Handling a glitch during a presentation

You know the drill, and you're prepared for your talk. You know your audience, know your slides, and know your venue. But you can’t prepare for everything. And you can’t prevent everything. Bad things happen, apparently randomly, to good talks.

What you can do is to put yourself in a position to be able to handle surprise problems with flexibility and grace, and to go on with th

I gave a talk this week that I’ve given before. It was tweaked to the audience, prepared but not rehearsed, and well organized. I was familiar with the slides. I had assessed the room the night before the talk and had actually stood on the stage (a handy tip for making sure there aren’t any surprises when you step out to give your presentation). 2 hours before the talk I had connected my Mac to the projector and made sure there weren’t any issues. It all worked.

Houston, we are all systems go and ready for launch.

Speaker, speaker, break, speaker. Then it’s my turn. I walk up, connect my Mac to the projector, and the synch is wrong. Slides look muddy, whites are yellow, and there is a slight jitteriness on the image.

Well, dang.

Steve the introducer-guy starts my intro while I fiddle with the screen; I figure I’ve got 45 seconds to get it working. I futz. I fiddle. No difference. Intro is finished.

Decision time

So right now I could continue to fiddle. Other speakers have done that before me. I have seen this glitch once before (also with an Epson projector: note to self, remember to curse Epson when I am endowed with magical powers), and it resolved after much fiddling, connecting, and disconnecting. I might be able to fix this.

But, the slides are readable. Colors are wrong, and I’m not happy with that, but the audience can easily read them and the problem isn’t distracting to anyone but me.

I decide to go ahead with the presentation. Continuing to fiddle will be disrespectful of the audience’s time, and draw further attention to this problem. Most groups are sympathetic to a technical glitch, it’s happened to everyone. But the longer you work the problem the more of it sticks to you. The idea here is to get in, get it “good enough,” and get on with the talk.

Was it just me, or did that go OK?

I started out a little flustered. It really is important not to apologize at the start of your talk; you might get sympathy, but not respect. I didn’t exactly apologize, but I did stammer something about this not having happened in rehearsal. I don’t know why. Crap was just leaping out of my mouth.

I got a hold of myself right after that fell out, though, and plowed into the talk. The audience was engaged, and the talk mostly landed. Afterwards a dozen or so people made their way up to talk more about the topic or to tell me that they enjoyed the talk. Of course all I could think of was how ugly it looked.

What’s going on here?

Presenting is a performance, and a lot of performance happens inside your head. Everything did not go as planned, and a little of that ickiness stuck to me during the talk. It’s like if you’re runnning a race you’ve trained hard for, it’s on TV and your girlfriend is going to see you, and you show up with mismatched socks. It doesn’t really matter too much, but it niggles at you.

The content was solid, and the message was one the audience was interested in. These things engaged the audience’s attention, and are ultimately what let to a positive reception.