Fuel your presentation
Europe’s energy regulators are meeting at their 30th annual conference on Tuesday, 30 March. Organised by the Council of European Energy Regulators, #CAC2021 will focus on Dynamic Regulation in Practice.
Not planning to attend? Yet the subject could not be more important. Energy regulators play a significant role in how energy is produced, transported and billed to homes and businesses. These topics affect us - and our wallets - so deserve visibility. We can only hope that the speakers’ presentations rise to the occasion.
How can you ensure the subject you are presenting, no matter how dry it may sound, comes across as lively to your audience? How can your presentation attract and hold listeners attention, ensuring you impress on them the importance of the issue you have taken on?
There are many things to take into account when giving a presentation that wows your public. They range from your arguments, how you lay out your slides and visual aids, to what you wear and how you speak. Three columns will hold your presentation up:
substance, what you know and how that relates to the audience;
structure, your logic and whether your arguments follow from one another; and
style, how you present yourself and your arguments to your audience.
These three Ss essentially translate to who you are, what you know and how you say it.
You have been invited to address a conference on a subject you are an expert on. Great! However, your standard presentation laying out everything you know, do or have done may not cut it with the audience.
The Cheshire cat shows the way
Before you jump into writing your presentation, set yourself a clear goal. What is it that you want to achieve by presenting? What is the key information your audience must retain, even those busy answering emails on their phones, popping out for more conference coffee or, in pandemic times, checking multiple windows on their computer while the zoom conference runs in the background?
You can heed the wisdom of Lewis Carroll’s tale of Alice in Wonderland. Alice is wandering aimlessly and meets the Cheshire cat. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Said the cat.
If, like Alice, you “don’t much care where” you are going with your presentation, don’t be surprised if most of your audience does not follow you there.
Most conferences have a dedicated theme. In our example, there are many topics of interest to energy regulators, but this year the theme is Dynamic Regulation in Practice. Make sure your presentation ties in with this.
How does your presentation tie in with a current event, or another speaker’s presentation? Make sure you highlight these to both attract the audience’s attention and make them link your message to something they are familiar with or that is being talked about during the coffee breaks.
Gimme five
Research suggests that the perfect length of a presentation is 20 minutes. That does not mean that you will get the audience’s attention from the beginning till the end. For this to happen, start by creating building blocks.
The basic structure of a presentation consists of an introduction, a main part and a conclusion. Explain at the beginning the pertinence of your topic. If the audience is not familiar with the subject, you can spend a bit more time on that part. An index slide or slides introducing chapters is not necessary. Building on Miller’s magic number seven, we recommend to split up the body of your presentation in no more than five chapters. You can then arrange them logically.
Are you zooming in on Member States? If yes, you can go through them from East to West, or according to new capacity installed. Or is the order causal? This was impacted by that, which leads to the emergence of another technology? If you can’t lay out your parts logically, you will probably lose listeners on the way.
Rococo was a style in the 18th century
For the few people out there who remember conferences before PowerPoint was a thing, you might recall being invited to speak and, only if necessary, having to bring your “visual aids” with you. Today, almost everyone is expected to come armed with a PowerPoint, and they do.
The facility with which we can add slides, reproduce graphs, pictures, tables and videos on our presentations should not make us forget that our PowerPoint slides are still “only” visual aids. Visual aids focus attention on what you are saying, not distract from it. They reinforce or illustrate the key point, not drown the audience: death by powerpoint is, unfortunately, a thing.
People always remember an amazing statistic! If you have one, use it. A great way to get your point across is by surprising your audience with unexpected figures. There are, nevertheless, two caveats: a substantive one and a visual one.
Firstly, make sure you are comfortable with your numbers and that you can source them. During the question and answer session after your presentation, your hot numbers will inevitably attract questions and comments. An innocent question may expose that you are (inadvertently) confusing data on apples with data on pears - or electricity and energy - and your whole argument may collapse.
Visually, present your stats in a clear and legible way, Rococo may be decorative, but makes for a poor event bedfellow. Tables and graphs must be devoid of distractions, like lines or bright colours. Only the key figures should be represented. Long data sets or any numbers that are used as multipliers, or are only relevant to the methodology should be taken out. You can always discuss these with interested people during the Q&A or the coffee break.
If you have a large data set with information for, say, many years on it. Is representing every year in your table or graph necessary? Can you shorten the data set to recent years, or group data in blocks of five or ten years and still support your argument? If you need to reduce font size to fit all your data into the table, will people sitting at the back be able to read it? … and will they want to?
When making a pie chart, if you are interested in the shares of two items, but you need to include many items to reach 100%, can you clump the less important ones into an “others” slice? An energy regulator may want to show that energy production in Poland and Germany represent 24% of total EU production. If so, the pie chart will only need 3 slices: Poland, Germany and ‘rest of EU’.
As for your speech, focus on the salient points and gloss over other issues that may well be fascinating, but unimportant to the case you are stating.
Finally, your slide headings or titles are ideal for stating your case, make sure they carry your message rather than describe the content of the slide. In the example about energy production above, which one of these two titles attracts attention and drums the point home? “Graphic representation of primary energy production in Mtoe in the EU, Germany and Poland, figures from Eurostat (2019)” or “Poland and Germany alone produce a quarter of EU energy”. Be assertive!
Three tips to fuel your presentation
Fit your topic to the event theme and current affairs.
Have a clear intro, conclusion and no more than five chapters.
Focus on salient points on your slides by removing distractions.
- written by Jacopo Moccia, jacopo[at]thedandeliongroup.eu
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