You most likely suck at presenting. But you’re in good company as so do most of us, and it is in part because of the culture of presentations that most of us grew up with.
It doesn’t have to stay that way, nor should it.
If you have any curiousity about why you have been bored dead during lectures in med school and through most of post graduate presentations and you don’t want to carry that forward this post is for you.
The SSAI educational committee recently hosted two webinar sessions with Ross Fisher on the science behind why we fail to present well in medicine and, using that scientific insight, how we may improve.
You will likely have seen Ross’ name here on scanFOAM as we’ve arranged a few presentations workshops with him and been involved in other adventures with him over the years.
He is an all round good chap. He fixes up kids’ abdomens on his day job, but as if that wasn’t enough of a challenge and accomplishment he has taken on the endless mission of helping the field of medicine improve its dismal presentation standard.
Ross kindly agreed for us to share these webinars after the fact. We think you’lll find a lot of value in them. They have a nice learning conversation feel to them. When they’ve introduced you to the topic you can choose to delve a bit deeper on your own, suggestions below.
Part 1: Your Presentations Fail Because of Science
Part 2: How to improve your presentations by understanding the science
Please share widely or you shall be partly responsible for the next death by PowerPoint.
Further reading
Ross Fisher himself
Most obvious place to start is the website. It has lots of good posts with details. We might recommend starting with How to do a presentation and this case study of him preparing for a talk of his own.
Also give him a follow him on twitter. He is always happy to interact.
Garr Reynolds
Ex-Apple emloyee and presentation sensei. He authored Presentation Zen, an early foundational text that set off Ross on his path.
Also a great website with tons of good stuff.
Worth a follow on twitter.
Scott Weingart
This post nicely illustrates the work behind the success of the man and his EMCrit site. That stuff doesn’t happen at random.
Tim Montrief
Tim is an editor on a couple of big medical outlets, the ALiEM and EMDocs. While revisiting this topic I happened on this twitter tutorial with 10 tips for better presentations which I found excellent. He has some core supporting literature bundled in a google folder here.
If you’re the twitter kind you can find more convo on the topic of presentations at #presentationskills and #htdap (how to do a presentation).
Scandinavian paediatric anaesthetist / intensivist.
PHARM, ED, OR, ICU.
Digital MedEd
Co-founder scanFOAM.org
Co-organiser CphCC & TBS-Zermatt (aka The Big Sick)
Medical lead REPEL (resilience in pediatric emergency life support)
Web dev SSAI.info
