Green Living Forever

Your Presentations Need Help!

Yes – I mean YOU.

Maybe you’re just getting started.

Maybe you’re thinking “I’m an expert. I do 10+ presentations a year. I’ve spoken before hundreds at a time.” Fair enough.

Your presentations still need help!

I know, because I’ve been to your talk.

You’re using PowerPoint as a teleprompter, driving me crazy as you repeat out loud the headings I’ve already read. Your graphs and tables confuse more than enlighten. Your graphics are too dense and so is your text. You’re distracting me from your message and most of all from YOU – the person I came to see!

It’s not really your fault – PowerPoint made you do it.

The solution? Take a cue from these masters.

Edward Tufte, “The Leonardo da Vinci of data”, offers these remedies in “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”:

PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector for low-resolution materials. And that’s about it. Never use PP templates for arraying words or numbers. Avoid elaborate hierarchies of bullet lists. Never read aloud from slides. Never use PP templates to format paper reports or web screens. Use PP as a projector for showing low-resolution color images, graphics, and videos that cannot be reproduced as printed handouts at a presentation.

Paper handouts at a talk can effectively show text, numbers, data, graphics, images. Printed materials, which should largely replace PP, bring information transfer rates in presentations up to that of everyday material in newspapers, magazines, books and internet screens. Thoughtfully planned handouts at your talk tell the audience that you are serious and precise; that you seek to leave traces and have consequences. And that you respect the audience.

Seth Godin, marketing guru, has this advice in “Really Bad PowerPoint”:

Communication is the transfer of emotion.

If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report. Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.) Unless you’re an amazing writer, it’s awfully hard to do that in a report.

Our brains have two sides. The right side is emotional, musical and moody. The left side is focused on dexterity, facts and hard data.

When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain. So they use the right side to judge the way you talk, the way you dress and your body language. Often, people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you’re on the second slide. After that, it’s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good.

You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough. If all it took was logic, no one would smoke cigarettes. No one would be afraid to fly on airplanes. And every smart proposal would be adopted. No, you don’t win with logic. Logic is essential, but without emotion, you’re not playing with a full deck.

PowerPoint presents an amazing opportunity. You can use the screen to talk emotionally to the audience’s right brain (through their eyes), and your words can go through the audience’s ears to talk to their left brain.

That’s what Stephen Spielberg does. It seems to work for him.

Four Components To A Great Presentation

First, make yourself cue cards. [You can do this using Notes Mode.] You should be able to see your cue cards on your laptop’s screen while your audience sees your slides on the wall. [You can also] resort to writing them down the old-fashioned way.

Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

Second, make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? Amazingly, it’s more fun than doing it the old way. But it’s effective communication.

Third, create a written document. A leave-behind. Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over, and they don’t have to write down everything you say.

IMPORTANT: Don’t hand out the written stuff at the beginning. Don’t! If you do, people will read the whole thing while you’re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.

Fourth, create a feedback cycle. If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there’s no ambiguity at all about what you’ve just agreed to.

So What’s On Your Slides?

Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing PowerPoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER.

2. No cheesy images. Use professional images from corbis.com instead. They cost $3 each, or a little more if they’re for ‘professional use’.

3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions. None.

4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never (ever) use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have.

5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They’re emotional, and they won’t work without you there. If someone wants your slides to show “the boss,” tell them that the slides go if you go.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).