Demos Done Right - Pick a Partner

Let's face it, no one can do it all alone. In these days of heightened sense, nuanced, and increased edge case count, a team is needed to make meaningful progress. This is true for demonstrations as well. For this post, we are going to cover how to best use a partner to accelerate your progress.

When choosing a person to provide feedback on demonstrations, I tend to choose someone I already have a close relationship with. Why choose an existing relationship? An existing close relationship already has a foundation. That foundation of honesty and trust makes it easier and more comfortable when providing difficult feedback. In those instances where the relationship has not been well established, the negative feedback is harder to relay to the demonstrator. This leaves the positive and neutral feedback. Growth comes from improving on the negative aspects. The next important aspect of the person you choose to provide feedback is their availability to attend your demonstrations. For this, you may want or need to rely on a pool of people to provide feedback. All with the ability to judge the body language of attendees. In my experience, it is not always possible to have a single person attend all the demonstrations I have given.

As your group of reviewers grows, choose people of various backgrounds and experiences. This will give you a broad range of feedback to keep in mind while preparing and providing the next demonstrations. Seeing ourselves through the lens of a wider variety will improve our skill set faster, as that wider range of feedback will help us anticipate others in between the data points you have already collected. Be wary of accepting and implementing all feedback. As you will learn, not all feedback is created equally, but we will reserve the conversation about feedback for another post.

There is an open question not yet discussed, that is, whether or not the person reviewing your demonstration should be knowledgeable in the topic being presented. For this, I do not have a strong opinion. In scenarios where you are presenting to an audience with strong technical backgrounds, such as a conference talk, the person could help you from being too slow or boring to the audience of technical folks. Whereas a less or even non-tech person would be more aligned with the slower pace and foundational details. The opposite is true when speaking to a non-technical audience. What is more important for your reviewer to understand is body language. This way, the reviewer can sense how the audience is doing, even if they are not verbal. This person can also determine your confidence as the presentation carries on.

With all this, one could easily make a case for just watching the recording. At this time, with the technology we have, watching a recording is a valid argument. I have seen others do this and done it myself. However, my issue with this approach is that opinions and feelings matter.. In the moment, it is easier to pick up on a feeling someone has than in a recording. For some who are overly harsh critics of themselves, like myself, I have had times when I feel that what I communicated was far from ideal. When in reality, I did a fine job of communicating, it was just not up to my expected standard. Others are not critical of themselves enough. As you may imagine, this causes the exact opposite problem, where one thought they did a great job when in fact, it was not good at all.

Before you jump into the driver's seat for your next demo. Let a person you are close with know you want some critical feedback after the demonstration is over. Tell them where you think you could improve, and inform them to be honest about the performance. In the long run, your skills will improve and your ego will remain intact.