 Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Evgeny, so I'm going to talk about this topic today. Actually, I wanted to call it, not like this, I wanted to call it how not to screw up your presentation completely, and this is like some experience which I had, and unfortunately I've seen some people having this experience also, and they screw up the presentation I mean when you completely fail to communicate your message. I quite sure you had, you see in the presentations like this on the conferences, on in some certain situation when people are not able to explain to you what they mean, or more precisely when you're not getting anything out of this. So to put a little bit of background on this, I'm a member of a 50 times 4 team, and one of the jobs which I'm doing, I'm looking through a lot of presentations with these people and trying to help them to make presentations better. And there's different reasons, I just like to do it, but another reason I think it's important. For me, for example, pretty selfish reasons. And I don't need really to remind you about the importance of soft skills in modern business environments, and the soft skills of course contains a lot of things, but the very core thing of soft skills in my opinion is the ability to communicate clearly what you want to say, to deliver your message. In our way to look on this will be in a modern world you always expected to produce ideas, but what good ideas if you cannot present them? And the presentation is just very condensed case of this. The underlying principles which are following, in my opinion at least, these are stay the same. So this is why it's interesting to look in the presentations. So I'm going to share today some thoughts of mine on this and my view and then we can discuss if you agree or disagree. So let's start from the very basics. So every successful presentation should contain introduction, development and a conclusion. This is not telling us much actually about what's a function of these three parts. So let's take a slightly different angle. So presentation as well as a sexual act contains three parts. So it's maybe a little bit far-fetched, but the parts are the functions of the parts exactly the same. And the only way how you can really, you can really screw up their process, the presentation. It's to miss one part. So they're pretty common cases. There's something like this, for example. There is no introduction. It's just like the development just pushed on you and it's not clear like what it, what it mean and why, why you need to participate. Or, okay. In our very common case, their development isn't sufficient. So this is not, the explanation is not clear. So this speaker just jumps from the original point of the conclusion. This is kind of embarrassing always. Okay. And the most common one. This is just development without intrigue and without culmination. And it's just action like on and on and on. It's like experience like studying in high school, something like that. Okay. And before we go a little bit deeper in the functions of three parts, let's take a step back and try to understand how it fits in a general, general landscape of the presentation. So the case of the presentation is pretty simple. Say you supposedly know something which the audience doesn't know. And you want to share this knowledge. So let's try to represent it a little bit visually. So this is a field of your knowledge. It's what you know on a topic. And this is a field of the audience. This is some kind of approximation. So it's like a lot of people. There is a, if it's audience is one person, of course it's, it's a field of knowledge on one person. But it's several people. This is the approximation of the knowledge of the several people say. And what do you want to do? You want people to invade this territory and get something from your knowledge. And this is, this is not a joke. This is hard thing. And you know it because as you know probably from experience in studying in school, it's almost impossible to force someone to learn something. It doesn't matter how much violence you apply. And also it's very, very difficult to force yourself even to learn something. Although you know maybe it's valuable for you, but it's difficult. So until it's really interesting, you, you will not get it eventually. So now the question come. So we would like to make it interesting. So the process we make to make a process interesting. So okay, what's, but what interesting mean? It's one hell of a question in this context. Let's try to look on this in very simple way. So say we're talking about the facts, not about general things. Which fact you will consider interesting? Like can you think about like what, what, which property should this fact has? No? Something? Probably what you will think about, you shouldn't know it. It should be new for you, the first thing. But is it really enough? Anything which you doesn't know it's interesting for you automatically? I don't think so. There's like whole universe of unrelated information. So for example I can say something like Battle of Gettingsberg took place in 1861, first of July. Is it, is it interesting for you? For whom it was interesting? For whom it was interesting? Yeah, yeah. So I'm really surprised because it wasn't interesting for me. I looked it up on Wikipedia actually. But probably, probably it will be not very good example of a fact. It's just like, okay, it's some piece of information. So there are actually two properties. The one property, it should be new. So it shouldn't be here. And also it shouldn't be too far here. It should be somehow related to what you already know, to the field of your knowledge. Something like this. So this is pretty, pretty intuitively understandable. We're doing it all the time in our life when we're communicating with the people. Say, you're not talking with your colleague who's not interested in football, about football. You're talking with different people, say. Or even like in a little bit, little communication, everyday communication, something like, you're asking a different, oh, have you seen this new Netflix show? Like Altered Carbon. And I say, okay, yeah. Okay, I've seen