Thread by @AskMichaelTaiwo

Shell and other companies usually include a “technical presentation" as part of the interview process.

I had one the day before my Shell Recruitment Day.

Presented to a bunch of folks from the Technical Safety Engineering team.

One of the biggest scams in the corporate world is in that name – technical presentation – because I can assure you that the last thing they want is something technical.

I have seen so many smart candidates fall for this.

You think you impressed them.

But the next thing you get is a rejection email.

Because nobody is actually evaluating your technical skill.

They are looking for something else entirely.

(I wish they’d just be more honest about this.)🧵

In a technical presentation there’s usually that one person – the boss – that makes the final go/no-go call.

And this is what is going on in the boss’s mind as your mouth is moving:

Can he sell our ideas to clients?

Can he sell our team to the higher ups?

Can he secure buy-in from key stakeholders?

CAN. HE. SELL?

If you can't sell yourself in that room, you can't do any of those things.

And if you can't, he doesn't need you.

Simple.

This is why Daniel Pink’s book "To Sell Is Human" became an international bestseller.

Whether you are a manager, engineer, teacher, project lead or parent — what do we spend our days doing?

Isn’t it in trying to move others?

Selling has always been important but now, with AI, it is super important.

AI has made intelligence cheap: with the right prompt anyone can solve technical problems.

But what AI cannot replicate is YOU in a room.

Your poise.

Your voice.

Your ability to make people lean in.

Your sales IQ.

That is what stands you out now.

And that’s what the “technical presentation" is really about.

I presented my doctoral dissertation - Mathematical Modeling of Fluid Spills From Hydraulically Fractured Well Sites – to those folks at Shell.

They wanted me to condense 4 years of PhD work into 40 minutes, including Q&A.

I knew the game.

I knew they weren’t interested in mathematical models or hydraulically fractured well sites or anything.

Half of them were there because someone told them they had to.

The other half were sizing me up to see if they wanted me as a colleague.

And the boss was looking to see if he had another good salesperson coming on board.

This is what I did and what I avoided.

The #1 mistake candidates make is going too technical.

The core of my model is a vertically-averaged Navier-Stokes partial differential equation.

Once you average it over depth, you collapse a 3D problem into 2D, making it more amenable to analysis.

Coding it in MATLAB took me almost a year.

I was so proud of it.

You know what?

I didn’t even put it on the slides.

No triple integrals.

No Fourier Transforms.

No Greek symbols.

Just a story about the problem and how I solved it.

Why didn’t I include all those technical details?

Because I wasn't there to teach math.

I was there to make them understand what I did and why it mattered.

This is what people don’t understand:

Simplifying complex material is the REAL test of mastery.

Anyone can read a paper and parrot the jargon.

That is memorization, not mastery.

Mastery is when you understand something so deeply that you can explain it without using a single technical term.

Einstein supposedly said: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

Whether he said it or not, he was right lol.

So when you simplify, you are not making yourself look less impressive.

You are making yourself look like the most prepared person in the room.

They need to understand you to be persuaded by you.

Understanding is the first step in any sale.

Confusion never sold anything.

There’s a deeper, psychological issue at play here.

The people in the room think they are smart.

Very smart.

They are senior engineers, GMs, technical authorities.

Their entire identity is built on being smart.

So if they can't follow what you are saying, they will NOT think: "Wow, this guy is so brilliant we can't even keep up."

Nah.

Human ego doesn't work like that.

They will think: "We can't understand him because HE doesn't know what he is saying."

Going too technical doesn't make you look smart.

It makes you look like a fraud.

Their ego will protect itself by demoting you.

Every. Single. Time.

This is why simplification is the way.

So what does the audience actually want from you?

Three things:

1. Did this person identify a real problem?

2. Did they solve it in a way that makes sense?

3. Will they solve OUR problems the same way?

Notice none of those is "are they smart?"

That is already assumed by the time you walk in.

Stop trying to prove it.

You will only end up disproving it.

Now for some tips on how to ace your next so-called technical presentation.

TIP 1: SPEAK AS IF YOUR AUDIENCE IS A SMART 16-YEAR OLD

Plain words.

No jargon.

No vocabulary flexing.

If a high schooler cannot follow you, your real audience cannot either.

Go out and find a teenager and present to them.

If they ask thoughtful questions afterwards, then you have communicated clearly.

Well done.

TIP 2: ANALOGIES ARE YOUR WEAPONS. DEPLOY THEM.

Compare your method to something they already know.

A traffic jam. A leaky bucket. A football team. A market full of buyers.

Find the analogy the audience will understand.

Don’t go and use a football analogy in the US.

They are thinking American football, you are thinking soccer.

A great analogy lands the entire concept in 5 seconds.

A bad slide takes 5 minutes.

When you find the right analogy, the whole room nods at the same time.

That is the moment you have sold them.

Bonus tip: AI can now help with this. (We didn’t have that advantage.)

Prompt: "Here’s my presentation, give me an analogy I can use to pass my concept across."

Tip 3: OPEN WITH A QUESTION THAT HOOKS THEM

In my case, I said "How can you know where to locate an oil well to minimize environmental damage in case of a blowout?"

I opened this way because BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster was still fresh in my audience’s mind.

I wanted an opening that would rock them a little bit and position me as someone who could help Shell avoid BP’s fate.

From my first sentence, I hooked them.

Got them right where I wanted them.

Some quick mechanics:

Use more pictures, and use less words.

Make the slides yourself.

Don't use AI to make them.

For now, AI doesn't produce slides that good.

If they gave you a presentation guide, USE IT.

Don't get cute.

Following instructions is key.

If they said 20 minutes, prepare 15 minutes of material, or even 10 but certainly not 25.

If you have to speak fast to fit it all in, you have too much material.

Cut it in half.

Confidence shows in your pace.

Rushed = nervous.

Calm = in control.

Speak at your natural, relaxed pace.

Don’t try to form an accent.

You don’t need that fakery.

Just speak loudly, calmly, and confidently.

And they will follow you.

The last part is Question & Answer.

Q&A is where your village people show up.

No gree for them.

Let me show you the two most common landmines here and how to avoid them.

Landmine 1: What if you don't know the answer?

Just say so.

"I don't know. That is an interesting question and now you have gotten me curious about what the answer is. I'll dig into it."

Honest "I don't know" beats confident BS every time.

Senior people in the room have seen too many candidates BS their way through.

They smell it from a mile away.

It also shows emotional maturity to acknowledge that you don’t know.

It makes you more believable.

Landmine 2: What if someone challenges your method?

This happened to me.

One of the Subject Matter Experts asked why I didn’t use a Runge-Kutta method to discretize my time series.

Another time he questioned why I wrote a custom program instead of adapting one from MATLAB’s library.

I grabbed a bottle of water, opened it, took a sip and said, "Where I come from, we have a saying — one road doesn't lead to the market. I see your point, that approach may work too. But the method I showed you has been tried and tested. That's why I used it. And it worked."

I acknowledged him.

I didn't fold.

And I defended my work without ego.

That is the move.

I didn’t come this far for one yeye expert to derail me.

Some people believe that storytellers rule the world.

That humans are wired for stories.

Maybe.

But what is the purpose of a story?

Isn’t it to sell something?

So I believe that salespeople rule the world.

And my larger point here is that you should see that "Technical presentation" as a sales pitch.

Your career will depend in large part on your ability to convey technical content to a non-technical audience.

The earlier you get this, the faster you win.

Thank you. And I love you.