It was the big presentation of the national conference. The speaker was widely known for his provocative views and keen insights, all delivered with refreshing, iconoclastic frankness.
The hotel auditorium was at capacity for what promised to be quite a ride.
Armed with nothing more than an overhead projector and a small pile of transparencies, he opened with confidence and high energy. He established his premise cleanly, slapping on the first couple of overheads to illustrate his points. Then he moved to his problem statement, accompanied by another few transparencies.
His movements were fluid, practiced, a compelling display of passion and assertiveness. He was Lord of the Room, and with confident flings of his wrist, overhead after overhead would slide onto the projector’s glass stage to reveal clever illustrations and telling graphs that punctuated his remarks.
It was turning out to be quite a ride, after all.
Then the projector’s bulb burned out.
The screen went blank.
The speaker stopped abruptly, surprised by the interruption. He glared at the projector, glanced at the audience, smiled painfully, then proceeded to crash all that he had accomplished up to this point.
He fiddled with the projector. He started apologizing to the audience. He called out for someone from the hotel staff; there was no one there to answer.
He escalated a minor mechanical inconvenience into the central feature of his show.
The audience became visibly uneasy. All the momentum of a great presentation had been brutally arrested and replaced by the awkwardness of a speaker floundering vainly over a piece of disabled equipment.
Although this event happened a decade ago, I remember it vividly for the simple lessons it taught:
First, a single spare bulb could have fixed the problem (and saved the program) in less than two minutes. So could a spare projector.
It quickly became obvious that the speaker had thought of neither.
He had put his faith entirely in the presumed capacities of the hotel’s audio-visual “technician” (in this situation, regrettably, a bellhop handed a bundle of microphones and cables and told, “You are now today’s A-V tech.”), who was nowhere to be found.
The presenter did not anticipate mechanical failure as part of his presentation, so naturally, mechanical failure happened.
Second, he made his presentation, and by extension, his audience, a victim of his problem. It now became clear that he had so tightly integrated his remarks with his visuals that when the projector failed he didn’t know how to finish. And since there would be no fix for the projector (the hotel staff never did show up), his presentation essentially ended there, frustratingly incomplete.
From what I witnessed, however, it didn’t need to conclude this way. This speaker could have recovered. He could have continued without his visuals to complete the program.
True, several of his graphs did good work illustrating complex data points, but the content still could have been explained verbally. As for the other overheads, they were clever cartoons and photos that helped keep the narrative structured but were not essential.
The story itself was good enough, important enough, strong enough to be told without illustrations and cartoons.
The speaker would have had to adapt his remarks a bit, put more emphasis on explanation and context, but it could be done.
He clearly hadn’t prepared for that.
The irony, of course, is that the audience wanted to hear this speaker because of his message, not because he had clever overheads.
The speaker thus failed his audience because he had become overly dependent on his overheads to tell his story.
For the sake of a projector bulb, an opportunity to tell an important story was lost.
For want of preparation, the lingering memory of this presentation was not a thought-provoking message that could change minds, but of a speaker helpless in the throes of an otherwise minor and entirely preventable glitch.
post script: Witnessing this experience taught me to make sure I have two projectors— a primary (usually my own) and a stand-by (the hotel’s or meeting center’s)— on hand whenever I teach or present. If a second projector isn’t available, then by all means I make sure there is a spare bulb in my kit. It’s cheap insurance.
Yeah, I'm like a cracked record on this subject, people need to remember that they are the presentation, not the visual aids. Sadly in most cases these days the speaker is the presentation equivelant of "best supporting actor"...!
Posted by: Rich...! | April 17, 2005 at 02:29 PM