The second trap revealed that a question may not be a great audience warm up! How about a joke, then? “Start with a joke”, “make them like you by making them laugh”, the pundits say. 

And out they go, on a limb as always, out go the serious presenters who end up being the only ones chortling at their own jokes. The day before the event (it is easier to remember), they rush to the web for recycled jokes, or they try out the latest joke heard in a bar or at the canteen. Jokes often have sexual, religious, or racial connotations. Upon hearing these, many instantly move from a neutral attitude to one of dislike. Some may even get up and leave. I witnessed such disastrous joke-telling at an international gathering of scientists.
Some stay away from risky jokes and instead try self-deprecating jokes; after all, it’s ok to laugh at yourself, is it not?  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, or it might have been… had you been able to skip my talk and run to the beautiful beach in front of this hotel.” or ” I’m delighted to be the one who has been designated to help you sleep after today’s copious lunch. So I’ll do my best to make this talk as boring as I possibly can. Could we have the lights down now, please? Thank you very much.” The audience did not come to attend your talk expecting to be bored! Your self-deprecating humor à la John Cleese will be translated by the audience as follows: “His slides are boring. He has not even bothered to rehearse his talk at all. He really doesn’t enjoy presenting to us, but he’s doing it because he has to.”  
Last but not least, Starting a talk with a joke sets the tone for the presentation. People will expect more of the same. But then again, you will not deliver on the promises set from your entertaining start; after all, yours is a scientific presentation! 
In short, avoid jokes altogether at the start of your talk, even cartoons that may be funny. A play on word requires a good understanding of English. Idiomatic expressions, or culture specific jokes are beyond the level of comprehension of scientists with English as a second language or from different cultural backgrounds. 


To conclude, If you want the audience to relax at the very start of your talk, do what works 100% of the time: Face the audience, keep silent, and SMILE .

Do you have someone work the audience before your appearance on stage, as is the case for famous singers preceded by less known groups getting the audience into shape? Some university dean, or Nobel Prize winner celebrating your multiple journal citations, your incredible academic record, your long list of patents? If not, your audience is still cold when you appear behind the lectern. And this is why what the pundits recommend does not work: “Start with a question”, “Interact with the audience”, they say. And out on a limb they go, the misfortunate presenters for whom good advice but poor timing and unreasonable expectation garner nothing but the awkward silence of a reluctant audience.

Sometimes, the question is wrong. I recall the young scientist whose work featured the discovery of a gene associated with breast cancer. After introducing himself at the beginning of his talk, he probed the audience with this memorable question: “Has anyone had a family member die of breast cancer?”
Naturally, the long silence that followed was not an indication that the audience was made of healthy individuals whose parents were healthy and grandparents were still in their prime. The presenter must have felt like someone listening to the SETI space probe waiting for a signal betraying intelligent life in the universe, for there seemed to be no life at all in this audience. The question was too personal and too risky: imagine someone had replied: “Yes. My mother died of breast cancer last week.” What would the presenter have responded?

But most of all, the timing is wrong. At the beginning of a talk, the audience does not readily open up to someone they do not know. It adopts a wait-and-see attitude. The positively-charged presenter must create a low resistance channel to reach the neutral audience. And I know no better way to do that than by smiling and welcoming the audience. The presenter must also establish a potential difference (voltage) between him/her and the audience – for example, by creating a curiosity gap that the audience eagerly wants filled. The question is a good way to build that curiosity gap, particularly an intriguing, provocative question or statement like Friedman’s assertion that “the world is flat”. But that question must be rhetorical.

There is no need to force the audience into action at the beginning of your scientific talk. An audience that has had time to be interested in both the presenter and his/her topic is easier to interact with and engage.

By Jean-Luc Lebrun

With this, the first of 10+ blog entries on presentation traps, we are entering the quagmires and the quicksands where many presenters get trapped. These traps are avoidable because the ones who lay them are none other than…the presenters themselves.
In your presentation, usually on one slide at the beginning in the motivation part, you compare your method to  1) methods widely accepted and recognized as adequate by the people in the field, or 2) the first (and now dated) method invented by the pioneer in the field or 3) only those selected methods that perform worse than yours. Actually, let me take back point 3 because you would never do that since all scientists display great intellectual honesty. You would never keep silent on methods that perform better than yours in certain aspects, or you would never filter out from your evaluation criteria the points where your method does not perform as well as other methods. After all, the reason why you can list the weaknesses of other people's methods is because they had the intellectual honesty to recognize them in their papers, or because you have the irrefutable evidence to support your assertions somewhere in your paper.

So what is wrong with comparing your method to other methods to claim superiority?

1) Because PowerPoint does not give you much space to illustrate or justify each limitation (font size 30 is restrictive), you list them all in bullet point form, relying mostly on the use of adverbs, adjectives, and judgmental verbs to validate your claim of superiority: slow, computationally  intensive, limited, complex, expensive, fails to, suffers from…

2) In the room, attracted by your title, chances are you will find the very people whose methods you critique: the experts, the “related work” folks. They came to learn from you, not to have their contribution to the field questioned or featured in a poor light.

3) Your summary judgmental evaluation on their methods is probably based on old reading, and the state of the art may have progressed since then, thus rendering your evaluation inaccurate.

As a result, your comparison strikes a match that will light the short fuse of the bomb bound to explode during your Q&A. These scientists you indirectly attacked will dispute or question your claims; after all, any adjective or adverb is a claim and a claim deserves fair justification before it can be accepted. Because the reputation of their work is at stake, they will bring you onto their turf – a place you know little about – and they will take great pleasure to demonstrate how inaccurate are your claims!

So here are your solutions:

If you have to expose limitations:

1) Choose the main limitation, illustrate it visually and scientifically so that it cannot be contested, and make sure you clearly define the scope under which that limitation applies.

2) Find a way to praise the method whose limitation you are presenting.

But you do not have to expose limitations. If the experts are in the room, they will ask questions to assess how well your method is likely to work in their field (and this is good!). If you do not know, you will be able to deflect such questions on the grounds that you have not tried it on their problems. At the same time, you will welcome their interest in your work  and propose to collaborate with them to extend  the application range of your method to their work– or to discover its boundaries (don’t say limitations!)

If you do not know how well your method would perform on untried problems, be conservative. Do not say “This method should also work in your field, or on your problem”. They could call your bluff and ask “On what ground do you form this opinion?”  If the experts in the audience detect what they consider unwarranted evidence in your answer, you will be seen as a scientist of much enthusiasm but somewhat delusional and lacking experience. 

Look at the photo above, how much bigger the orange seems depends a lot on the perspective, doesn’t it? An architect who has studied perspective would have a more accurate answer than a researcher in life science. But someone who has handled both fruit would have the best answer.

By Jean-luc Lebrun