Disneyland Presenting

How Disneyland can alter your mode of presentations

A colleague of Neal Ford’s at ThoughtWorks recently blogged about his Disney World experience and how it changed his thoughts about teaching and presenting. The part I found most interesting was the following:

The thought about performance also reminds me that Disney doesn’t overdo live performances. If there’s something that could be a recording, then they just leave it that way. For example the briefings for the rides - they seem live, but they’re not! This is yet another lesson for us - never do a live demo if it doesn’t add significant value. It’s a recipe for disaster, creating an additional point of failure for your presentation or workshop. This is not to say you shouldn’t do anything live. You just need to be pragmatic about what’s valuable and what’s not.

We also believe that Lipsync, a pattern of recording portions of product demos in a compelling harmony to your live talk, is a benefit to most presentations. Having things go “perfectly” time after time is a criticism we are happy to be the recipients of.