science of fail

Choosing wallpaper for a room involves decisions of colour, pattern, and density. Buying wallpaper before you have even bought the house it is going in makes no sense. But you probably decided on the template for your last presentation before you considered the content. Presentations are not about the decoration.

Everyone can toss a ball up and catch it. Many people can do that with two balls. When there are three balls it is officially called juggling. Personally, I can juggle three balls with lots of patterns. The world record for “toss juggling” that is balls successfully in a pattern, caught twice, is 11. The average presentation is like the Sonia Bravia advert of bouncing balls falling down the streets of Los Angeles. Our brains weren’t built for this. Juggling is fine for three balls (or facts).

The phrase ‘in a mirror, darkly’ comes from the Bible. It describes a first-century mirror, not made of glass but of polished metal. What that showed was a poor, dark reflection, not a true one. Blurred. Distorted. Partial. As a presenter at a conference you will have rehearsed your script, loaded the slides, stood in front of the mirror and checked your appearance before confidently walking onto the stage reflectiung that everything was in place. What if the mirror doesn’t show what actually matters? What if the reflection is like looking in a mirror, darkly?

“Thank you.” That phrase you’ve been aiming to deliver for weeks now. You have finished your talk. There is polite applause, you smile gratefully, and maybe even someone congratulates you. You return to your seat feeling a deep relief, even pride. It worked. The slides were great, the timing was perfect, and you hit every point. It felt good, clear, like you communicated.

Your PowerPoint is not the presentation. If you believe that it is, then you have entirely missed the point of every single presentation you have ever “delivered” or “received”. You are not alone in this erroneous belief but you are…
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