Perceptions

“When we taste a wine, we aren’t simply tasting the wine. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires.”
–Jonah Lehrer , in The Frontal Cortex blog

Many presenters, particularly those in the academic and technical fields, persist in the delusion that content is all that matters. They think they can continue to bumble, stumble and fumble their way through their presentations and have their work judged strictly on its own objective merits. But they’re wrong.

Most of us like to think of ourselves as relatively rational, logical and objective in our judgments and choices, but the evidence says otherwise.  Irrelevant perceptions can have a powerful effect on our thinking.

In his blog, The Frontal Cortex, Lehrer describes two of the more famous studies, carried out by Frederic Brochet of the University of Bordeaux, that showed the effect of subjective perception on wine drinkers.

Brochet found that when experts were served two glasses of the same white wine, but with red food coloring in one, they were unable to tell that the two glasses held the same wine, or even that the “red” was actually a white.

In another study, Brochet put an average red wine in two different bottles, one bottle from an expensive grand-cru and the other from an ordinary, cheap table wine, and asked the experts to rate them. The perceptions of the tasters were markedly different. The experts rated the wine from the expensive bottle far more highly than the same wine from the cheap bottle.

I mention this not just to bash insufferable wine snobs (though that is a nice bonus), but rather to point out the critical role of your audience’s perception of you, your apparent authority and your presentation skills on their understanding of your content.

They can’t help but see the shy, hesitant speaker as unsure of her own conclusions, or judge the speaker who struggles with his computer and projector as perhaps technically incompetent in his field, as well. The effect may be subtle, and the content interesting or significant enough to overcome it, but it’s still there.

Conversely, they can’t help but be impressed with the competent and confident speaker and transfer that feeling onto the content of the presentation.

It’s impossible to say, over the course of a career, how many times ineffective presentation has been the difference between a grant funded and one rejected, between a sale made and a polite dismissal or between getting the job you want and a promise to keep your resume on file.

The margin between success and failure, for a career or a company, can be so small. Can any of us really afford to give away that edge?