413 Seamless Slides and Stellar Delivery. Unlocking AI’s Potential in Presentations In Japan
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 11/25/2024
Presenting During The Time Of Cancel Culture
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
“That has to come out”. “Why?”. “It might offend women in the audience”. “But this example is totally in context with what I am saying”. And so it went on. This was my first bruising encounter with cancel culture. Living in Japan this third time since 1992, I have been outside the cancel culture debates sweeping America. Until now. The speech I was going to give would be videoed and go global, including to America. Perplexed, confused, insulted – these were the emotions I was confronting upon hearing I had to make that...
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Gold Medal Winning Mistakes When Presenting
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world’s biggest corporations. The topic was on building your personal brand. A good crowd had turned out to pick up some pointers. Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded. The slant taken was how to project your brand “within” this gargantuan monster. How to climb their thousand foot high greasy pole. As with other luncheon speaker events, you had a chance to meet people beforehand and then engage with your table mates over the meal. I...
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Ineffective Persuasion Techniques For Presenters
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
This is horrible. Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking? I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation’s finances and he is doing a woeful job of it. They have a dedicated Coms team, there are talented people in the leadership group, so I am asking myself how could this train wreck come to pass? I was also thinking, “you should have called me, I could have saved you a lot of wasted opportunity with your messaging”. Too late now, the video is out there for all to ignore. This is a classic case of people who...
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When To Fake It When Presenting
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain. As someone wise once noted, “if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with who you told what”. Presenting is something similar. Maintaining a fiction in front of an audience takes a lot of skill. In fact, if you have that much skill, why worry about faking it in the first place? Well, there is a place for fakery when presenting, but we need to know when is appropriate. We know that the way we think about things influences how we well we...
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When Using Storytelling In Business Don’t Lead With Your Insights
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
When I read this quote from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon from 1971 that “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention” I thought about its ramifications for presenters. Today, we are firmly swimming against a King tide of information overload, so Simon’s dystopian prophecy has come to fruition. This is the Age of Distraction for audiences. They are gold medal winning poor listeners and yet we have to present to them. We know that storytelling is one sure fire way to snaffle their attention and yet that path is littered with landmines. Very few...
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Presenting When Your Organisation’s Leaders are Struggling
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
The largest meeting venue in the office complex was big enough to handle hundreds of people and it was packed. This presentation involved all the senior heads of the Department going through their strategies for the coming year. One after another, we took to the stage and spoke about our areas of responsibility. I was one of the five who spoke. My turn came after a particular colleague who was a numbers wiz, a brainy technical expert. He didn't like the way I presented. He went around telling other colleagues I was all style and no substance. I just laughed when I heard that flat earth...
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Business Storytelling For Fun And Profit
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
I listen to some podcasts on writing, trying to better educate myself on the craft. I was hopeless at English at school, so the rest of my life has been a remedial fix in that department. Fundamentally, these podcast authors are aimed at fiction writers, rather than non-fiction scribblers like me. A lot of what we do in business on our dog down days may seem like we are living a fiction, when the numbers are not there or the results are dragging their sorry backside along the ground. Despite these self-recriminations about our situation, we are in the non-fiction storytelling...
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How To Question Your Audience
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Presentations have become tediously monochrome. The speaker speaks, the audience sit there passively taking it all in. After the speaker’s peroration, they get to offer up a few questions for about 10 to 15 minutes or so and then that is the end of it. With the pivot to online presentations, the fabric of the presentation methodology hasn’t changed much. We sit there peering at the little boxes on screen, hearing a monotone voice droning on. We listen to enquiries from others submitted beforehand or we may actually get an open mic opportunity to ask our questions...
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Breaking The Rules By Choice, When Presenting
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Many people break the rules of presenting, usually unknowingly. They have Johari Window style blind spots, where others know they are making mistakes, but they themselves are oblivious and just don’t know. This is extremely dangerous, because when you don’t know, you keep hardening the arteries of your habit formation. It is diabolically difficult to break out of those habit patterns once formed because you become comfortable with sub-standard performance. On the other hand, breaking them for effect, is very powerful and can be a tremendous differentiator in a world of...
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The Incredible Leverage Of Speaking
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Bonseki is a Japanese art creating miniature landscapes, on a black tray using white sand, pebbles and small rocks. They are exquisite but temporary. The bonseki can’t be preserved and are an original, throw away art form. Speaking to audiences is like that, temporary. Once we down tools and go home, that is the end of it. Our reach can be transient like the bonseki art piece, that gets tossed away upon completed admiration, the lightest of touches that doesn’t linger long. Of course we hope that our sparkling witticisms, deeply pondered points and clear...
info_outlineSeamless Slides and Stellar Delivery. Unlocking AI’s Potential in Presentations In Japan
Something I had never heard of before called “Steampunk” popped up in my TikTok feed. Now I write a daily blog published on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and X, called “Fare Bella Figura: Make a Good Impression, Be A Sharp Dressed Man” on the subject of classic men’s wear for business. Obviously, I am interested in how we men choose to master and control our first impressions in public. Everyone is judging us based on how we appoint ourselves and that is before we have any chance to utter even one word. If that is the case, and it is, why not make an effort to control that first vital impression?
Anyway, that is another podcast subject, so back to today’s theme. These Steampunk videos were AI created and featured seriously “killer handsome” men wearing very, very cool Victorian era clothing. The imagery was amazing, fantastical, and addictive. Sadly, probably no one looked anything near that good in foggy Victorian London and few guys today could even come close to these AI images. It is all fake, and this is an important point to keep in mind when we are dealing with AI.
This got me thinking about AI and fakery in the field of business presentations. Where is the line to discriminate between fakery and authenticity? Let’s look at some of the AI tools and see where they are leading us. Canva, Beautiful.ai, Visme etc., use AI to arrange our basic slides into very sophisticated output. If we are not sure what style of visual presentation will best suit the content, then we can access help from Microsoft Designer and Google Slides AI. If we have numbers to represent on screen, then Infogram and Datawrapper can help. The AI will suggest the best chart type based on the data. I don’t know that we need that much help though: for data over time use line graphs, for short-term comparisons use bar charts, and use pie charts for gauging proportional differences.
If we are thinking about how to put the talk together, then ChatGPT, Claude and Jasper AI can craft a script as a base for us to work with. If we want a formal tone, we can command it or go for a conversational tone, and the AI will respond accordingly. If like me, you are not that red hot on grammar and punctuation, then Grammerly or ProWritingAid can make suggestions. They don’t always get it right, so we have to maintain a certain amount of knowledge to intervene when needed. It is handy though to be reminded that you have started the last three sentences with the same word, so that we can introduce more variety into our prose.
I haven’t tried them myself yet, but I am told that Orai and Speeko will analyse my delivery in real time. I can get feedback on pacing, tone, filler words, modulation and pronunciation. I had to give a major keynote recently to an elite audience and if I had been more organised, I could have tried them out. I will use them the next time during my rehearsals.
I wonder if they give us Good/Better feedback, rather than confidence sapping critique? By the way, a word to the wise, if you ever ask anyone to listen to your practice sessions, instruct them to give you only Good/Better feedback. Otherwise, their first inclination will usually be to criticise what you are doing and demotivate you.
I have seen some speakers using Mentimeter and Slido, which are AI driven to facilitate real time audience interaction. We can run instant polls, pose questions, and get feedback during our presentation. We can do the same things analog too, but it looks cool to use these tools. I have seen simple bats with “Yes” on one side and “No” on the other used to gauge audience agreement with whatever the speaker is proposing and it works well. We can simply ask people to raise their hands in response to their agreement with the question or not and no tech involved. Personally I go for simplicity when presenting.
I do recommend keeping a hawk-eyed accounting of the faces of the people in the audience. If you think that is too old school, you can try Beyond Verbal and Emotional AI. These tools will interpret audience facial reactions and voice tones to help you understand the engagement levels of the audience. All great stuff but I find watching their faces carefully does the same thing, and it is real time.
There is no doubt AI is here to stay and capacity will only broaden and improve. We have to keep in mind, though, that these are just tools and not a substitute for our role as the speaker. I actually don’t want my AI enhanced slide deck to be so spectacular that the audience stops watching me and becomes totally engrossed with what is on screen. We, the speaker, have to be the center of attention and the tools are at our command, rather than commanding us. That is why I don’t like using videos. If they are to be used keep let’s them super short.
Like those handsome dudes in the Steampunk videos, the presentation is superb, but the AI is fake and we can never match what is being presented. We can dress ourselves in the same Victorian way, using fine fabrics, but we will never be that handsome and cool looking. We need to keep AI in perspective too, not get carried away with the tool set and forgetting about the human dimension aspect of the delivery. We, the presenters, must always be the main game, the core talent and the real focus for our audience.
The tech has to be used in moderation and the speaker must be soley placed in the spotlight. Don’t let the AI become the star like in those Steampunk videos I mentioned. We reserve that position for ourselves, always, everywhere and we allow no AI substitutes for us.