Death by Powerpoint

It's nearing presentation time again at work and one is faced with the inevitable question: how should I communicate the message this time? Actually this is an excellent question to ask, because the way business and organisations have developed - I don't think we actually regularly ask ourselves this question anymore - we just automatically turn to PowerPoint, whether it is the correct medium or not.

PowerPoint, not only frustrating to use - trivialises any message, creates some truly awful looking graphics and has a wonderful ability of making your message absolutely transient - as soon as the lights go up again, people will have forgotten every single thing mentioned in the presentation. Yet, we persist with it, almost religiously although it does us no favours. Some things to bear in mind:

Rethinking the purpose of a presentation

What is it you want to get out of the presentation? Do you want decisions, feedback, pointers where to go next, agreement - what? It is useful to start by thinking of what you want the outcome to be and plan backwards. The rule for good board meetings is that you should not surprise any of the members with news on the day of the meeting that they have not had a chance to aquaint themselves with in advance.

If translated into a presentation setting, this means you should send the in-depth report to the participants in advance and go over the main points and conclusions in the presentation - hence allowing for a meaningful conversation to take place, rather than creating a lecture. This means people will have had time to reflect on any issues you raise and come with meaningful, useful comments on the day and moreover - if there are any problematic findings, the members concerned will have had time to prepare and do not feel threatened when you present the same findings in front of everybody.

Smallest font-size used is the age of the oldest audience member divided by two.

If relying on assumptions, presentations increase exponentially the higher you go in an organisation and invariably those up in the higher echelons of any organisation are at least in their forties, if not older - so a conservative estimate means your minimum font size should be no smaller than 30 point. That means you can only cram about 40 words (if you are lucky) on to a single slide - which equates to about 8 seconds of silent reading. If you have any depth and insight to your message you will find that your slides start multiplying like rabbits, again counterproductive - as the more slides you have the less likely people are to pay attention to what you are saying. See point above.

Have Something to Say - not Animate!

"Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure. At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple. The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience." (Edward Tufte - PowerPoint is Evil... see link below)

Your Slides Are Not the Ones Listening

Simple: Don't Talk to Your Slides. This makes for some extremely boring presentations - the presenter is so paranoid they will forget to say something they not only say it once, they turn to the slide and read it out too. This is a surefire way to convince the audience that you don't actually know or have any confidence in what you are on about, if you need to keep turning to check it all the time. This tendence is usually followed by slides, which not only contain the bulletpoint summaries of the message but little transcripts of the stories to remind the presenter when to break into a 'case study' to support the message. That makes everything seem much staged, artificial and thin. If you need something to help you remember what to say - use que cards (IN BIG WRITING) so you can read it easily. Don't write entire sentences on these cards, just put down key words - this will help you speak more naturally and stops you looking like you are reading a script.

Some great links to help you:

• Everything You Wanted to Know About Presenting but Were Afraid to Ask
• Stop Your Presentation Before it Kills Again!
• PowerPoint is Evil
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

Comments

[Hal]

The rule about font size is moronic. How big is the presentation being projected? You don't know. Therefore, there's no such thing as "font size"

[Cecilia]

You are absolutely right - for some reason they were'nt there, but I have put them back in and with an extra note at the end.. thanks for spotting it!

[Acowymous Nonherd]

If you're going to quote Tufte wholesale, please have the decency to put quotation marks around it.

[Cecilia Weckstrom]

Very good point - thanks for that Alex. I found a link on the topic for those interested:

http://www.coe.montana.edu/IE/faculty/sobek/A3/report.htm

It explains the steps and also shows an example what the A3 looks like.

[Alex Corscadden]

Take a page out of the Toyota management book, write an A3. You get one page of 11x17 or A3 sized paper, thats it, one side, no more, no less. It sounds a lot harder than it actually is and its surprisingly effective.

Google for "Toyota A3", there are a couple good papers on it.

You can use a power point presentation to bolster the report, but a well written A3 shouldn't need it. Everything thats important to the presentation should be on the page.