Second Time’s a Charm

On Thursday I gave my talk “Fight for Relevance” on the challenges facing (personal) banking at the Meniga Customer Conference.

I had a lot of fun in wonderful company, and I did great. I really wanted to do great as my last public speaking event was a bit of a blunder, or at least sub par. This is how I did it.

I worked quite hard preparing this Meniga conference talk. To me that was important as my last (big) public talk, in the spring, lead me to write a post titled Public speaking “blunder”: Is it too late now to say sorry? The title was a bit dramatic as it was not about a real blunder, just about not being great when I wanted to be great but wasn’t.

Now I wanted to avoid making the mistakes I made last time.

Cool framework of success and failure from Wait But Why

In my last talk I used the cool framework from Tim Urban of Wait But Why from the post “Doing a TED Talk: The Full Story” to conclude that I was on the wrong side of the template; neither at “birth-birthday level memorized” nor “talk through a set structure”. I was at the horrible level of “read of a script” in the latter half of my talk. This is something I wanted for sure to avoid this time around.

Source: http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/doing-a-ted-talk-the-full-story.html

Learnings from previous blunder

In my post about the failed performance I outlined key takeaways that I kept in mind before this talk. Among those takeaways was that I always need to bring my A-game, never read off a script and don’t forget to engage, move around and show emotions through the whole talk. This time everything worked out.

Having many visual supporting slides can guide you through

I was very happy with how my presentation looked. I had outlined my pages well in advance and my co-worker, a brilliant graphic designer, took some Getty Images I had picked to show what kind of impression I wanted and turned them into stylish drawings the linked perfectly to what I was saying. This put a holistic cool look on the show.

One of the wonderful simple visual slides I used. When this was up I used a quote from Leonard Cohen from the Daily Telegraph in 1993 after having brought a message that was a bit gloomy to the crowd in the previous minutes. “I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.”

The simple slides helped me quite a bit as I could very easily walk through a set structure with great visual supporting slides. The audience easily avoided getting caught in the details of busy slides and could focus on the context of the narrative I was trying to create.

I was quite happy with the look of the pages — my co-worker worked some magic here

Practice, practice, practice (and think about your structure)

I practiced more and better than last time. My talk was last Thursday but I was pretty much ready on the Friday before. I revised over the weekend and had rough visuals and structure ready on Sunday. Monday I focused on the key message, the flow and the structure.

When I was planning I asked myself if I should use “the pyramid” with a situation, complication, resolution structure or simply the “tell them what you you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them” framework. I ended up with the latter.

I started to practice out loud on Tuesday. On Wednesday I did a full length dry run with a few co-workers and got a lot of good feedback after that session. In the evening I went through the presentation three times from beginning to the end and made a few final edits. In the morning I thought about printing my notes but realized I didn’t need it and headed to the Blue Lagoon, where the event was taking place.

The Performance

Georg Ludviksson, the CEO of Meniga started the day, we had the digital banking visionary Michal Panowicz and Sigga Sigurðardóttir, an ex-Amex leader and ‎now Managing Director and Chief Customer and Innovation Officer at Banco Santander UK. So I knew I was going to follow people that knew exactly what they were talking about and would perform well. That came true. They all did a great job.

I had the last slot before lunch. Not the best slot of the day with a hungry crowd.

Relaxed, moved around and engaged with the audience

I was at the center of the area or next to the podium but was never behind the podium. I felt great, was loose and started off by making a few jokes. I walked through a set structure a la Wait But Why, changed a few things on the go to link to some takeaways from the previous talks and everything went great.

I got very good feedback from the audience during the presentation as well as after it. I was really satisfied with my performance and feel that I managed to achieve the goals I had I had set myself for the day.

So What?

So the “so what?” is that I am happy that I performed at the level I want and that I learned from my previous sub par performance.

I am passionate about my industry, my challenges and goals and it is fun to share that passion. It is also not that difficult to do well in public presentation if you are focused, realize what your goals are and strive to work hard in that direction for a few days.

Thanks to Meniga for giving me this opportunity and thanks to everybody that helped me prepare for the presentation at this great event at the Blue Lagoon on Thursday.

Key Takeaways

• If you learn from previous performances progress is easy
• Do full dry runs outloud by yourself and with an audience
• Collect feedback and use it
• Many great visuals make the performance a lot easier
• An average of 1/3 words per slide is a good ratio in a conference talk
• Move around and engage — don’t stay behind the podium
• Best Way to Recover from a Blunder => Be Great

Pic: Eva Björk Guðmundsdóttir