MODERN management relies on presentations, so there is an endless thirst for courses on presentation skills. They come in various guises, from the rather mundane — how and when to use the overhead projector — to the grooming of television presenters.
There are still lots of consultants and designers who “help you with your slides”. They can advise on what font to use, whether yellow on blue is as authoritative or “playful” as black on green, where to place the logo and what is the correct ratio of words to graphics.
Powerpoint obsession has replaced overhead-projector etiquette and the slide seems all. However, the PC-run, multi-media show is starting to take over. The speaker runs slides and videos seamlessly, changing the mood, the focus or the pace here and there. The skill lies more in the design than the presentation.
Actually, what is more important is to know how to work the electronics. There are few more pathetic sights than the fumbling speaker who cannot upload, download or switch on his carefully crafted presentation. It is, of course, the real test of a speaker’s knowledge, ability and style to deliver a prepared talk without the props.
At the other end of the scale is the course that focuses on how to handle people. This can be called anything from “presentation” to “handling the media”. Presentation is too downmarket a concept, as is “interviewing”, so new words have to be found to sex up old products. So we have “media appearances” courses or, better still, “multi-media interfaces” courses. These are often fronted by a has-been newsreader, whose job it is to humiliate you a little at the start of the day and ingratiatingly praise you at the end to prove the course has worked.
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The more senior you are, the more you have to do some form of public speaking — to staff, shareholders and customers’ groups. We have all sat through enough rambling, tedious, incompetent talks to know that a bad speech can seriously damage your reputation. Equally, most people can recall the exhilaration of a sparkling performance, even though the content was somewhat thin.
But are skills courses what most people need? Public speaking is the most common phobia. Some people will do anything to get out of speaking in public, even to a group of their friends and supporters.
Sometimes people will recommend a presentation-skills course after they have seen a transformation in a colleague or friend who has turned from an anxious, shy burbler into a self- confident, articulate performer who seems to relish the opportunity to wow an audience.
But should we worry so much about skills? Are the basic assumptions of a skills course faulty? The belief is that if people are taught some fundamental points and skills — use of slides, pace of presentation, how to tell a story — they will become able presenters. Perhaps this is why so many of these courses verge on being patronising.
Another approach is to offer therapy rather than instruction. The idea is to concentrate on the problem, namely anxiety. For many, public speaking is a sort of everyday phobia like agoraphobia. Phobia is fear of fear. People “cope” with it by avoiding any situation in which they may be asked to speak in public.
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There are essentially three types of therapies for phobias: two behavioural, one psychoanalytic.
The first is the most dramatic: flooding. Scared of birds? The answer is to march you, trembling and sweating, into Trafalgar Square, where you are forced to endure a pigeon attack. You learn you can survive it. You learn that the fear can be managed. You are cured. At work this means being forced to give a speech with some help from your therapist for anxiety control: deep breathing, clenching your buttocks, visualisation and so on.
The second method, desensitisation, aims at the gradual approach. You give a presentation to your spouse, then the family over the dinner table, then your favourite and supportive colleague at work. It is a mixture of practice plus helpful, warm support. You learn how to do it and that you can do it. But the focus is on feelings, not skills. Manage the anxiety and the skills will come easily. This is the favoured method of treatment.
The third method is based on the assumption that in the murky depths of the unconscious lie buried memories — nearly always unhappy — about public speaking. The idea of speaking in public is supposed to trigger certain events, memories, feelings. Your dad was a brilliant public speaker and you had deeply ambiguous feelings towards him. You played the female role in the primary-school play and were mercilessly teased. You dried up and fainted on your first attempt. The therapist ‘s job is to find the associations, repressed memories or unconscious motives and bring them into consciousness so they can be dealt with. Confront the repression and you will be cured.
The moral of the story is this: much of the problem with public speaking among non-professionals is not about skill, but fear. They talk in creativity seminars about “liberation” and “unblocking”. They teach a few tricks, but assume we are all well above average and just need to liberate our creative juices.
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It is essentially the same point with presentations. The pendulum has swung in favour of skills training and away from anxiety management. That is not to say every stage-struck bore can be turned into a stage-struck star after a shot of flooding or weeks of desensitisation, but rather that the place to start is the heart, not the head; feelings, not formatting slides; and dread, not dress codes.
Adrian Furnham is professor of psychology at University College London