Sooner or later, despite your best efforts to rehearse, one of your demos will fail.
You’re going to try to fix it really quickly without the audience noticing. It won’t work because the entire audience is at least vaguely familiar with the subject material.
Your entire delivery will instantly come unglued. Your posture will change, your voice will get quieter. Watch the body language of the presenter on the right:
The presenter clearly feels like he’s lost control of the demo – and the crowd – when in reality, he’s got an amazing opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, he’s under a wee bit of pressure, doing a Windows demo with Bill Gates, but listen to that laughter again.
When demos fail, the crowd is laughing with you, or at you. It’s your call, so laugh with them.
Every one of us in the technology business goes through failures every day, and not just in our demo environments, either. When the presenter onstage gets a failure, he instantly becomes one of us, and he’s on our team. We’ve all been there. Here’s how to win the crowd over fast:
- Stop what you’re doing, take one small step back, and grin at the audience. They’re going to be laughing. Be happy, because this is a great memorable moment for everyone involved, including you.
- While you’re still away from the keyboard, explain what you think the error message means.
- Explain the one thing you’re going to try to do to recover.
- Step back up to the keyboard and try that one thing.
If it succeeds, keep right on going, happy and confident in the knowledge that you’ve mastered the technology and the audience.
If it fails, stop troubleshooting, no matter how easy the situation looks. You’ve already been wrong once, but the audience is with you. If you proceed down the path of troubleshooting your own broken environment onstage, you’ll lose the audience’s faith in a matter of seconds. Instead, bail out of the demo, switch back to your presentation, and use the hidden slides with screenshots you took ahead of time while you were rehearsing the demo. Explain what the audience should have seen, and share a laugh about the failure.
Most presenters would kill for the chance to get the audience to belly laugh. You just achieved it. Done properly, even your presentation failures can be successes.
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Great post. I hope this is not perceived as an unfair characterization of your work, but in many ways it seems like you’ve gone from being a DBA, to being a teacher of DBAs, to being a teacher of teachers of DBAs. Even though I may not be an aspiring presenter, as a proud member of the laughing horde, this is great advice.
No offense taken at all! In fact, I feel like I’ve been doing that for the better part of a decade. My post on how to start a technical blog spurred lots of folks into writing blogs, and for several years I had a standing offer that I’d pay the hosting fees and set up WordPress for any blogger that wanted to get started. My proudest moments aren’t when I fix somebody’s database – it’s when I can motivate someone else to teach dozens or hundreds or thousands of other people how to fix their database. I’m all about it. 😀
[…] was at that moment that I thought about a blog post by Brent Ozar I read the previous week–When Good Presentation Demos Go Bad–and I remembered the line, “When demos fail, the crowd is laughing with you, or at you. […]
I’m presenting at a UG next week. I really should have my hidden slides ready.
Mike – it’s such hard work doing the hidden slides. I usually do end up doing them the week before because I can just do screenshots as I step through rehearsing my demo, and that way I kill two birds with one stone. Good luck!