Giving a presentation is never an easy thing for a presenter. There’s a lot that you have to keep in mind, like pacing and content. You want to keep your audience in mind and make sure you’re providing value for the time they are giving you.

But there is usually something else you need to keep in mind today. Most presentations are being recorded for later publication. When presenting for an audience that has a video camera or two, there are a few other things you want to keep in mind on top of every other thing you are trying to keep track of.

Tip 1: Introduce Early. And Often

One of the things you really need to keep in mind for recorded presentations is time. If the videos are going to be posted to Youtube after the event the length of your presentation is going to matter. People that stumble across your talk aren’t going to want to watch an hour or two of slide discussion. A fifteen minute overview of a topic works much better from a video perspective.

Never rely on a lower third to do something you are capable of taking five seconds to say.

Keeping that in mind, you should start every section of your presentation with an introduction. Tell everyone who you are and what you do. That establishes credibility with the audience. It also helps the viewer figure out who you are right away. Sometimes not knowing who is talking distracts enough that people get lost and miss content. Never rely on a lower third to do something you are capable of taking five seconds to say.

Note that if you decide to go down this road, you need to make sure your audience is aware of what you’re doing. Someone might find it off-putting that you’re introducing yourself twenty minutes after you just did. But you don’t want to turn it into a parody or humor point. Just be clear about why you’re doing it and make it quick and clean.

Tip 2: Take A Deep Breath

When you are transitioning between sections, one of the worst things you can do is try to fill time with idle conversation. People are hard wired to insert filler into conversations. Conquering that compulsion is a difficult task but very worth it in the end.

One of the reasons why getting rid of filler conversation is important for a video recording is the editing around an introduction. If you start your introduction with, “Um, uh, hello there, um, My name is, uh, Tom Hollingsworth…” That particular introduction is rife with unnecessary filler that does nothing but distract from a statement of who you are.

The easiest way to do this is to take a deep breath before you start speaking. By clearing your mind before you open your mouth, you are much less likely to insert filler words in an effort to keep the conversation flowing. Another good technique that news reporters use is the countdown. Yes, it does serve a purpose for the editor to know when to start the clip. But it also helps the reporter focus on when to start and collect their faculties before speaking.

Try it yourself next time. When you’re ready to make a clean transition, just insert a single second of silence while you take a breath. Odds are great that you’ll find your transitions much more appealing.

Tip 3: Questions Anyone?

This one is a bit trickier. The best presentation model works from the idea that the audience should ask questions during a presentation instead of after it. By having a question closely tied to an idea people are much more likely to remember it and find it relevant. This is especially true on video, as the view can rewind and listen to the question and answer a couple of times.

But what about those questions that aren’t exactly tied to a specific idea or cover a topic not discussed? That’s where the final Q&A period comes in. You want to make sure to capture any final thoughts from the audience. But since this is all about the video you also want to make sure you don’t cut someone off with a premature close out.

When you ask for final questions, make sure you take a few seconds and visually glance around the room. Silence is very easy to cut out of a video. But it’s much harder to cut out someone saying “Okay, so there are no more questions…” followed by someone asking a question. It’s much better to take the extra time to make sure there are no questions or comments. The extra seconds are more than worth it.

Tom’s Take

I get to see both sides of the presentation game. Whether I’m presenting at Tech.UNPLUGGED this week or editing a video from Tech Field Day. I find that presenting for a live audience while also being aware of the things that make video useful and successful are important skills to master in today’s speaking circuit.

It doesn’t take a lot of additional effort to make your presentation video-ready. A little practice and you’ll have it down in no time flat.

Talk to any modern IT person about shifting the landscape of how teams work and I can guarantee you that you’ll hear a bit about DevOps as well as “siloed” organizational structures. Fingers get pointed in all directions as to the real culprit behind dysfunctional architecture. Perhaps changing the silo term to something more appropriate will help organizations sort out where the real issues lie.

You Dropped A Bomb On Me

Silos, or stovepipes, are an artifact of reporting structures of days gone by. Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) has a great piece on the evils of ITIL. In it, he talks about how the silo structure creates blame passing issues and lack of responsibility for problem determination and solving.

I think Greg is spot on here. But I also think that the love of blame extends in the other direction too. It is one thing to have the storage team telling everyone that the arrays are working so it’s not their problem. It’s another issue entirely when the CxO-level folks come down from the High Holy Boardroom to hunt for heads when something goes wrong. They aren’t looking to root out the cause of the issue. They want someone to blame.

That’s where the silo comes in. The vertical integration and focus on team disciplines means the CTO/CIO/CFOO get to find out which particular technology was responsible for the issue and blame those people. Modern IT organizations revel in blame assignment. What they want more than anything is to find out who is responsible and berate them until they feel vindicated.

Silos aren’t organizational structures. They are pipelines that allow management to find “responsible” parties and get their retribution for any problems that happen. The focus lies solely on punishing the guilty rather than correcting the problem. Which leads to people not wanting to be challenged outside of their team environment for fear that they’ll get double the blame when something goes wrong.

Trans-Organizational Pipeline

How can we fix this issue with silos and stovepipes? Think for a moment about the physical structures that we use to model them. Silos and stovepipes are all vertical. They might as well be using sewer pipes for a visual representation. After all, the crap does flow downhill.

