Technical Difficulties: What Advice Would You Give This SME?

Last week, a colleague had an unfortunate run-in with technology at the start of his presentation. Here is his story.

“I had been asked to deliver a 30-minute lecture on the anatomy of the eye and I was concerned about two things: how on Earth would I fill up a 30-minute block of time on this subject? How on Earth am I supposed to present on this topic when there will be eye surgeons in the audience? They’ve forgotten more about the eye than I could ever teach.

I put together a slide deck and I rehearsed my session...Not wanting to read the text on the slides verbatim, I wrote out a script for each slide on a piece of paper. If I got lost (or if I was hit with a sudden bout of stage fright), my plan was to simply refer to this paper in order to get back on track...

The moment of truth arrived. The session moderator introduced me. I took the podium. The computer on which my slides were loaded had “gone to sleep”, but I had the password to log back in to the computer. I entered the login and the computer told me: “Invalid password.”

I entered the password again, and I got the same message. I was starting to see a disturbing trend. Technical staff from the conference rushed the stage. Everyone was trying to figure the problem out. Nobody was having success. I grabbed my own computer which also had the PowerPoint file. I entered my login.

Invalid password!

The session moderator announced a 15-minute break. After more fiddling and anxious moments, we were able to bring up my PowerPoint slides. The break ended.

Thrown off by the technical difficulties, I referred to my script to get started. I found that I couldn’t look away! The script was like a beautiful siren, singing me a song as I navigated the treacherous oceans of the presentation.

Twenty minutes later I was done. I had read my script verbatim from start to finish.

Not my finest (one third of an) hour.”

Below, two experienced learning and development professionals offer their insights. What would you say? Use the comments section below to share your own thoughts about what to do the next time an SME finds him or herself in a similar situation.

 

Priscilla Shumway

Senior Trainer, The Bob Pike Group

First: Start with humor: Ask the audience: How many of you have ever experienced technical problems such as this? Anyone care to share a quick episode? (Do this while the techies are trying to fix it.)

Second: Explain that the purpose of the session is to review the anatomy of the eye and that you’d like to honor the experience and knowledge in the room. Ask the audience to turn to the person next to them and come up with their top three facts that they would present if they were up on stage. This would buy time and involve your audience while the technical issues are addressed.

Take comments from 4 or 5 pairs. If the technical problems are not fixed at that point, take a 15 minute break. Once your slides are back up and running you can go through the slides and recapture what the audience said, using names of audience members who stated that fact. For example: “As Dr. Morris stated, here is…”

Third: End with humor. “Thank you all for making my presentation even more stellar than it would have been if all the technology had been working!”

 

Bob Pike

Chairman Emeritus, The Bob Pike Group

Here are questions I would ask in order to respond to the situation:

1. How many people are in the audience?

2. Are they all eye doctors?

3. Why did they need this presentation?

4. What is the outcome of the presentation supposed to be?

5. Why were you asked to do this presentation? What do you bring that is unique?

Then, given that it is only 30 minutes and that there is probably a huge amount of expertise in the audience, I might approach it this way:

1. I’ve given each of you a piece of paper. Working with a partner you have two minutes to draw an eyeball and label as many parts of it as possible. Begin. At the end of two minutes I would say, “Familiarity doesn’t mean competence.”

2. Then, I would allow them two minutes to confer with those around them and add/subtract/correct anything they want to.

3. I would the use this as a springboard into pulling from them the anatomy starting from macro to micro, maybe with a large poster of the eye rather than a PowerPoint just to change it up.

One thing we constantly talk with our trainers about is having at least two ways to present each piece of content so that we are not dependent on technology.

 

Brian Washburn (a.k.a @flipchartguy) originally posted this to his blog at trainlikeachampion.com.

Never miss a post! Get blogs and more delivered directly to your inbox.

arrow-right Sign Up