Dealing with DevRel Presentation A/V Equipment Failures

A/V equipment fails all the time with presentations; Here is my guide on how to avoid making a bad situation worse

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been presenting at the KubeCon EU and QCon London events, hence the low number of posts here. However, getting back on the speaking scene reminded me of that universal truth of presenting: it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” audio-visual (A/V) equipment will let you down.

I get asked about this topic often, and when I had my own A/V failure in Paris, it was the perfect opportunity to jot down some notes to share.

The benefits of starting small with public speaking

I’ll caveat my advice by stating that I’ve been speaking in public for over 20 years (over 30 if you count my school poetry club). I’ve been lucky enough to teach multiple courses at university, present at international academic events, speak a lot at local meetups, keynote popular tech conferences, and toast my friends and family getting married. I like to think I’ve encountered almost every type of A/V failure in most situations. I didn’t handle them all well, but the cliche of practice makes perfect definitely applies here.

After a failure happens a few times, the impact on you as a speaker is less severe. You realise that even if the worst happens, it’s not the end of the world. You might even walk away with a funny story to tell people.

It’s worth noting that I presented at many small local meetup events before aiming for national and international conferences. This obviously helped build my skills and confidence. Also, and with hindsight, having my computer crash and microphone fail in front of 20 friends from London was a much gentler introduction to A/V incident management than having to recover from these types of issues on an international stage with 1000+ people staring at me!

I mention this because many of the folks I mentor are looking to fast-track their way to international stages. I don’t always think this is a good approach.

KubeCon EU 24: The blank/blue screen of death!

It’s a presenter’s worst nightmare. About 10 minutes into my AppDeveloperCon talk at KubeCon, the big screen behind me went blank. Suddenly, hundreds of pairs of eyes were trained on me and me alone. No one could see my slides. The screen had flickered moments before, and so I was at least somewhat (subconsciously) prepared for this, but it still caught me by surprise. Check out the live-action replay that begins at 08:10 (and thanks to the CNCF folks for not editing this out :) )

I’m pretty happy with how I handled the situation. As mentioned above, I’ve thought about this type of situation before. I have also practised dealing with failure (shout out to my mentors who drilled me on this), and I’ve encountered many failures in the real world. I had also presented similar material several times, and so it briefly flashed in my mind that I could probably freestyle this presentation without slides (although it wouldn’t have had half the impact!)

How to deal with an A/V failure

Here is my step-by-step guide to dealing with A/V failures when presenting:

1. Acknowledge the situation! I’ve seen presenters try to pretend the failure hasn’t happened and/or hope it’s a temporary glitch. This can slow the rate of recovery.

2. Signal to the A/V team or host in the room that something has happened. The A/V folks are only human, and so sometimes they won’t be paying attention. I tip my hat to Mark Fussell from Diagrid, who hosted AppDeveloperCon. As soon as I said, “Help!” into the microphone, he sprang up from his chair. The A/V folks followed shortly.

3. Keep the audience informed as to what has happened. Cue the speculation and awkward jokes (and I apologise for making the well-worn Microsoft problem resolution gag about turning it on and off again, but this did fix so many MS Word and PowerPoint issues for me over the years! :) )

4. Attempt to fix the problem (if help isn’t coming). I put this as step 4 — after step 2, where you attempt to engage with the A/V folks — as my experience has taught me that trying to fix something not obviously broken usually results in me making it worse.

5. If the failure seems unrecoverable, you can either freestyle the presentation without slides (recommended only for advanced speakers) or apologise to the audience and state that you will chat with the organisers and see if the talk can be rescheduled. Don’t feel guilty about this, as the issue is typically outside your control.

6. If you can fix the issue, thank the folks who helped you and acknowledge that the situation has been fixed. Try to pick up your presentation from where the failure occurred, but don’t worry if you backtrack somewhat. Don’t dwell on the situation or keep referring back to the failure. Not only does constantly referring to the issue make you relive the situation and increase your stress, but it makes editing the recording more difficult, too.

7. Be sure to thank the A/V team that helped you at the end of your presentation. If the problem looks endemic, I might also subtly ask if additional fixes will be made for the speakers presenting after me. I didn’t do that in this situation, but several times in the past, I have hinted that new microphones might be needed, etc.

If you watch the above recording when the failure happens, I follow the script above fairly closely. I was lucky that I had seen the screen glitch out of the corner of my eye moments before, and I had also just landed a small joke (which was great for my confidence!) To their credit, the A/V team sprang to action fairly quickly and did a great job fixing the issue.

The fix ultimately looked to be solved by unplugging and plugging the HDMI cable back into my laptop. I didn’t do this myself as my laptop screen wasn’t showing any signs of issues (i.e. it wasn’t obviously disconnected), and I’ve seen this worsen the problem. Making lots of panicky fixes just adds to the list of things the A/V team must consider when diagnosing the issue.

What is the worst A/V failure you’ve seen?

Now that I’ve shared my approach to recovering from an A/V failure, I would love to hear your presenter's horror stories. As confident as I may be, I’m sure there are situations that I haven’t encountered. I would be keen to think about these and create an action plan :-)