I can’t talk about that, I’m not an expert!
// August 24th, 2009 // As featured in..., Communication, Me, My work, Presentation
Good mate Miles Campbell of TTA and I got up and presented last week on a topic neither of us has formal qualifications or professional experience in: placebos. It’s a topic of interest for both of us and it’s something we’ve done a lot of reading and talking about.
Sometimes my clients are uncomfortable with speaking or writing about topics in which they have no formal qualifications. It comes up when I’m trying to encourage them to blog or to present an opinion at an industry event. “But I’m not an expert,” they’ll cry, “I’m a businessperson, not a journalist!” That’s not a valid reason. Journalists aren’t experts — they are bound by their editorial standards to quote expert sources rather than write their own opinions precisely because they aren’t experts — but then they write editorials which are 100% opinion and these days, increasingly blend their own opinion with their news stories. Researchers and academics are in the business of having an opinion based on research but where the data is unclear, they are supposed to remain quiet… few do. Politicians, salesmen, bureaucrats and your mates down the pub are fine with giving their opinion and yet nobody requires them to be experts. I trust your opinion far more than any politician or bureaucrat, so let’s hear it!
In this talk, Miles and I have a straightforward case to make: placebos are as effective as most other medicines and you should be able to be prescribed a placebo if it is as (or more) likely to make you better. Many in the medical profession have an ethical problem with that idea, so we propose a draft ‘placebo consent form’ that you can sign and leave with your medical practitioner.
The event, Interesting South, limits speakers to eight minutes or less, and we had a lot of ground to cover in that time, so the resulting presentation is, well, perky!
Big thanks to Ian Lyons for taping our talk. After you’ve watched the video, consider the following points for presenters:
- It’s OK to present on a topic in which you have no formal qualifications, but it’s important to be humble — don’t pretend to be an expert if you’re not. Disclose your amateur status upfront before you show what you’ve learned.
- Pace and pitch are as important in an eight minute talk as they are in a sixty minute talk. A dry topic can be made less-so if you’re able to vary the pace and pitch of your delivery.
- Sharing the presentation burden between us helped us with pace, variation and tone. We did a little too much turning to each other because the cinema stage wasn’t very deep, meaning eye contact was a full 90 degrees away from the audience. We could improve by making sure we both stood still, just turning our upper bodies to introduce the next slide.
- We were very freaked out by the loud woman’s voice whispering our names at the very beginning, then more than a little distracted by the partial failure of the presentation clicker (damn those Apple IR remotes!) but you’ll see that we made a joke of it and kept on with the show. Even when you’re dropping juggling balls and the top hat resolutely fails to disgorge a bunny, you can retain most of your audience by keeping on with the show. Afterwards, many audience members won’t even recall there was a problem.
- Eight minutes makes it difficult (if not impossible) to follow my preferred Rogen technique of introducing the major points, delivering the major points and summarising the major points at the end. Instead, we opted to give you all the resources online at the end so if you’re interested in further detail you can find it. Note we’ve used Tinyurl to make the URLs shorter and moderately memorable.
- We didn’t try to cram ten minutes of presentation into the eight minutes allotted to us. Instead we were ruthless in cutting it to considerably less than eight minutes so we knew from the outset we’d have all the time we’d need. The only thing worse than a slow, tedious presentation is a rushed presentation.
- All that ruthless cutting forced us to rehearse our presentation several times, over the space of two weeks, until we had it down to length. Nothing makes a presentation better than repeated rehearsal. I’m usually terrible at rehearsing in advance, and this presentation reminded me I need to be more disciplined and do my rehearsal homework.
The presentation and the links to the resource material are all here:
