Rehearsing a Team Presentation
I often work with teams of technical experts (engineers or various sorts and programmers) who are preparing and rehearsing oral proposals on large — usually government — contracts. The contracts can range in size from twenty-five million to two and a half billion dollars, so there’s a lot at stake.
Depending on the size and complexity of the contract, the rules governing the length of the presentation and the number of slides that can be use, we can spend anywhere from one to four weeks preparing the presentation. We review the written proposal and its win themes, read the presentation guidelines, strategize the oral presentation, and create the PowerPoint slides and other visual aids.
I consider preparation an important part of rehearsing. If you know your message — what you’re going to say and why you’re going to say it — you’ve half-way home. But you still have to rehearse. There are a lot of factors that influence how often we rehearse and for how long, but typically we schedule one to three days.
I always start with a “wall walk.” (I don’t think I came up with the term, but I can’t find references to it anywhere else on the web.) Here’s how it’s done or, at least, how I do it:
- Print out your slides, one to a page.
- Tack or tape them to the wall in order. You may need to post a number of columns — five slides top to bottom in one column; then start another column.
- Ask your team to stand in front of the first slides.
(For the sake of this explanation, let’s pretend there are 100 slides broken into five sections.) - Ask the lead presenter to answer these questions as briefly as possible:
What do you want the review board to do at the end of this presentation? (The answer should be something like “to award us the contract.”)
What does the review board need to know and feel in order to do that?
How does this presentation as a whole achieve that goal?
(These questions should have driven the creation of the presentation in the first place so they should come as no surprise to anyone.) - Then go section by section — in this case through all five sections — through the entire presentation, asking the team or the person who will be briefing each section to answer these questions as briefly as possible:
What is the purpose of this section?
How does it advance the overall goal of the presentation?
By the time you’re finished presenting the slides in this section, what do you want the review board to know and feel? - Once the team clearly has in mind the purpose and flow of the presentation at a high level, walk slide by slide through the entire presentation, asking the person who will be presenting the slide to answer these questions:
What is the one central idea of this slide?
What concern, problem, or goal of the customer does it address?
How does it lead to the next slide?
That final question — “how does it lead to the next slide?” — is critical. Too often, people create a lot of slides and simply string them together. They seem to think that simply by presenting a lot of information that they’ve somehow made a persuasive case. They haven’t. What turns data or information into something compelling and useful is the connections, how you tie things together.
A wall walk with a team of five presenters and a hundred slides can take anywhere from two to four hours. It’s a great investment. If you work with teams, consider doing something like it before sending individual presenters off to rehearse their parts. Make sure everyone understands the presentation as a whole and their role in it. You’ll be surprised by how well everyone does.
Do you do something similar? What variations do you suggest?
Tags: rehearsing an oral proposal, team presentation rehearsal, wall walk