Presentations as we define them at TRIPLE A cover a multitude of challenges. Of course..the full-blown presentation, you up on a platform at a conference talking to an audience of 10 - ??? people. We also include however, a situation where you are chatting informally with a group of people, probably in a professional, semi-professional situation; suddenly ' the floor is yours.' You do not have a prepared range of tools with you - how can you put your message across with impact, so people will remember what you say? Try this: link what you want to say with a concrete object in your local environment in a creative, unexpected way. Example Jens-Ole, a trainee on one of our courses, wanted to explain what a green corridor is. (A green corridor is a section of natural vegetation, grass, shrubs etc in a city which allows animals, insects etc to move safely and freely between one good habitat to another. Without such green corridors small animals etc, might be isolated and thus put at risk.). He was sitting chatting over a cup of coffee with some colleagues in his office and the talk moved to green corridors - 'What are they?' asked a colleague, and 'Why are they important?' 'Come with me,' said Jens-Ole and went outside the office. 'A simple question,' he said, 'Where are we now,' 'In the corridor,' 'What is the function of this corridor,' 'It enables us to get from the entrance hall to the manager's office,' 'Yes, and green corridors in our city enable small animals, insects etc to get from A to B easily and relatively safely.'
You could say this way of putting a point across is unneccesarily elaborate and Jens-Ole could just as easily have defined green corridors as I did above and then moved on. I believe however, that by taking his listeners out into the corridor he involved them more deeply and made more impact on them.
I would be interested to read any comments you care to post. What do you think about the way in which Jens-Ole involved his audience by using his local environment? Do you have any more examples?
