Nothing Can Go Wrong On Stage

Imagine this scenario. You’re about to hit the stage at a conference to give a presentation on a topic that you have a lot of enthusiasm for. You’ve been researching and rehearsing for hours to get the flow right and you feel confident that your ideas will interest the crowd. The room is filling up to capacity, the start time is minutes away … and the projector goes out.

Now what? How are you going to show your demos when no one can see them?

Giving a presentation is not a trivial task. It takes time and effort to get all your thoughts and concepts together into a cohesive package. If you’re new to presenting, you may be nervous about your delivery and you’re putting a lot of energy into staying calm. You’re keeping your eyes on the crowd and limiting the “um’s.” But all that work can come to a screeching halt because of technical glitches that are out of your control. The scenario I mentioned above happened to me at a conference, and believe me, for a moment, my internal panic engine was kicking on (fortunately, the audiovisual team from the conference figured it out before start time). Another time, I accidentally deleted all the source code for my demos just 5 minutes into my talk. Again, the panic began to rapidly rise. How do I get my code back in place?

There’s a funny story I heard a while ago from an artist by the name of Henry Rollins. He talks about a show he did in Rio for a large rock festival in front of tens of thousands of attendees. Before his band’s start time, he got himself energized and revved up to give everyone a great show. When he ran out on stage, he kicked his knee up so hard and so high while moving his head down, he literally knocked himself out for a couple of seconds, giving himself quite the cut in his forehead. However, he said that his view of the stage is that nothing can go wrong and you must keep going. He did the entire show with the injury.

Now, I’m not suggesting you keep talking even if a light fell from the ceiling and broke your leg. But you should anticipate that technical difficulties can, and probably will, occur. Here are some tips you should consider using for future presentations:

If the projector goes out but people in the audience can download the slides, they can follow along on their own devices. If you’re doing a demo, they may not have the tools on their machine to build code, but at least they can see what you wrote and you can illustrate to them what would happen if you visually show the demo executing.

If you’re going to show a demo but for some reason the demo doesn’t work, don’t spend most of your session time debugging the issue. Rather, have screen shots or videos of the demo working successfully. You can state to the audience that something unexpected is happening and show the backup visuals instead.

This is useful when you’re doing an online talk, which has become the standard for conferences in 2020. Your network connectivity may unexpectedly terminate at home, but if you have the talk uploaded to YouTube, moderators can play that instead.

This isn’t easy to do when a wrench is thrown into the works. It’s tempting to stop talking, but that creates awkward dead air. If you can show the audience that you’re calm and you’re able to move on, they’ll stick with you. If you can, simulate a failure when you’re practicing so you know how to react if the time comes.

I’ve found that audiences understand that things may not always happen as expected, so long as you have a way to keep going. Anticipate failures and you’ll be able to present with confidence, knowing that you have a bunch of Plan B’s ready to go!