A better model for the modern IT environment should be the horizontal pipeline. These would be more like oil transport pipelines or other precious materials. Rather than focus on storing things vertically, horizontal pipelines are all about getting raw materials to a processing facility. There isn’t time to waste along the way. Product moves from one location to the next rapidly.

That’s how teams should function. Resources should be allocated and processed. Equipment should be installed and configured. Applications should be installed and be operational. No time to waste. But who should do it? Which team gets the vote?

The reality of the world is that this kind of implementation style needs a cross-sectional horizontal team. Think about the old episodes of Mission: Impossible. The IMF didn’t pick the disguise team to infiltrate or the computer team to hack door locks. They found one or two people with the unique skills to get the job done and focused them on their task. And when the impossible mission was completed everyone went on their merry way back to real life.

In the case of IT teams, new technology products like hyperconvergence and programmable networking require the inputs of many different disciplines. Creating ad-hoc teams like the IMF can go a long way to helping stagnant IT departments rapidly embrace new technology. The rapid implementation approach leads to great things.

But what about the blame? After all, CxOs love to point fingers when things go wrong? How does a horizontal team help? The best way to treat this kind of issue is to remember that these new, smaller cross-functional teams have a much larger atomic unit than traditional silos. A CTO can blame an individual on the storage team for a failure. But in a cross-discipline team, it is the team that is responsible for success or failure. Blame, if any, resides with the team itself and not the people that comprise it. That kind of insulation helps individuals rise above the fear of committing egregious errors and instead embrace the kinds of thinking needed to make new IT happen.

Tom’s Take

The best teams don’t happen by accident. It takes effort to make a group of people across disciplines work together to make amazing things happen. The best way to make this happen is to form the team and get out of the way. No blame shifting. No segregation of skills. Just putting awesome people together and seeing what happens.

The sooner we stop putting silos around teams for ease of management the sooner we will find that people are capable of amazing feats of technology. Let’s turn those blame pipelines into something infinitely more useful.

Imagine you’re sitting in a presentation. You’re hearing some great information from the presenter and you can’t wait to share it with your colleagues or with the wider community. You are just about to say something when you look in the corner of the slide and you see…

Confidential Information

You pause for a moment and ask the presenter if this slide is a secret or if you should consider it under NDA. They respond that this slide can be shared with no restrictions and the information is publicly available. Which raises the question: Why is a public slide marked “confidential”?

I Fought The Law

The laws that govern confidential information are legion. Confidential information is a bit different than copyrighted information or intellectual property that has been patented. In most cases, confidential information is treated as a trade secret. Trade secrets can be harmful if they are divulged, since a trade secret can’t be patented.

A great example is the formula for Coca-Cola. If they tried to patent it they would have to write down all the ingredients. While that would protect the very specific formulation of their drink it would also allow their competitors to create something extremely similar with a few changes and create a viable competitor. Coca-Cola chooses to protect this information by ensuring it isn’t widely known. It ranks right up there with nuclear launch codes and Star Search results.

How does the concept of trade secrets and confidential information apply to slides? Well, one of the provisions of confidential information is that distribution must be controlled somehow. This means that you can’t just hand out information to anyone walking by on the street and hope that it stays confidential. You have to control distribution through confidentiality agreements and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

Most of the times you are seeing slides marked “confidential” you have implicitly agreed to some kind of confidentiality agreement. You are either covered by an NDA from your employer or from the event you are attending. Even if you didn’t sign an agreement it can still be argued in a court of law that you were invited to the presentation which means the presenter was selective in who could attend. That should meet the requirements of protecting distribution of the information.

I Shouldn’t Have Said That

The other reason why you see slides prominently marked as confidential is because the law says they have to be to be protected. A company can’t release information not bearing a confidential mark and then suddenly decide after the fact that said information should have been confidential. Could you imagine a world where companies routinely try to remove sensitive information from public knowledge because it isn’t flattering? What if they could use an ex post facto declaration to restrict distribution?

Confidential information has to be treated and marked as such from the very beginning to qualify for protection. In order to make sure that there is no chance for a slip up most companies will mark anything remotely sensitive to ensure it won’t come back to bite them later.

But why put the confidential marking on slides that you’re going to show to the world? What if those slide get uploaded to the Internet and shared all over the world as often happens? What purpose could it serve?

The reason to mark slides as confidential is to make sure you can restrict their use whenever you want. Rarely are slides uploaded by a company with a confidential marking. In order for something to be uploaded it has to be cleared through a legal department. So if there are slides out there that exist with a confidential marking it’s more likely someone uploaded them without explicit permission. Which isn’t a bad thing in general.

What if a competitor gets a copy of the slides and starts using the information? Or better yet, what if they use it in a marketing campaign against the company?

If the slide is marked as “confidential”, that allows the company to use legal means to remove the information or disallow use of the information. It means that rather than just complaining or fighting a marketing battle that heavier means can be used to take down anything embarrassing. It’s also more lasting to bar anyone from mentioning anything listed on a confidential slide.

Tom’s Take

I agree that the whole legal need to label everything short of your underwear as “confidential” is just plain stupid. This is the same legal system that says trademarks must be defended to be protected. But the rules are the rules. Which means that any company that wants to protect confidential information must mark it that way from the genesis of the concept. And having the ability to protect those assets also means dealing with misleading marks long after the information has entered the wild. Just make sure you ask the right questions before divulging anything that could be considered confidential.