Expansion Joints

Back in the days when I did live talks, one of my abilities was to finish
on time, even if my talk time was cut at the last moment (perhaps due to the
prior speaker running over). The key to my ability to do this was to use
Expansion Joints – parts of the talk that I’d
pre-planned so I could cover them quickly or slowly depending on how much time
I had.

The way I’d do this would be to plan for some topics to be optional. The
talk would work if I skipped over them, but I could also witter on about them
for five (or ten) minutes. Ideally, each of these topics would get one slide,
usually with a bunch of key phrases on it – the headings of what I’d talk
about should I be talking about it. When I got to the slide, I’d look at how
time was going with the talk. If (as was usually the case) I was running short
of time, I could cover the slide in about thirty seconds, saying something
like: “in doing this, there’s a bunch of things you need to consider, but they
are out of scope for today’s talk”.

If, however, I did have time, I could then spend some time talking about
them. The slide would be simple, and not provide much of a Visual Channel, but that wasn’t so important, after all this material
was optional in the first place.

The single flex-slide was my favorite Expansion Joint, as it was easy to
use. Sometimes however my optional topic required a proper visual channel,
necessitating dedicated slides. My solution here was good control over
slide handling. Presentation tools include the ability to skip over slides
while I’m talking, and I made sure I practiced how to use them so I could skip
a bunch of slides without the audience knowing. It’s crucial here that it’s
invisible to the audience, I find it looks sloppy if anyone says “in the
interests of time I’ll skip over these slides”. To do this, however, I do need
access to my laptop while presenting, venues that only provide a clicker while
loading the slides on some other machine lack that control. That started to
happen in my last couple of years, much to my annoyance.

When creating talks, I was always worried that I would run out of things to
say, even though experience told me I reliably crammed more stuff in than I
could possibly cover. Expansion Joints helped with this, I could aggressively
trim the core talk to less than I needed, and rely on the Expansion Joints to
fill the gap. In practice I usually didn’t need the Expansion Joints anyway, but
their presence helped my confidence.

Using Expansion Joints was particularly important for me as I never
rehearsed my talks. I was always someone whose ability to present was driven by
adrenaline. Talking to a rubber duck just didn’t work, the duck was clearly
every bit as bored as I was. Consequently the first time I gave a talk, I was
hazy as to how long it would take. Yet with Expansion Joints in place, I was
able to finish a talk right on time.

Expansion Joints enabled me to give the same talk
to different time slots. Sometimes I’d have thirty minutes, sometimes
forty-five. With Expansion Joints, I didn’t need to change my slides,
particularly handy if a time cut (or more rarely a time increase) appeared at the
last moment. (Although in my later years, I handled this by doing a Suite Of Talks.)

Talks that encourage audience interaction need these because we can never
predict how much time the interaction will use up. Sometimes we get a steady
stream of questions, other times (particularly in Scandinavia, or
upper-Midwest America) a lack of questions had me blasting through the agenda.
Any such talk needed a double-dose of this temporal ballast.

Expansion Joints are at their most useful in later parts of the talk, as
it’s then that I have the most information on how much time I have. Earlier
ones can still be handy, particularly if they come after an interactive
section when I’d like to rebase my timing.