How to continuously improve your presentations

February 4, 2009 by Peter Stevens

As a Scrum evangelist, I often talk to groups about Scrum. I want each talk and each course to be better than the last one. The best source for feedback is the audience, but usually audience feedback is limited to a multiple choice feedback form. You get a report card, but nothing to build on. I now collect feedback from the participants using a feedback form inspired by Scrum’s Heartbeat Retrospective. This provides useful information and enables continuous improvement as a speaker.

Qualitative feedback is the basis for improvement

The first two questions are borrowed directly from the heartbeat retrospective. “What were the three low points of the talk?” “What were the three high points?” I can see what things made a impact and choose which ones to build on and which to eliminate.

The third question from the retrospective, “What could we do better?” wasn’t as useful as I had hoped. The answers usually amounted to “Fix the low points!” This wasn’t really new information, so I dropped it. I recently learned about a different retrospective question, “What still puzzles you?” I will try asking it at my next talk to see if I can discover unmet needs.

Quantitative input is useful for keeping score.

It’s nice to have some statistics to report to your hosts or customers. I only ask one or two ‘rate on a scale of 1 to 5’ questions: “What was your overall impression?” If I was sharing the stage with another speaker, I would also ask “How well did the trainers work together?”

Binary questions establish a reason for continued dialog

I find the percentage of positive answers is also an interesting data point. It is both an indication of how satisfied the people are with your talk and of how interested they are in the topic. Would you recommend this course? Would you like more information about Scrum? Would you like to be informed about the Scrum Breakfast (or insert your regular event here)? May we contact your with questions about your feedback?

If the participant answers one of these questions with a yes, then you can ask him/her for their coordinates and you have started an individual dialog.

Continuous Improvement

Using this feedback retrospective driven feedback approach, I have been able to improve my talks and courses considerably.

Positive Feedback has reinforced good practices. I thought bringing brownies to a dinner time talk would be a good thing. A lot of people liked the brownies. (It turns out, there is a name for this: “Do Food”).

There is even more to learn from the Low Points. “Embrace the Skeptic” is a pattern I apply which emerged from a low point reported by my students:

I had a RUP evangelist in one of my first Scrum courses. He was, shall we say, a bit confrontational, and this produced endless bickering during the course. This was reported as a low point by most participants. At the next course, I tried starting out with an “I’m OK, You’re OK’ message, recognizing that other people might have other ways of doing things. Since then, I haven't had any such conflict situations in a course.

Just recently, I took the concept a step further by asking the pragmatists and skeptics in the room to collect all the tough questions and save them for the end. Then, five minutes before the end, I asked them to step forward with their difficult questions. I used this approach for the first time at a talk last week, and people loved it! Many reported it as a high point of the event.

Try it yourself

If you want to try this approach, you can download my template, customize it, and try it at your next talk!

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