it. Oh, what do you think about this and stuff like this? So actually what you wanted to talk about, you wanted to talk about show, but before you go for the talking about show, you're asking the question, are you aware of this? What's your field of interest? And the answer will be no, I don't know this. It's very unlikely we'll say, oh, what do you think about it, right? It will be just stupid. Or it's exactly how people come across as boring. They started to talk with you about something. No, they just think about it. They started to talk with you about something, which they are interested in, but you're not. And they just miss this part. And it's like, everyone knows it kind of, but this is a mistake, unfortunately, people doing presentations all the time. They saw into their field of knowledge. Maybe this is a huge field of knowledge and they're so deep in this, but they're missing the part what it should match the interest of the audience, understanding an audience, say. And so, okay, so taking this into consideration, what we would like to do. So we need to understand what's the starting point of the explanation. So you want people to go there, but how to understand from which point you would like to start. So the question will be what people already know. It's a pretty tricky question, especially if you're talking about the audience, which you don't know in advance. But let's look maybe for a little bit of an example. So this is the talk which I gave for 15 times four. It was about how search engines works and also about the history of Google. So it's related to my professional field. And let's look how I would like to lay out the skeleton of the introduction. I said something like this. So millions of people and probably you are using Google every day, stating the obvious. Although Google was not the very first search engine and not even the most successful one in the very beginning. This is the story of two PhD students who defeated huge corporations by thinking out of the box and became billionaires. This is the two students actually. I like this picture. It's very nice people. So let's look what we're doing here. So first of all, we identified something that people already know. So we're starting from some point which people already are aware of. We add something interesting which is probably people don't know and never thought about it but it's pretty close to the field of knowledge of their field of knowledge. And there we're doing the different thing. We're essentially, although we're not stating this directly, we're saying what people will discover when the talk will be over. And so this is, if we would like to take a visual representation of what happens. So we identified the starting point we identified the ending point. Okay, so this looks pretty much logical and in my personal opinion this is the single most important part of the presentation. So the 15% of the presentation is introduction. This is the most important part. The reason for this is pretty simple. If people are not following you in the beginning there is no chance for you to follow you later. So okay, so now we know this and so what we would like to do now, we would like to connect with these two dots. So how would like to do it? And one way to think about it will be, we would like to split our knowledge which we know about the topic on some kind of four parts and give it to the audience like step by step. I'm not sure if you've seen a movie called Extra Terrestrial. It's essentially a movie about the kid who's became a friend with an alien. And in the very beginning there is a scene in which a kid is trying to make alien go out of the garage in a home and this alien because of some reason he likes candies. And so what kids is doing? He's making a path out of candies like step by step and then the alien just come there oh, okay, this is kind of makes sense. This is kind of makes sense. And so it's a good way to think about it. So what you need to do? You need to go through the logical steps of explanation one by one and it should make sense because if the leap will be too far like the person just will lose what you're talking about and will go back essentially. And this is also another thing which we intuitively know. It's how we explain something to a person. Did you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, and now we can go to the next point until the previous point is understood there's no point to go forward essentially. So let's maybe look for the example what is essentially happening. One way to look on this will be when you put the points properly then field of knowledge is extended and so this border is already in a different place. So you would like to do it really smoothly. You need to move person through this field of interest and field of knowledge. So let's look again for example of this talk. So this is a starting point. So they defeated huge corporations by thinking out of the box this is the ending point. So how would I like to connect the dots? Say, okay the logical question will be what a competition was about. Building the best search engine on the market. So here the explanation comes what's the search engine from the business perspective. Okay, but how they work what was the complexity of this? They work by indexing and ranking whatever it is here you just put the explanation. What was the challenge? Make it scalable, whatever it is again. How it was done? By page rank algorithm. So now the dots are connected and supposedly the person understands the logic why it was done this way and what exactly happened. And also now interesting thing if you look on this you see what this is actually the key point. So the whole talk is about page rank algorithm but you cannot just go to people and start talking about it. It will be exactly the situation of this development thing. Because you need to explain why you're telling it to the people you need to explain what the context and you need to explain why they need to know it also in the end. So say it's going on and go on and then it reaches the final conclusion and then there is a success. And the culmination if everything is done properly on the previous stages the