Not long after writing my last post, Coulda / Woulda / Shoulda, about poorly prepared speakers, I happened to see a speaker who had taken the exact opposite approach.
This guy was so totally prepared that it hurt to watch him. Every word, every gesture, every pause was so carefully memorized, so deliberately presented that he reminded me of the computer animated graphics of human characters that we sometimes see in the latest video games and movies.
There’s an odd effect that occurs in CG animation. While most of us are perfectly willing to suspend disbelief and enjoy the antics of computer generated toys (Toy Story), fish (Finding Nemo) and blue-skinned aliens (Avatar), the closer the characters get to looking like real humans, the less convincing they become and the creepier they seem.
This phenomenon, known as the “uncanny valley”, is caused by the lack, or the incongruence, of the very subtle cues of voice, expression and gesture that we have come to expect from our fellow humans. We are all exquisitely sensitive to the meaning of even the most nuanced tilt of the head, slant of an eyebrow or the twitch of the lip in another person. The absence, or mismatch, of these very subtle signals, in even the most artfully rendered digitally generated characters, gives them an empty quality that just creeps us out. They look like robots, vacantly mouthing the words coming from their mouths.
The presenter I saw, whose every word and move was so carefully choreographed, failed because he was so focused on doing his presentation perfectly that he lost sight of his audience. He failed engage us as a human being, with all the attendant social signals that we’ve come to expect from our own species.
His presentation was technically excellent – his content was well structured, he clearly knew his subject well and his assertions were very well supported by statistics and anecdotes – but it was an impersonal performance, as wooden as a computer-generated character, rather than a personal conversation.
You may be the on only one speaking, when you are on stage, but you can’t forget that every presentation is still a conversation. If you’re not connecting with your audience, you’re not communicating.
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Russ:
Excellent post! In 2008 Nick Morgan briefly discussed how conscious gestures look inauthentic, so they have to be unconscious. Read his article on How to Become an Authentic Speaker. A summary is here: http://hbr.org/products/R0811H/R0811Hp4.pdf
That idea is described in detail in his 2009 book: Trust Me four steps to authenticity and charisma
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