Paired Presentations
We pair code. We pair coaching. Why shouldn't we pair presentations?
It turns out that we should, and did. Laurie and I ran a 90-minute session at last week's Scrum Gathering, talking about some of the new practices we've developed in the last year. Feedback from the crowd was good, with the first raising of the Sword Of Integration getting unexpected spontaneous applause. The other paired presentation at the conference, Nigel Baker and Paul Goddard's session on Enterprise Scrum, was similarly entertaining - the room was packed.
Now, if it was just about entertainment, we could skip the conference and go see Zombieland. But it's not: more entertaining presentations are more memorable, and that extends to the content. Tell me 'be careful of corporate sponsors that, while exerting significant influence in the organisation, risk attaching an aura of fear to the project', and it might stick, but it might not. Say "BEWARE OF DARTH SPONSOR" while your colleague makes scary breathing noises, and I'll remember.
I really believe that this is the future. Neither presentation sacrificed content quality - in fact, with two brains you have more material to draw from, and are more likely to have a specific answer to questions from the audience.
It's not easy. If you're just talking alternately, it's not hard to say "and now, over to Laurie to hear about meetings". If you've both rehearsed the full session, then you don't even need defined handover points. But if you do only that, you've given up the most compelling reason to pair presentations - the interplay between the two presenters. Laurie and I ran mini-scenes to show some of the problems that our new practices solve. At key points he'd interrupt me, or my phone would deliberately ring, or I'd suddenly switch costume and try to strangle him. It takes accurate timing and, should anything go wrong, it's harder to recover from than a solo misstep.
But there isn't time to rehearse it like a theatre show, so an element of improvisation has to remain.
We borrowed from Scrum to fix this. We couldn't define the specification weeks in advance, because we wouldn't remember it. Instead, we discussed the basics, then nailed it down in the final rehearsal the night before the show. It takes many, many fewer rehearsals if you only need to remember something for 24 hours.
The corner of our slides specified the slide number. We each had an identical set of printed notecards, also prominently featuring the slide number. This let us resynchronise just by glancing at the screen.
The notes were important. I wrote a script to produce notecards from a keynote presentation, then chopped them up manually. We're both used to presenting without notes, but we needed the details as a reminder during the more complex interactive bits.
We ran the slides on a macbook turned sideways to face us, since it's easier to glance to the side than behind to see the screen. Each of us had a mac remote, so we could each control them.
In the end some of this was overkill, and the show went smoothly. We're looking forward to taking this format further in our upcoming presentation at XP Day - and in the meantime, we'd love to see what you do with it.