Is There Anybody Out There? Presenting into the Void

I’m a naturally good presenter. Assuming – of course – that I know what I’m talking about, I believe in what I’m talking about, and my audience is at least open to listening. Something happens to me when I have an audience, I pick up on subtle cues or sense the dynamics, and I’m riffing. I’m witty, articulate, always able to strike the right tone and say the right things. This holds truer with small groups than with larger ones. I’ve done theater and improv, spoken at conferences - all to much larger audiences – and while I’m OK with it, it’s not the same. I’m talking to those audiences, not with them. I’m apart from them, other. I’m unproven, and they expect me to give them something worthy of their time and attention. I get some feedback – reactions – but not interaction. Intermittent pings rather than sustained connection.

“This better be good. I guess we’ll see, won’t we honey.”

Today I had my 3rd interview with a company I’ve always admired, presenting myself and my work to a group of very smart, talented folks. Presenting remotely that is, which – as it turns out – is a completely different thing.

I spent the better part of 2 weeks preparing – poring over the structure and the story of my case studies. Struggling with my introduction – how was I going to neatly and succinctly articulate who I am – my identity – in a meaningful way? Not just as a professional, but as a person? How to establish my character with them? If I were presenting in person, I wouldn’t have to think about it. My character would become apparent in our initial interactions.

I also feel a tremendous aversion to “selling myself”. I just want to be myself and present my work. To be authentic and real and humble and imperfect, yet unshakeable in my passion, my ideas, and my work. To have the confidence to be vulnerable. When you don’t feel the need to hide your flaws, bluster your strengths, or jockey for position, you can shed the artifice that prevents you from being truly open. You become more interested in learning about and connecting with the people and the world around you. And that’s what separates good designers from truly great ones. It’s another of those things that people can pick up on easily when they’re in the room with you – less so when they’re not.

It’s easy to see that remote communication is a lossy process. But often there are factors that mitigate the impact of what’s lost. People you’ve met with or worked with before already understand these nuanced aspects of you, and you theirs. As a consultant, I’ve often presented work to or pitched clients with other team members, who can help to ground and support you, as well as share the burden. Perhaps most of all, remote meetings and presentations are rarely about you – the goal isn’t to communicate who you are and what you’d be like to work with. Usually, these things just aren’t all that important.

In this case, it felt to me like these things were important. And I felt like I needed to find ways to be explicit about the implicit – to articulate that which goes unsaid.

I came up with a few ideas. Rather than a static intro slide, I included a background video montage combining clips from a “day in the life” video I made for some friends when they asked me to describe my typical workday, a few from my project reel, and the rest from a compilation of home videos I put together every year. I figured while everyone was introducing themselves, I’d hit them Clockwork Orange style with some context that I hoped would impart some impression of me. They could see the breadth of my work, what I do around the office, how I take my coffee. The fact that I built a garden railway, juggle, play with puppets, make little films about myself.

The Ludovico Technique always delivers results

This was great in theory, but I’m not sure it came across. Of course I had technical issues that ate into the start of the meeting, one of which being a bandwidth problem. I suspect what they saw was what appeared to be random series of images in stuttering succession. A french press. Me driving. A train. A keypad.

But I don’t actually know what they saw, and I don’t actually know what they took away from it. And that touches on perhaps the biggest challenge of presenting remotely. You don’t know what they’re seeing, or hearing, or doing. You don’t know if you’re connecting – you don’t know if your message is being received as intended, or how they feel about it.

The goal of any presentation or collaboration is ultimately to achieve a shared understanding.

In person, there’s a whole dance that happens under the surface – as you’re presenting, you pick up on subtle cues that tell you when your audience is with you, when they’re confused, when you’re losing them. These help you to improvise as needed to course correct - to make sure they stay with you the whole way.

Feedback cues can be very subtle, but quite powerful

The effort of bridging any gaps is undertaken mutually. It’s easy for listeners to interject, ask a question, engage in a dialogue. In the end, the presentation didn’t go exactly as you had planned – it went as it needed to go – for that audience, in that room, on that particular day. You can walk away knowing if an understanding was reached, and with a good sense of how it was received.

What I ended up doing was more of a one-man show. By myself, in my shed.

Everyone goes on mute, and I start yappin’. I think I did pretty well, but I have no idea what aspects were most interesting and could have been expanded, or when I should have just moved on. And so I plowed ahead, for about 40 minutes. Nobody interjected. I tried to keep my eyes trained on the camera. Unfortunately my initial technical problems had eaten into our time so that when I paused for questions, they offered up the remaining time to answer my questions.

What I should have asked was - “What… what do you think?”

When the call ended, the whole thing just felt unresolved. “How did it go?” my wife asked. “It was good for me…” The kicker is, the position itself is a remote position. It made me realize that should I get it, I needed to devise some strategies to compensate for the shortcomings of remote collaboration. Here are a few I’ve come up with so far:

Achieve A/V superiority. I thought I had this with my DSLR webcam, lighting, and condenser mic. Sadly, Microsoft teams suddenly decided to stop recognizing my Canon webcam and I had to switch to a backup. But I want to look and sound as close to the real thing as possible.

Know your audience. Do your research on those you’re presenting to. Check out their Linkedin, website, articles they’ve published. Stalk their Facebook and Twitter and tell yourself it’s not creepy, it’s research. Are they straight-laced, goofy, irreverent? Did their dog just die? Anything helps.

Ask for feedforward. Try to get ahead of things by asking specifically what your audience is looking for, what they hope to come away with. What’s most interesting to them? What’s not important?

Ask for feedback. What I really wish I had done for this presentation in retrospect is to pause more frequently to try to elicit some sort of response. Ask for questions, ask for thoughts, engage in some way. Perhaps even give the audience some options – “I can talk about this, this, or this - what’s most valuable to you?” Try to pull the audience into participating and engaging.

Interject. On the flip side, as a listener, be proactive about interjecting, asking questions, or providing feedback. Set the precedent to make it ok for others to do so.

Be transparent. Openly acknowledge the challenges with remote communication, and how you’d like to try to overcome them. I could have said at the outset “I need your help to make sure we understand each other, so I’ll be asking you what you think and how you feel. It might seem awkward but we need to be explicit with each other. If something isn’t resonating, please say so.”

Pad the time. I felt this meeting – scheduled for 1 hour – was far too short. Of course the technical issues compounded this, but there should be time up front to mingle and shoot the shit for a few minutes without feeling the need to rush into things. And time at the end – if not dedicated, perhaps try to make sure participants don’t all have hard stops at the end. There may be more to discuss, best let it resolve naturally.

Follow up. In this case, I sent out my thank you emails with this addendum:

“I’m sure you’re very aware that the hardest part of presenting remotely is the absence of the subtle, unspoken feedback cues that tell us that our message is being received as intended, and how our audience feels about it. It guides us toward a mutual understanding, which is the goal of any presentation or collaboration.

I’ve found that being more intentional and explicit in our communication can help to bridge this gap somewhat. To that end, I would truly value any thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with me. I’m happy to answer any questions, or to continue any aspect of the conversation with you.”

Practice Radical Honesty. Put yourself out there, be open, say what you think, what you need. There’s no room to be coy or put up more barriers to connecting with people. It’s the best way to be intentional and explicit about who you are.

My closing slide was honest, explicit, and clearly summarized my point.

I’d love to hear what challenges and strategies you’ve come across in your remote adventures.

Also, what did you think?

Up Next – Part 4: The transformative power of feedback

Start with Part 1: Mid-carer wayfinding now that (gestures broadly at everything)

Then try Part 2: Into the darkness: defining career attributes