8. PUBLIC SPEAKING
8.3 Presenting as a Team
As discussed in Chapter 4, one of the key goals of working in a team is to develop synergy. A high-performing team can produce better results than any of the individuals could do alone. So how can you show your team’s synergy in your team presentation?
In this 12 minute video, Delivering a Successful Team Presentation, a team of business students both shows and tells us how to plan and deliver a successful team presentation, using effective visuals and including key topics like assigning roles, planning handoffs, and preparing for Q&A. Watch their “team presentation on team presentations” and take notes on what you think works particularly well.
Did you notice how they spoke naturally to their audience in plain, friendly language, and only very minimally relied on notes? how they kept a reasonable pace and didn’t rush? how they used humour and questions to engage? how they offered specific examples (positive and negative)? Their visuals were simple, yet effectively illustrated their ideas using minimal text. The hard work they put into planning and practicing made the delivery look easy! Although I’m sure they felt nervous, they projected confidence and positivity. In essence, they used all the “strategies for effective public speaking,” and their collaborative efforts resulted in a final product that was “more than the sum of their parts.” A single speaker could not have delivered this presentation as effectively as the team did.
Presenting coherent and engaging information as a team takes collaborative planning, deliberate practice, and sustained commitment. Team members can take on different tasks and content to split up the work, but sometimes preparing a team presentation is more work than a solo talk. Be prepared to put in the time needed to synergize your team.
For some more tips, read Nick Morgan’s 10 Rules for Presenting as a Team. While there is some overlap with the video above, there are also novel ideas that can help you make your team presentation stand out. Where the student presenters demonstrate ideas, Morgan spells them out in clearly written guidelines.
EXERCISE
Review the two resources above as a team. Take notes, with each teammate identifying at least 3 tips you learned from the resources that you had not considered before and think are important to use in your team’s presentation. Use these to collaboratively choose the planning and delivery strategies that will work best for your context.
Planning an Interactive Team Presentation
Let’s imagine you are planning to present a prototype design, poster, or infographic to a client. Before you do this, you want to run it by your colleagues (classmates) and get their feedback on how well the current iteration is working and what could use further revision. This could be considered as a modified form of focus group activity, as your listeners understands the context and are especially suited to giving you the kind of feedback you need. The goal is to get them to engage, interact, and provide meaningful feedback to help you validate and possibly improve your design.
Keep in mind that a focus group is different from a presentation: you don’t have an audience, you have participants. Thus, the planning tips outlined above are especially crucial for a successful outcome. A suggested process is outlined below.
Planning an Interactive Team Presentation or Focus Group Activity
1. Determine what feedback you want to get and why
Ask yourselves: What are we struggling with, unsure of? What do we want to “test out” or validate? How will we use this feedback? What kinds of changes are will willing or able to make at this point?
Create open-ended questions and neutral prompts that will help you elicit this feedback; avoid “leading” questions where you are trying to get a certain response. The kinds of questions you ask will of course depend on what you are getting feedback on. Here are some very general examples:
- What stands out in the design? What seems most/least important?
- What do you think is the purpose of X? What does Y suggest to you?
- Does this seem intended for you? Relevant to you?
- Would you use it/ find it valuable/convincing/credible?
- What changes would you suggest?
2. Select Strategies, Technologies, and Roles
Ask yourselves: How can we get the feedback we want? What strategies and technologies will we use? Verbal Q&A? Electronic survey? Interactive digital space (Google.doc, Kahoot, Zoom white board, etc). How much time do we have? What can we accomplish in that time frame? How will we collect and save the feedback? Will we share the data with participants?
Every team member should participate actively, engaging with the participants at some point. But also keep in mind that you need to have a way to record and save your participants’ feedback. Don’t rely on memory alone. Have a reliable method of collecting and saving the data, even if that is a teammate with a paper and pen.
3. Plan your Structure
Engage: Start with an Engagement Question to gauge your participants’ familiarity with your subject (have you ever…? How many of you have…? Etc). Continue using engagement strategies throughout the activity.
Clarify Purpose: Explain the purpose of your design, going over the various component parts and your reasons for choosing specific design elements. Describe the intended audience/user and desired impact. Be careful not to spend so much time on this that you don’t have enough time actually get feedback from participants.
Elicit Feedback: Ask questions and record feedback accurately. You might do this continually (while going over your design and audience) or you might do this at a certain stage in the activity. You might also answer questions from your participants.
Wrap up: thank your participants for their time and contributions to your project.
Additional tips:
Depending on the context and who your participants are, it’s often wise to avoid asking participants to “justify” their responses (avoid asking “why?”) as this might make them feel “judged” and discourage them from further participating. Instead, ask follow ups like “Can you say more about…”
It’s important to try to get as many people to participate as possible, so you get diverse perspectives. You can encourage a variety of voices by asking, “Who else has something to say? I would love to hear more from…” You might ask participants to share similar experiences or problems they have had and suggest ideas or solutions.
Don’t feel like you have to “stick to the script” – feel free to explore and pursue unexpected ideas that come up. Leaving room for creativity is how innovation happens!
