“Everybody has a plan, until they get hit.”
~Boxer Mike Tyson, via Eric S. Smith
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 ©iStockphoto.com/Viorika They call the meeting venue’s electrician “Sparky”. Unfortunately it’s not so much a affectionate, if clichéd, nickname. It’s more a description of his work. Inspired by a Nicholas Bate post from earlier in the week. (BTW, check out Nicholas’ terrific ongoing series, How To Be Brilliant: 1-50, currently on number 39.)
Don’t you hate when you see something like this happen. You know someone, somewhere had a really bad night. You can imagine the band’s management yelling into their cell phone as techs scramble to get systems rebooted or rolled over to backup while simultaneously updating their resume in their heads. There are hundreds of hands reaching for hundreds of phones to send pictures to roommates who decided to bail and stay back at the bar. How many people in the audience are shouting, “Did you try control, alt, delete?!” Imagine the quiet thrill of the the elite handful who could actually knew what went wrong based on the error message. Disappointment soon followed for the elite of the elite who actually had dates as it slowly dawned on them that demonstrating this particular level of alpha nerdiness wasn’t getting them any action that night. As much fun as it was to imagine all that, it’s not even close to what’s really happening. The big screen blue screen of death (BSoD) shown here was intentional. It’s actually part of the act and not a real OS error message. Turns out Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is a serious Mac fanboy. Does this picture bring back bad memories? Have you ever been unfortunate enough to see a BSoD on the screen you were supposed to be projecting something rather important on? Whether you’re the AV tech or a presenter showing your own slides, it can be a unforgettably unpleasant moment. Changes to Windows have (supposedly) pretty much eliminated the BSoD. I don’t know if that’s true but I’ll admit can’t remember the last time I saw one. *  *  * Sometimes I think we take for granted how much easier it is to recover from badly timed computer failures now than it used to be. Remember what it was like during the time of transition as 35mm slides were fading away? We had this great, new technology that saved us all a huge amount of time, money and effort, but sometimes it seemed like this great, new technology wasn’t always so great. It often failed, often in ways we never experienced before. To make matters worse, we didn’t yet have the tools necessary to easily recover from these failures. For example, there were no USB flash drives. How many times would our bacon have been saved if there had been a storage media with enough capacity to easily transports multiple presentation files. One that also worked seamlessly and immediately with any computer you connected it to. Remember floppy disks? Remember only having 1.44 MB of space to work with? How about ZIP drives? More storage space, but they needed to have software installed before you could use them. They also weren’t completely reliable (I still find myself waking up in a cold sweat from a vivid “Click of Death” flashback nightmare). It was also very unlikely that the ballroom where you were presenting had Wifi and many hotels didn’t have any kind of internet capabilities at all. So not only was it more difficult to move content between computers, this was also before it was common for just about everyone in an organization to have a laptop with them at the meeting venue. If you got the BSoD, you couldn’t just grab someone’s machine and throw the presentation on it, or run it right from a USB drive, or download it from the corporate servers, etc. Remember, and be grateful, as you’re planning for your next life-or-death presentation: you have tremendous advantages that weren’t available just a few years ago. Just make sure you take advantage of them.
(okay the first one’s a little boring) Would you rather give a presentation with your slides but not your speaker notes or have your notes but not your slides? (the second has a little more “zing“) You’re at the crossroads, it’s midnight, the contract has been unrolled, the pen is ready and it’s time to make the deal. Carry a spare for EVERY piece of equipment you normally use to do a meeting and the king of the AV gremlins guarantees that you will never, ever have to use them. In other words, would you be willing to haul around two of everything you typically bring with you knowing you will never need to use the backup because nothing will ever fail? You would propitiate the gremlins by being perfectly prepared to deal with them. Your plan B could no longer involve a quick run to the Best Buy or renting something from the hotel. (Does that sound too much like a Twilight Zone episode?) I think that for most people, answer to the second question would really depend on what kind of meetings they were doing and what was at stake. I wonder what offer the gremlins would make someone if they already carried two of everything. How about you? Would you go with the slides or the notes? Would you make the deal or take your chances? When presentations go wrong and how to recover afterwards (OfficeRocker!) – “If any of you were at the Nottingham Technet event last week, you were a witness to probably the worst crash and burn I have ever suffered during a live presentation. I had put quite a lot of work into the presentation, believe it or not, and I had planned some 50 minutes of demo during my 75 minute session. As a bookend to my death by powerpoint tips post, I thought I might share the horror of the experience with you and how I picked myself up after it.”
