Tips on what to do when things go wrong during a presentation

#01 - A guy won't stop asking questions To prevent: - If people are yelling out comments or questions; request them to raise their hands first To rectify/ respond: - A speaker is not obliged to answer those questions. Ask the audience if anyone is interested in that question and if only a few says yes, tell the asker to come forward for you to answer them afterwards - During a break, talk to the person in private. Thank him and ask him to hold off his questions so others can ask. Offer email address to address his queries. #02 - If an asker takes more than 2 minutes and still rambles a question that makes no sense To prevent: - Difficult to prevent but good to inform audience before-hand that to limit each question to 30-sec per question and 1 question per person. To rectify/ respond: - Ask a clarifying question. Interrupt if necessary and ask them to rethin ktheir questions while you answer the next question. Do it with charm! #03 - The microphone breaks To prevent: - Demand a soundcheck before the talk - Check with sound people/ AV guys if there are sound problems in the room To rectify/respond: - Confirm with the audience if they are hearing the same problem - Contact the tech crew to rectify. Afterall, they are paid for this. #04 - Your time slot gets cut tremendously due to event schedules' mistakes To prevent: - Recommend to event organiser to cut short a break time or ask several speakers to cut short their presentations or make up a few minutes each to fair for everyone. To rectify/ respond: - Ask the organiser to introduce you and to tell the audience that it's not your fault that the schedule has fallen behind. #05 - You left your slides at home To prevent: - Put slides in three places = in a thumbdrive, on the laptop and a website where you can access - Print out a copy as back-up To rectify/ respond: - Make a list of 10 questions - pulled lived from the audience - at the start of the talk. And answer them one by one. Could turn out a much better material that what has been planned. Extracted and summarised from: "Confessions of a Public Speaker" by Scott Berkun.