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Don’t think that your slides are your presentation. They’re not. Your slides are like beads lying on a table in a big messy pile until you assemble them into a coherent order and string them into a beautiful necklace.

I like to watch Law and Order. There are a certain number of scenes in episodes of Law and Order, and if they are not arranged in the right sequence, there is no drama, no message, no clarity, no meaning!

This is pretty obvious, and I imagine you’re good at arranging the scenes of your show into marching order. But what do you say to the audience when you’re moving from one scene to the next?

If you’re like most people, you say nothing. You just click the clicker to bring the next slide up. Then you stare at it for a few seconds to get oriented, and then you begin to talk about it.

When you do this, you’re giving up your power as the creator of the narrative, an act which diminishes your stature and your control of the message.

Better to link the next slide to the current one before you leave the current. Stitch the scenes together: Make them curious about what’s coming next. In Hollywood, it’s called foreshadowing.

For instance, at the end of a slide that provides quantitative evidence that there is a 3 to 1 return on advertising dollars, you might say, “So, you might think that the more we spend, the more money we will make. And it turns out, that’s not exactly how it works.”

And suddenly all your listeners are like bird dogs on a hunt, tense with interest as they await the nugget of insight you’re about to reveal–on the next slide.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

A bunch of great people (and great presenters) in big pharma told me one of their challenges is re-doing PowerPoint decks for presentations to different levels of management.

When they get a PowerPoint deck done to their boss’s satisfaction (they happen to work on reimbursement for a multi-billion dollar brand), that’s only the beginning. 

After their boss presents the deck to his boss, then that boss (boss #2) wants to change the PowerPoints for his presentation to the senior executive committee.

Word comes down from above, “Create yet another version that will fit the needs of yet another audience.”  They spend a good deal of their lives creating presentation decks, and then retro-fitting them to meet the needs of people up the chain of command.

This need to alter presentation content and flow to fit the needs of senior people requires them to rely on their bosses to serve as cultural ambassadors.  The bosses hang out in the court of the senior decision makers, who care, on a global corporate level, about accurate predictions of revenue, whereas my clients are reimbursement specialists with a lot of technical knowledge about how to get the drug paid for by insurance companies.

What can these time-pressed business presenters do to respond to the interests of the senior decision makers  they serve, while still providing an accurate and complete picture of the reimbursement environment for their immediate boss?

One way of defining the solution?  Empathize!   Empathy  is the capacity to understand the thoughts,  reasoning, and  priorities of others. 

Empathy demands that we suspend our attachment to our own view of things, and imagine what it must be like to be a senior decision maker who is responsible for predicting and delivering a particular revenue stream to the bottom line of a global organization.

When creators of presentations empathize with their various audiences, they are better able to create documents and scripts that can expand or contract.  They can be lengthy and technically detailed, or they can be stream-lined and bottom-line oriented, much like a politicians standard stump speech, which can be delivered in 30 seconds on the evening news, 3 minutes at a quick campaign stop, or 30 minutes at a big event.

In the case of these pharmaceutical marketers, they now know that the senior people care about the bottom line, the final number, the revenue they can expect from the brand.   The long and complicated story about how that  final number gets calculated is background–off the screen. 

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.  Sign up for our presentation tips and learn more about us at http://www.simswyeth.com/.

Just this morning, I was rushing to catch the Metro in Washington, DC and found myself staring at a refrigerator-sized ticket machine with buttons, bells, arrows, windows, slots, writing and numbers all over it.  I had no idea where to look or where to start.  It had to be the worst design of a ticket dispenser in the world. The train was coming, I was going to be late, and I could not focus.

I asked a lady next to me how to work it, and she reached over, grabbed my money, shoved it into the slot, and pressed a button that indicated I was about to buy a $20 ticket to go one-way to Union Station from Shady Grove.  I said, “Not $20,” and began to push various buttons in desperation to stop her from spending all my available cash. 

She gave up and walked away, and thank God a Metro employee was there to educate me on how to interpret the hieroglyphs swimming before my eyes.  She was great.  And she was busy too, dealing with everyone else who was confused by the machines.

Somewhere around 30 million times a day, busy audiences have the same experience when they sit down to view our PowerPoint slides.  Our audiences are content-driven, time-pressed, and results-oriented.  They want it quick, clear and simple, and we need to give it to them that way.

Please see these posts How to clarify complexity, How to clarify complexity, Part 2, Scientific and Technical Training on how to clarify complexity.  (Please note that I didn’t say, “simplify complexity” which can be mistaken for dumbing down your message.)

Presenting for Results^SM Update:

We have scheduled our 2nd public seminar called Presenting for Results^SM. If you are so inclined, please join us on Nov 18 & 19, 2010, at the Upper Montclair Country Club in Clifton, NJ, which is on Rte. 3 East, just east of the Garden State Parkway.  The program is fun, eye-opening, highly experiential and beneficial to your confidence and career, and thus good for your company as well.  Or let somebody who could benefit know about the program. There is very limited enrollment to keep it practical and interactive.  Click here to learn more.

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

I just spent two days with a private equity firm preparing the executives of a portfolio company for a sale to another financial buyer.

As you may know, the practice is standard:  Potential buyers meet with company executives to perform due diligence on the past performance, future opportunities, and to get a feel for the executives themselves.

In this case, an investment bank had prepared the slides.  The first order of business at the meeting where the current owners, the company executives, and the investment bankers gathered was to go through the deck, page by page, and attempt to agree on what should be said on each slide.

It was not pretty.  The executives were seeing the deck for the first time.  They knew their business inside and out, but they were not accustomed to seeing it presented as the bankers did.

