I just returned from Agile West. During the first few days of tutorials I started thinking about some anti-patterns I see at the conferences I attend. I wanted to capture some of these thoughts for my own reference later.
Presenter Anti-Patterns:
War Stories
Building your street cred during a presentation is important. Clearly, if the audience doesn't believe that you have significant experience with the topic you are discussing they are likely to leave or simply not absorb what you discussing. That being said, if the majority of your material is giving anecdotal stories from your personal war you'll likely lose the battle for the attention of the audience. In the tech world, we've all seen our fair share of daily wtfs. You can get typically get solid attention by telling a great story that reflects the theme of your topic. However, if all you are providing is cautionary tales with no direction on how to avoid those situations you likely don't leave your audience with much to consider once they leave.
HUGE WALL-O-TEXT
This one comes in several forms. One form is attempting to cram too much content on one "slide." If you are using 12pt font to get it all to fit, you need to edit more. If you have a graphic that doesn't scale don't try just to blow it up on the slide and call it good. If people a few rows back can't read it they are going to find something else to look at. Capture the main points and capture them simply. The audience is likely looking to reference your main idea from your slides because they probably can't capture your words in real-time as you talk. Your slides don't need to carry every detail of the discussion. In fact you'll probably get better engagement but having the audience focus on you over your slides.
Always Repeat Yourself
This is hat tip to dry. I've noticed that many times, especially in longer presentation that ideas get beaten to death. There is a difference between carrying a theme throughout a presentation and repeating the exact same idea over and over. The key here is to remember that the audience is likely looking for good bits to take back with them. Covering breadth on your topic is probably more valuable than drilling deeper and deeper into one basic concept. If you think it's likely people will want more info on a supporting discussion point, save time at the end for people to ask questions and drive more impromptu discussion. If you cover an idea early in a talk and then come to you prepared content it's easy enough to mention you've covered the topic, ask if there are any questions, and then move on.
80/20 - Restating the problem
If you spend 80% of your time or content restating the problem and 20% on the real meat you'll likely have people leaving your talk feeling "meh." It feels to me like this anti-pattern arises because we often find ourselves explaining problems to management in detail before proposing solutions. Often times it seems we have to draw the problem out into gory details before we can get buy in for a solution. However, at a conference people come to hear you because they have the problem you describe in your summary. Also, ensure what you are covering is not just a restatement of the problem. There's not much value in problem restatement. Most experienced conference attendees are looking for signs around the 5-10 minute mark if they should cut-bait or continue to fish. If by that point you haven't reached your topic you run the risk of people bailing.
Audience Anti-Patterns:
Expect The Silver Bullet
I fell into this trap early in my career. "This presenter better have all the answers." If anyone has all the answers they should be selling them because they are hard to come by. My goal at every conference is to bring something back. I try even harder to bring one thing back from every talk I attend. Sometimes this is not easy to accomplish. Often, if a talk comes up short I'll try to spend some time reflecting on how to solve the problem myself. Just because a talk has the perfect title or summary you should not assume its going to solve all your problems. The other caution here is to be leery of anyone claiming to have all the answers because it's very likely they are trying to sell you something. Also any time someone is presenting anything with a ™, ®, or ⓒ symbol next to some part of the name is probably trying to sell you something. While we all have to eat, if I'm paying to attended a conference then I'm likely not going to listen to an advertisement. There are plenty of opportunities to get a sales pitch from a vendor at the expo portion of a conference.
Solve My Specific Problem
Somewhat similar to expecting the silver bullet, people often tend to want someone to solve a specific issue. At this particular conference, there was a keynote about scaling agile and at the end someone asked a question about how to get their particular "crusty but brilliant" contractor onboard with agile. It was off-topic and wasteful of everyone's time. Specific problems usually need specific solutions, that's the purpose of coaching and consulting. A conference presentation is going to deal in generalizations and abstractions. Specific questions can be useful in more of a technical talk, but anything that involves a lot of explanation to get the context correct probably isn't going to make for a very useful question. Focus on concepts in a presentation and then follow-up afterwards with a specific scenario type problem.
It's All About Me
This one drives me nuts. This is when someone tries to monopolize a session for their own purposes. Sometimes it's for attention, sometimes it's about solving their specific problem, and sometimes it seems to be someone with no understanding that they aren't the only audience member. In any case, it's usually annoying and distracting. I've been in two or three talks, where within the first few minutes someone starts asking questions at every slide change and it just derails the talk. Asking questions is fine for clarification, but if I find myself with lots of questions I take notes on my questions and hit up duckduckgo for the answers.