I just finished an engagement developing a presentation to introduce a major Human Resources initiative across a global company. When I arrived, the client had close to 50 bullet powerpoint slides. When I left this morning, he had eleven slides, and not one bullet point in sight.
I think what made the difference was moving away from informing the audience about the details of the program, and instead moving toward defining the problem that it solved and arguing why it was an effective solution.
The original presentation answered in great detail the question, “What’s in the HR program?” The presentation as it stands now answers (with three key points) the question, “What’s in the HR program for the audience?”
You may say this is basic stuff, and you’re right. But those of us who have spent an entire year researching and developing a globally useful HR program tend to be blinded by our newly acquired expertise. We have our new abstract vocabulary (“behavioral competency matrix”), and our knowledge of the incredible complexity and sophistication of the thinking behind the program. To do it justice, we feel the need to give the audience a sense of its richness.
Meanwhile, back in the minds of the audience, that persistent question we’ve all been taught to answer has to wait for 45 minutes before being acknowledged. That question rhymes with, “What’s in it for me?”
As for the slides, we took our cue from Cliff Atkinson of Sociable Media, who has argued elegantly that PowerPoint is used most effectively when bullet points are banished. Basing his recommendations on research in cognitive science, he has helped the business community understand how to communicate in a way that allows people to absorb what’s being said.
We crafted the presentation around images of “The Journey,” starting when a new employee enters the company, and mapping her career through many permutations. We used the visual element of a beaming young woman being handed the keys to a new car, with the headline saying, “Program X gives you the keys to your career.”
It has not been delivered yet, but I have high hopes for a great success for everyone involved. I’ll keep you posted.
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It is also my experience that consultants tend to include the kitchen sink in their presentations to clients. Why does this happen? Allow me to speculate.
1. You are right. For consultants, the “deck” is the presentation which is the report.
2. The deck must serve both as a presentation document and a written document for those not able to attend the meeting.
3 The consultants therefore are careful to include mountains of data, reasoning, graphs, sources, etc. to document the validity of their recommendations.
4. A thick deck implies substance and depth. A thin deck of a few pages makes the client wonder what they’re paying for.
5. The client doesn’t trust the consultants and wants to see all the data.
6. The consultants value the rich complexity of their findings and want to share their passion with the client.
7. The consultant in charge has always done it this way, so that’s the way it’s done.
8. The client wants information density for a variety of reasons, some good, some bad.
Acutally I think there is more than one issue here. The first is the number of slides. The second is how the information is displayed on the slides.
First, the number of slides. Cognitive psychology tells us that we can hold no more than three-to-five items in our minds at one time. Those who have trained their memories can retain more than that, but for the vast majority of us–that’s the limit. Also, audiences have notoriously short attention spans, and they have limited room in short term memory too.
What’s more, as the speaker feeds them more and more information, the audience has to fight through the clutter to find the real value–the real take-away message. And when they have to fight too hard, they get frustrated and impatient, and then they stop listening.
Not only that, they associate the consultant with negative emotions–boredom, frustration, etc–and are therefore more likely to want to forget the experience.
This is not good for the consultant, because it could hurt client retention rates, and it’s not good for the client, because it might prediscpose them to sandbag, or delay implementation of good ideas.
As for the second issue–how the information is displayed on the slides–research into how people absorb information has demonstrated that we learn more when we simultaneously concentrate on pictures and listen to a spoken narrative. We do not learn as well when asked to read words and listen at the same time. (Think how annoying it is when you’re trying to read and someone talks to you at the same time!) So the presence of “100 words” on a single slide is a recipe for audience frustration and burnout.
I would help the consultants out of their muddled thinking by asking them what is the goal of their presentation? What do they want the audience to feel, believe, think, or do as a result of the presentation? And if the audience could only remember one thought, what would it be?
I would also ask them to put truly graphical information on the slide, and the detailed explanation into the Notes section of PowerPoint. This approach creates a document that serves their two purposes more effectively: it is a crisper, cleaner spoken communication, and it provides the necessary details in a written form that can be printed and handed to attendees, and to those who miss the meeting.
I’ll stop there. The weekend calls. Thanks for your comment.
I work with many consultants who bring a 50 slide PowerPoint deck to a 30 minute meeting. Half the slides are crammed with upwards of 100 words in an illegibly small point size. The other half are covered with incomprehensibly complex consulting diagrams and flow charts. If you point out that the audience won’t be able to read or understand their slides, they explain that the client isn’t expected to.
If you press them by asking why they present what the audience isn’t supposed to read, and then press again, you eventually get to the truth. Decks long ago replaced the written consulting report. The deck they are showing is the final deliverable for their project doubling as a presentation deck. Press again and you learn that there was neither time nor budget for preparing a separate presentation deck.
How does one help them out of such muddled thinking?
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