Tell them everything and they remember nothing!

Vol. 7, No. 2 — Resources for High Stakes Presenters — and those who hire them

Brand plan goes horribly wrong!

Brand plan presentations to senior decision makers can transform a career into a dramatic success story, or plunge it into a long twilight struggle against the odds. A case from our files...

Product X at Company Y had several ambitious managers working on it, all vying for attention from senior management. To keep the peace and give his direct reports face time with the big boys, the product director allowed 12 individuals to present a little section of the plan.

Thirteen questions

Two days before the presentation, after viewing the deck, the president of the company sent the product director a note with thirteen questions about the plan

The team worked overtime to develop responses to the president’s questions, but because of the fast-approaching presentation deadline, did not rehearse together.

When the big day arrived, the product director took several hours to address the thirteen questions, and then launched his managers into the actual brand plan.

Because they had not rehearsed, they discovered that they were duplicating each other’s efforts, but could do nothing about it.

Worse, because the managers were eager to outshine each other, they had crammed as much data onto their slides as possible, to show how much they knew and how hard they had worked.

Numbness at the end

At the end of the 4.5 hour presentation, when the president asked the senior team if they had any questions, no one responded or raised a single question.

When the senior executives gathered the next day to review the plan and allocate resources, they confessed to each other that they couldn’t remember much of what the team had presented.

They sent word to the embarrassed product director that they would need to hear the presentation again—a monumental waste of time and money!

What went wrong?

Many mistakes were made.

• The director not managing the process effectively.
• Adding 13 last-minute questions.
• The team failing to rehearse together.
• Too many presenters.
• Too many slides.
• Too much data on the slides.

Cognitive overload

Richard E. Mayer of the University of California has studied how people best absorb information. His research forms the basis of The Principles of Cognitive Guidance. The six most relevant principles are:

1. Multimedia: We learn better from spoken words accompanied by pictures than from spoken words alone. (Bullet points do not count as pictures.)
2. Coherence: We learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
3. Contiguity: We learn better when images and text appear close together on the page or screen.
4. Modality: We learn better from pictures accompanied by spoken words than from pictures accompanied
   by written words.
5. Signaling: We learn better when material is organized with clear outlines and headers.
6. Personalization: We learn better from a conversational style than we do from a formal style.

Professor Mayer's work suggests we:

• Use more pictures and graphics. Minimize the number of bullet point slides.
• Know your main points so you know what to eliminate.
• Label all graphics carefully.
• Better yet, put an image on the screen and narrate the meaning of the image.
• Write conclusive, assertive headlines for each slide.
• Develop a relaxed, conversational style of presenting in rehearsal.

Our corporate PowerPoint cultures often get in the way of good communication. Too many speakers with too many slides covered with bullet points can waste time and undermine the value of the information being presented.

Good business decisions depend on good information presented effectively. A disciplined process for preparing presentations is essential. There is a better way, and we can help.

Our corporate PowerPoint cultures can get in the way of good communication.

Bullet point slides might very well be the weapons of mass destruction that will destroy the morale of the work force and the value of our intellectual capital

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