This story, from Ian Whitworth’s blog, Can You Hear Me Up the Back?, ping-pongs back and forth from one to the other so often I lost track and ended up laughing at the same time I was cringing. Usually, when sharing a story that’s already been published online, I post the standard excerpt/link combination. In the case of this particular story, so many things went wrong in so many funny and cringe-worthy ways I had trouble choosing which excerpts to use. Luckily, Ian was kind enough to give me permission to publish it in its entirety. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Ian’s story is a great illustration of the first two Principles:
 A tad more embarrassing than your run-of-the-mill error and spell check never would have picked it up (you’ll need to click on the thumbnail to see the larger original on Twitpic — click on “View full size” once you get there).
Create Your Communications Experience: Handling Hecklers – Obama does it well Speak to Lead: Presidential oratory, discourse & disagreement – A look back at a kinder time? USATODAY.com: What happened to civility? Laura Bergells’ approach was to pose the question: “How will you handle a hostile audience member who wants to hijack your presentation or special moment on stage?” I think the best way to handle a situation like this is to begin to handle it long before you get anywhere near the presentation venue. Plan for an unwelcome outburst the same way you would plan for any other occurrence that could lessen your chances of presenting successfully. Just like you need to prepare for a projector failure or a sound system failure, you also need to prepare for a civility failure. We’re talking basic contingency planning here. Decide how likely it is that a civility failure will take place and characterize the nature of the failure(s) most like to occur. Then decide, for the types of civility failure that might actually happen, whether they are likely to cause your presentation to fail. If they are likely to happen and likely to wreck your presentation, plan for them. If there is some possibility of them happening but it’s absolutely certain that they will destroy your ability to continue presenting, plan for them. For example, in a meeting with an audience of any more than ten or fifteen people, it’s pretty likely that someone’s cell phone is going to ring. A disruption caused by someone forgetting to be polite enough to put the phone on vibrate. It may be very likely to happen, but it’s effect will be negligible so you most likely don’t even need to take it into serious consideration. On the other hand, we have the example of last Summer’s town hall meetings. The civility failures seemed to surprise almost everyone and the early events went very badly. Careful, thoughtful pre-presentation planning became evident once it was clear that attempts to disrupt proceedings were both very likely to take place and very likely to succeed. When you are preparing to deal with these situations, it’s crucial to remember our old friend, Principle Number 1: If you can’t do without it, make sure you won’t have to. If it look like civility is going to be in short supply at the meeting venue, be sure to bring your own as backup. And of course, few people know more about civility failure than Dilbert:
Thanks for the heads up Lisa.
I think it’s safe to say the that using the word “idiot” to describe himself is overly harsh. A true idiot would not have realized exactly how badly things had gone wrong during this presentation. Thanks again for sharing Bob. Principles that apply:1. If you can’t do without it, make sure you won’t have to. 3. If you practice like it’s the real thing, the real thing will seem like a practice. 4. It’s much easier to destroy something by accident than it is to create something on purpose. Your turn:Have you ever been humiliated during a presentation you’ve been involved with? ‘Fess up in the comments section. Email me if you would prefer to remain anonomous. |
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How about two quick questions, just for the fun of it…
Cringing and laughter. Good presentation disaster stories inspire one or the other. Really good presentation disaster stories inspire at least a little of both.
You may have noticed that, thanks to the recent outbursts of nastiness inflicted by Kanye West, Joe Wilson, and Serena Williams, more than a little ink has been spilled lamenting the current state of public discourse. Here are some random examples grabbed from my feed reader:
The Moore Speakers blog
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