging into way more detail than necessary for the context. So when the audience started to get restless as his speech wore on (I’d say at least 10 minutes if not more), Peter did not sense the body language feedback. He did not in any way self-edit to hone his presentation in-the-moment in order to move on to introduce the featured speaker.
This is not the first time I’ve mentioned the ‘twitch factor’ (See Scarlett Letter #80). This is an unofficial term for when your audience–whether it be one person or one thousand ‘persons’–is getting anxious, impatient, bored, distracted, uninterested, and/or disengaged. All of us, every single day, should be mindful of this. And we should adjust our communications accordingly….whether that be to speed up; edit out content; ask a question; change the subject; and/or articulate the key messages as a summary and ‘get out’.
As an oral communications professor and expert, I sympathized with Peter. As such, I’m embarrassed to say that I was a part of the problem rather than the solution (because I gave him encouraging nods as he muddled through his presentation/introduction). Nonetheless, I so wish that he would have adjusted based upon the remaining audience feedback.
As a sidenote, an introduction and/or pre-presentation IS a speech within itself. I tell my students all the time that they need to sincerely prepare their introductions of another speaker, in order to set the featured speaker up for success! I’d like to give kudos to the featured speaker at this Creativity Symposium. He didn’t miss a beat even though clearly he knew that the ‘setup’ for his presentation was lame and ineffective, at best. Despite it all, he was smooth, fun, articulate, and most important, gracious.