I had an interesting, fairly personal experience today and a resulting lesson that I wanted to share.

Earlier today I gave one of the opening keynotes at OSCON. It was 15 minutes long, and it was *OK*. While I didn’t consider it a bad talk, it wasn’t what I would consider my best work.

Immediately after the presentation I gave my second talk, which was 40 minutes long, and I was very happy with the results. A filled room of folks seemed to find the talk useful and there were plenty of questions. I *did* consider that some of my better work.

So in a nutshell, my 15 minute keynote felt *OK* and my 40 minute talk felt *solid*.

Something was bothering me much of the day about why this was.

My dissatisfaction was not with the execution of the keynote, I felt I was reasonably vibrant and articulate in the way I presented, but I was less happy with the content and the structure. It felt to me that not enough of the rubber hit the road.

I have been giving talks at conferences around the world for over twelve years. I have prided myself in striving to deliver useful content but wrapping it up in a loose and entertaining style, and providing plenty of anecdotes to identify with the audience. Twelve years in, I felt pretty confident that I had this presentation-business down pat. I felt like I had cut my teeth, paid my dues, and made all the mistakes I needed to make to get the art of delivering a solid presentation down.

I am an idiot.

As a bit of background, when I started preparing the content for my keynote, the content and the structure was something I really battled with. This was a different type of keynote; it was more along the lines of a lightning talk in terms of duration, but it had the gravitas of a keynote. It needed to be thought-provoking and set the stage for discussions elsewhere at OSCON. But I needed to do this in a short burst of time, and make it feel like an experience that people could identify with. I had my message; I believe that we are at the beginning of a renaissance in community management, but I found the shorter nature of the presentation and it’s position as a keynote really challenging, and more-so than I expected.

After delivering the keynote and in thinking about this and talking to some close friends, I came to some conclusions, and it is these conclusions that I wanted to share. If you are a presenter some of these thoughts might be useful in how you think about your own presentations too.

Firstly, my presentation style has always been story orientated; I build up a context, provide some tension in that context, and then deliver an outcome that strives to relieve the tension and provide insight. As such there is a certain amount of set up and context building that gets the audience up the curve, I then deliver the outcome and bring the audience back down over the curve and provide conclusions. This story-telling component takes time…valuable time in a short presentation.

Secondly, Steph Walli observed that there is a real skill in writing novels and a real but very different skill in writing short stories. I think this was really insightful. Short stories by definition need the story-telling to be more compact, and the finesse and skill is in delivering the same smooth set-up and transition of events, but with fewer keyframes thrown into the mix.

As such, my conclusion here is that I like to tell stories, and my presentations always comprise of telling stories, but my career so far has far been from the perspective of a novellist as opposed to a short-story writer. I believe this was illustrated today when my longer talk felt more natural and more *me*, yet the keynote felt personally more awkward, and *less me*. While I am confident in my skills in delivering a 30 or 40 minute presentation, I discovered today that delivering a shorter presentation that needs to have the same or greater level of gravitas requires a very different and distinctive set of skills, and I want to aquire them.

To be completely clear, none of this is at the fault of OSCON and O’Reilly, I have no issue with 15 minute keynotes, and they put on one heck of a great conference. Everyone has been so supportive and wonderful to me. I am delighted they gave me an opportunity to get up and speak and I feel even more grateful that my experience has now helped me to learn something new about myself, and a new area to focus, even after I had been down the presentation road so many times before and I thought I knew what I needed to know.

It turns out that this old dog still needs to learn some new tricks, and I am now switching gears to learn how to do this. Thoughts and advice all welcome! 🙂