How to Survive the 5 Worst-Case Presentation Scenarios

How to Survive the 5 Worst-Case Presentation Scenarios

We’ve all been there. You’ve spent weeks preparing to deliver a hugely important proposal. You’ve put in hours of time researching the care-abouts of every member of the executive team you’re about to face. You’ve had dozens of sets of eyeballs review your presentation, and you’ve rehearsed it countless times.

Your moment arrives. Everyone on your team is on edge already — all of them hoping you will nail the tightly scripted, 30-minute presentation and take home the gold. Land this one, and you all look really good.

Then it happens. You learn that your 30-minute window to present has been cut to five minutes to accommodate other executive committee business. Or you suddenly feel so nervous about presenting that you feel like you’re going to throw up. Or half-way through your presentation, you realize one key audience member is not only not listening, he’s dominating the conversation to push his own agenda.

These are three of the five worst-case presentation scenarios anyone can suffer. The other two nightmare situations can occur even before your big moment in the spotlight. Maybe you’ve been here, too: You’re past the deadline for getting your presentation to your boss for review and suddenly you feel you either have way too much data and can’t fit it all in, or that if you leave anything out you’ll be accused of cherry-picking the facts to bolster some desired action from your audience.

Don’t worry. These five scenarios are more common than you might think, and each of them can be prevented or at least mitigated with a few proven presentation tactics taken in advance.

dont-panicBut First: Don’t Panic — You’ll Be OK

Philosophers and scientists have long argued that one of the immutable laws of the universe is that if something can go wrong, it eventually will. The lesson to take away from this is that try as you might to bullet-proof your presentation plan, you need to be as prepared as possible to deal with a sudden wrong turn.

Let’s step back and look at this from 35,000 feet. Things often go differently than you had anticipated, right? Sometimes that’s a good thing, like bumping into an old friend out of the blue. Other times, the turn of events can be a lot more serious. When that happens, negative emotions such as fear, anger, and frustration can cause your brain’s “central executive network” (yes, that’s a thing; it’s responsible for problem solving) to constrict and work less effectively. On the other hand, positive emotions help your brain generate more creative solutions to problems.

So, how can you become prepared to generate more positive emotions and fewer negative ones when life throws you curveballs, like when you suddenly have to use different technology to make your presentation?

Dr. Jennice Vilhauer, a psychotherapist and author, gave these four tips in a Psychology Today article:

  1. Pause before you act. Don’t let your mind and emotions act on the first — and almost always reflexive — reaction to the turn of events. Slow things down and take stock of the situation.
  2. Don’t assume that the things you don’t want are bad. Aren’t we talking about dealing with suddenly worse situations than we’d planned for? Yes, but on the other hand, unexpected situations often have the potential to open the door to new, positive events in our lives.
  3. Plan for everything to turn out well. The minute you ask yourself what you can do to make something better, you’ve taken the first step in planning for events to go well, Vilhauer explains. So, when things go south, immediately start planning for them to go well, even if that’s different from what you’d originally hoped for.
  4. Trust in your ability to be OK. “When you redirect your attention from a problem to the knowledge that you’re able to handle it, you will start to feel better,” Vlillhauer says.

remember-preventionSecond, Remember That Prevention Is the Best Medicine

That’s all great life-lesson stuff, right? And it absolutely can help you shift course more easily and with greater success. But you might be asking, “What about those five worst-case presentation scenarios? How do I deal with them?” We’ll drill down into those in a minute.

First, consider a few presentation tips that can help you achieve all four of those strategies for thinking and acting more positively — including anytime you need to shift gears for a business presentation that matters:

  • Know your material inside and out. This sounds like a no-brainer. But you’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t be) at how many people communicate material they aren’t completely familiar with. It’s a lot easier to be resilient and adapt to a suddenly new situation if you know your material well enough to revise it at a moment’s notice. Being intimately familiar with your material will also help you maintain executive presence and tell a story that is clear and has impact if you face an unplanned scenario.
  • Know your audience. The best storytellers step outside of their world and walk in the shoes of their audience. This does more than help you tell a story that addresses your audience’s unique perspective and makes it feel more relevant to them. It helps you feel more comfortable when you suddenly have an unexpected change in your presentation plans.
  • Structure your presentation to tell a story. If you flow your ideas, facts, and data to tell a story with clear “acts” or stages, you’ll be better prepared to pull out the key threads of the whole pattern if you need to cut it down or otherwise improvise. Then, become so familiar with that story that you could lay it out to anyone, from a colleague to your mom.
  • Be very clear about the one essential point you want your audience to take with them — the single greatest thing you’re offering that addresses a key challenge or conflict that your audience cares about. When you have this through-line clearly established in your mind, you will be less likely to be thrown off your game if your presentation plan is unexpectedly blown up.

Now, about those five worst-case scenarios…

  1. “Yikes! They’ve cut my presentation time from 30 minutes to five!”