culmination is kind of the easy thing. I think you know it from your personal experience also. Sorry. And yeah this is pretty much it. And another fun thing about it if you look on this picture so the knowledge of the audience extended and also the borderline this knowledge of interest extended. So then you find essentially it means when you find out something new the world this kind of became more interesting for you because you know your field of knowledge is bigger and so you can get something for yourself on the end out of this. And this is what we're trying to do actually in 15 times 4. We're trying to help you to extend your knowledge and we don't know what you will find there. Like this is you extend your knowledge and life maybe will become more interesting for you. In which way we do not know what we have some hopes. Thank you. Thanks Evgeny. That is the most fabulous analogy I've ever seen. Oh. Everyone can relate. This is some sort of climax. So any questions on my friend's perfect presentation? Not at all. Yeah, is there a question here? My question is how important do you think is storytelling or personalizing this thing? So the question is how important is personalizing and storytelling when you're presenting? I would say I didn't mention this point. There is a different techniques how you can how to make your presentation more interesting which is this talk was about more intellectual way how you need to split the information. There is just a simple tricks which you can use. You can talk about what people are interested in what generally this is money, success, sex and also personal story kind of thing. But the personal story is a tricky thing because if you start in a personal story you need to be absolutely sure what people relate to the character and even you need to keep the structure in the way what people keep relating to the character. So I would say it's possible for sure but it's a tricky thing. How do you really assess your audience? Like you say that you should know what kind of interest under the audience goes but for example in this kind of audience there are really many people here how do you really assess? This is a very subjective topic here. What interests of your audience? This is a tricky part about talking for the diverse audience say. It's not a big problem if you say you're talking on a conference you more or less know what people already know. But you're just trying to be on the safe side say everyone knows what Google is right? Everyone more or less use it. So you just be conservative about it and approximate like over a general population. This is my view on this. So some other questions? Okay. No. So taking your point a bit further if you're talking about something revolutionary that is not commonly known is it the best approach to actually dump it down for audience? So a question there is should you dump something down to bring it back in line with the audience's knowledge base? It's a question how you define revolutionary, right? So this is always some problems with explaining the things which is viewed differently by people say. The revolutionary means you changing the view on the thing completely. So radically what it's impossible to comprehend essentially, right? So this is a pretty rare case and I think but you need to put some essentially the same rules. It's not meaning I didn't mean it what you need to dump it down. You need just to put a structure on something which is unstructured usually. The understanding of the topic in your head is usually unstructured. So you need to enforce the structure on the way how you explain it. So it's just slightly on this topic. Thank you. Any other questions? One moment. I would like to like extend this question to another scenario. And I think it also makes sense to like put a lot of candies from the starting point to the end point. But if like let's say on the working environment and all the topics are really boring, boring like topics and with the presenter for example let's say you have to train your colleagues some software product and it's so boring and huge amount of information. So how do you maintain audience attention like within two hours I would say I don't know. Do you think it's really difficult because what you essentially need to explain to people you need to learn this thing otherwise we will fire you or something like that. But it's how it is, right? There is very clear understanding why they need to do it. We get boring during the like whole two hours. So how do you like entertain or motivate? There is a two problems to this. The one problem is like original interest so there's what people will try to achieve and then essentially, right? And another question how you split the information in the chunks which people can consume. And there is a whole psychological theory about what if people can consume the information easily so it's in the age of their knowledge they can just get it for themselves. They do it natively. It's like and if you split it in the chunks, like small enough supposedly people will take it like step by step. But in my experience if you're talking about the business environment say the reason is not what the explanation is but the reason is unclear why you need to do it. So like your boss decided you need to take this training but what's the reason, right? So completely different topic kind of. Okay, how much guys have got? Sorry, I have an addition to the answer that actually I think one good way when you're having a long presentation and as I said it could be boring is to really engage the audience and some audience will ask questions or try to put up some interaction to make it more interactive and or add some humor to your speech. Somehow I managed to get sex into it very subtly. It's not very... Was it not? You didn't get it? They're attending to your point. This was my view and this is as you can see it's like very kind of data oriented view, right? You can view it completely different. You say what's the techniques which you need to use to do it on every stage and it's like the whole world of techniques which you can use. Okay, good. In which case, Afghani, thank you very much. Perfect presentation.