A long day of haggling and nit-picking ensued.  Some executives were tongue-tied and frustrated trying to deliver the content as the bankers had drawn it up, and scripting by committee continued into the wee hours.

The prospect of a slide deck making the executives look less than professional and knowledgeable began to loom over the group. And the subsequent reduction in the perceived value of the enterprise also flitted through the collective consciousness in the room.

While there are many lessons here, the simplest take-away is to let the speaker find his own way into the vast terrain of his knowledge.  A deck prepared by outsiders sends him into his own head from a point he’s unlikely to have encountered before.  As a result, he feels lost—a stranger to his own experience.

Don’t start with the slides, unless they ignite your passion and curiosity about the subject.  Start instead from a place that seems right to you, the speaker. 

Some of us prefer a wide angle shot of the topic, a broad overview supported by a deep dive into the underlying information.

And others prefer quite the opposite—a close-up view of one telling detail followed by an explanation as to why that granularity is representative of the whole.

Still others want to speak of their own experience, why they love the topic, or simply give a clear outline of the points they will make.

In fact, there are as many ways of organizing a talk as there are people.  But the way should be suited to the person, not to the third party that wrote it for hire. 

The speaker must find the thread that leads his own mind into the dense fabric of his expertise, and allows him to weave for the listeners a vision of his knowledge.

Once he’s got that, he can prepare the slides.  Without it, he will stumble around in a web of information, with no grasp of a through-line, and create at best a patchy image of the thing he’s trying to describe.

Don’t start with the slides.  Start with what you want to say, and say it the way that makes it yours.

Sims Wyeth is a speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t put it on the slide.

Knowledgeable people in the audience notice small details and ask penetrating questions. Less knowledgeable people lob random questions to probe for weaknesses in your argument and character.

If it complicates your point, and there’s no ethical reason why the audience should know it, leave it out.

As PowerPoint reaches its 20th birthday, Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal reflects on our love/hate relationship with “one of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers”:

While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.

He also interviews PowerPoint’s creators, Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, to learn their perspective on how their well-intentioned brainchild has changed the world of communication. Surprisingly, he writes, “they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint.” Gaskins, in fact, agrees with the harsh appraisals of infographics expert Edward Tufte, who basically fingers PowerPoint as a key culprit in the dumbing down of our civilization.

Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which it was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.

Many of us use PowerPoint as both written and spoken communication. We expect our decks to serve two purposes. First, to be a compelling display of visual evidence, and second to be a complete record of our research, analysis and thinking.

Often because of this dual purpose, the visual evidence is actually not visual at all, but rather written in the form of bullet points, which demand that we read and listen at the same time, causing us to lose concentration.

Further, because we expect the document to be clear and useful to someone unable to attend our talk, the data, analysis, and recommendations are often obscured because we write complete sentences on the slides, distracting from the more relevant graphical evidence.

Even more fundamental, the experience of witnessing a PowerPoint presentation can feel like a disconnected jumble of thoughts. The slides are rarely arranged in a way that feels logical to the listener, even though we’re given an agenda. They seem to be separate from each other–they don’t often flow like a story–and so they are hard to remember.

Tufte suggests that PowerPoint decks tend to be NOT rigorous enough for scientific and engineering presentations, while being too busy and congested for some other purposes.

For instance, there is no reason why the CEO has to use PowerPoint when speaking about the values and attitudes he hopes to instill in the people who work for the company.

And scientists, engineers, and researchers ought to prepare a thorough and formal report on their work, and then use PowerPoint simpy to summarize their findings and recommndations.

We continue to use PowerPoint in the way that everyone uses it, except we don’t know if the way everyone uses it is optimal for creating clarity and understanding.

Something needs to be done. Huge amounts of time and money go into the creation of PowerPoint decks, and as far as I know, none of us know whether our approach is effective and efficient.

I suspect we can do better.

I recently bought a book called The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley, which begins with a quote from Isaac Asimov.

On March 21, 1949, I attended a lecture given by Linus Pauling… That talk was the best talk by anyone on any subject that I had ever heard…  The talk was more than a talk to me.  It filled me with a desire of my own to become a speaker.

The book belongs on your bookshelf if you deliver scientific presentations, or presentations that report research of any kind.  It provides scores of examples from contemporary and historical scientific presentations to show clearly what makes an oral presentation effective.

What is most intriguing to me is his study proving that the proper use of PowerPoint slides can in fact boost audience comprehension.  Alley calls the most effective use of PowerPoint the “Assertion-Evidence” method. This means that the headline of a slide should be an assertion–a complete sentence–that is proven by the visual or graphical evidence below it.

I know several of my client companies in the consulting business do this, including McKinsey and Health Strategies Group, although the practice is not universally adopted in either firm.  But they are on the right track, according to Alley.  His study demonstrated an 11% boost in audience comprehension with the “Assertion – Evidence” model vs. the standard use of a phrase as the headline–such as “Market Share” or “Toxicity.”

It is time that those of us responsible for communicating ideas and information of strategic importance use PowerPoint in a manner that is based on research, and not on ease of use or corporate culture.

The book is called The Craft of Scientific Presentations.  The author is Michael Alley.  It’s worth owning, if you care about excellence in presenting ideas.

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.

Jerry Tarver, a speech writer and Professor at the University of Richmond, wrote this incisive limerick that skewers those of us who think that, when it comes to PowerPoint slides, “too much ain’t enough.”

Learn the fate of a speaker named Clive,
Whose PowerPoint ate him alive.
His face was last seen
Fading into the screen,
Which entombed him in chart ninety-five.