Meetings get cut short… All. The. Time. Make sure during your preparation that your presentation has a clear, well-defined story structure. This will help you navigate through your content and reorient effectively when your time is cut short. If you have a 100-slide frankendeck with everything but the kitchen sink in it, you can’t successfully manage the sudden need for a much shorter presentation. In that case, you have a jumbled mess of ideas, when what you need is a roadmap from which you can easily reorient yourself.

Also, have a clearly identified proposition or “big idea” for your presentation — the one thing you want your audience to know or do. You can use this central idea to guide you and pivot when you need to.

Finally, inject tension early on in your story, to be sure you give your audience a reason to care and the desire to lean into your presentation, no matter how short it will be.

  1. “I’m suddenly so nervous, I think I’m going to throw up.”

You’re waiting to be called in to make your big presentation and suddenly, your palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. You get the picture, right? It happens, even to those of us who have delivered hundreds of presentations.

To calm your nerves, take the focus off yourself. Preparation is key here. Employ these tactics before it’s show time. First, take a walk in your audience’s shoes; uncover what matters most to them, what they will most need to know from you. Then, use that insight to orient you as you prepare your presentation. When you apply these tactics, your talk becomes about serving your audience’s needs, and not about how much you know or how polished you look. When you put the focus on your audience, you take the pressure off yourself.

This audience-first approach also has an added benefit. It engages your audience from the start and provides more value to the meeting — because what you are sharing is relevant to what they care about.

  1. “Bill isn’t listening. He’s pushing his own agenda, dominating the conversation, and derailing my presentation.”

As in Scenario 2, first take a walk in your audience’s shoes — Bill’s shoes. Bill wants to be heard and unfortunately, he’s using your presentation as his platform. And again, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Rather than ignore Bill and plow ahead regardless of Bill’s positioning, find out what he cares about, and then connect his care-abouts to your message.

If you know ahead of time that Bill will be resistant to certain ideas you’ll be presenting, incorporate those concerns into your presentation to head him off at the pass. Build into your presentation an explanation of how your idea addresses Bill’s specific concerns. Then, during your presentation, ask Bill if he can think of any other reasons why your idea might not work.

What you’ve done is allow Bill to feel seen and heard, while establishing yourself as confident yet flexible and open to suggestions. In the end, you’ll have strengthened the reason for your audience to take the action you want them to.

  1. “If I only show some of my data, I’ll be accused of cherry-picking or bias.”

If you’re a scientist, engineer, statistician, or data analyst, you know this particular challenge. Your technical audience wants to see all the data, because they want to know your process and draw their own conclusions. But you only have 20 minutes to present. You don’t know how to choose between communicating clearly and communicating with transparency. What to do?

First, add value to the meeting by avoiding the fool’s choice. Don’t assume it’s an either-or decision between clarity and transparency. You can indeed communicate clearly and transparently.

Here’s how: Come prepared to present your data with clear takeaways that are relevant to your audience in the moment. (See Scenario #5 for tips on how to do this). After your presentation, provide your audience with access to all the data and encourage them to alert the team if they come to a different conclusion. Alternatively, you can provide them all the data as a pre-read. Either way, you’re communicating very clearly while offering full transparency. Everybody wins.

  1. “I have too much data to show and not enough time to show it all.”

If you’ve done your research well, you will never have enough time to show all of your data — and you can always find more data to show. Unleashing an indiscriminate avalanche of data on your audience leads to confusion, lack of focus, circular discussions, and more meetings. To make matters worse, your reputation as an effective communicator takes a hit.

To avoid all of that, follow these three rules when presenting data:

  1. Share only the data that is most relevant to your audience in that moment. Think about why your audience needs your data. Do they need it to make a decision? If so, show them data that is relevant to that decision and highlight it.
  2. Summarize your data story. You’re not getting paid to show raw data and your audience doesn’t want that. You’re getting paid to analyze data and show up with a well-considered point of view, maybe even a recommendation. To help summarize your data story, write a headline for each data slide that pulls out the most important and relevant takeaway from that part data.
  3. Minimize the noise and boost the signal. Stand back and look at each data slide. Can your audience glean the key takeaway in just a few seconds? If not, remove unnecessary text, chart elements, and other noise until nothing is interfering with the most important signal you want your data to transmit. Then, use color and callouts to highlight the most important data points in your data set.

remember-prevention

Our best advice? Be prepared and focus on your audience

If the solutions to these five worst-case presentation scenarios have anything in common, it is to be well prepared and keep your focus on your audience. These and other presentation nightmares can be avoided or mitigated when you set yourself up with a clear story that’s clearly told, a singular proposition or big idea you want your audience to leave with, and a constant awareness of what really matters to your audience and what you can do to deliver that to them.

Expect the unexpected, hope for the best, and plan for the worst. This way, the worst will never be as bad as you think it could be.

Related Resources

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