The prob­lem with Pow­er­Point is that it makes it so easy to bore your audi­ence to death. (Been there, done that…)

We all know the seduc­tive ease of cre­at­ing a new pre­sen­ta­tion: set­ting up a dozen slides with titles, and then fill­ing in the slides with end­less bul­let points.

It’s Too Easy to be Boring

The beauty of this approach is that you don’t have to remem­ber the details of your mes­sage: if you can see the screen, you just read what’s on your slides. This prac­tice is all-too com­mon when the peo­ple who cre­ate and those who present the slide decks are dif­fer­ent.

But it’s deadly for your audi­ence when you add noth­ing fresh beyond what appears on the slides.

Accord­ing to pre­sen­ta­tion gurus, this is absolutely the wrong approach for design­ing and deliv­er­ing slide decks. Wrong, that is, if you care about get­ting your point across — and being remem­bered for what you say or believe.

I can just hear my hus­band’s rebut­tal: in today’s hyper-busy busi­ness world, there’s no alter­na­tive to decks full of bul­let-point slides. What else, after all, can you do when cre­at­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion due later today while watch­ing yet another yad­dah-yad­dah webi­nar or attend­ing an all-hands audio con­fer­ence?

My counter-argu­ment: if pre­sen­ta­tions were more clear and mem­o­rable for peo­ple in the audi­ence, per­haps we would­n’t waste our time in so many unpro­duc­tive meet­ings or webi­nars.

What People Do Better Than Machines

As pre­sen­ta­tion guru Garr Reynolds writes in Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen, 

Remem­ber that we are liv­ing in a time when fun­da­men­tal human tal­ents are in great demand. Any­one — indeed any machine — can read a list of fea­tures or give a stream of facts to an audi­ence. That’s not what we need or want. What we yearn for is to lis­ten to an intel­li­gent and evoca­tive — per­haps at times even provoca­tive — human being who teaches us, or inspires us, or who stim­u­lates us with knowl­edge plus mean­ing, con­text, and emo­tion in a way that is mem­o­rable.

Although this point is often for­got­ten (espe­cially in high-tech prod­uct mar­ket­ing cir­cles), Garr Reynolds reminds us that:

Pre­sen­ta­tions are not just about fol­low­ing a for­mula for trans­fer­ring facts in your head [or the prod­uct man­ager’s head — ed. note] to the heads of those sit­ting before you by recit­ing a list of points on a slide. (If it were, why not send an email and can­cel the pre­sen­ta­tion?) What peo­ple want is fun­da­men­tally more human. They want to hear “the story” of your facts.

In Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen Reynolds offers numer­ous exam­ples of visu­ally stun­ning and mem­o­rable slides, clearly designed by peo­ple with a visual eye and a knack for sto­ry­telling. He also lays out a set of prin­ci­ples for design­ing slides when you aspire to sim­i­lar zen-like sim­plic­ity and mem­o­ra­bil­ity.

If you fol­low Reynolds’ prin­ci­ples (and license stock imagery from Getty, Cor­bis or iStock​photo​.com), you too can pro­duce more mem­o­rable slide decks.

This assumes you have a clear story to tell, have clar­i­fied what you want to say, and under­stand how best to get your points across to your audi­ence.

Back in the Real World…

Peo­ple who mar­ket high-tech prod­ucts are among the least likely to prac­tice the prin­ci­ples of “pre­sen­ta­tion zen.” Think about all those prod­uct man­agers — peo­ple who are paid to ago­nize over and fight for all the gory details of their prod­ucts. After all their effort get­ting the prod­uct ready for the mar­ket, they want you to appre­ci­ate all those details too. Point by point, slide by slide. Stack dia­gram after stack dia­gram.

Sixty-seven slides later, what do you remem­ber of the pre­sen­ta­tion? Can you remem­ber any­thing the next day?

The Best of Both

If you lack design­erly skills to cre­ate visu­ally stun­ning pre­sen­ta­tions, what’s the alter­na­tive (besides hir­ing a designer)?

I’ve blogged about the power of visual think­ing, and have rec­om­mended a book by Dan Roam, Back of the Nap­kin: Solv­ing Prob­lems and Sell­ing Ideas with Pic­tures. This is a great resource for busi­ness peo­ple (and teach­ers).

This book can help you learn how to think through and then con­vey com­plex sit­u­a­tions through the power of sim­ple visu­als. Through­out his book Dan Roam uses sim­ple, car­toon-like sketches to illus­trate his points (as he does here on his com­pa­ny’s web site).

I think the approach that Dan Roam teaches offers won­der­ful pos­si­bil­i­ties for help­ing you crys­tal­lize your think­ing and share your ideas — and how you got there — with oth­ers in very pow­er­ful ways. But some peo­ple might find his visual style too casual…

For sit­u­a­tions that require more for­mal­ity or visual ele­gance, the best of both approaches is to:

• apply Roam’s frame­work for think­ing through the chal­lenges and your com­mu­ni­ca­tions options, and
• design the pre­sen­ta­tion (and your voice-over com­men­tary) with the help of the prin­ci­ples out­lined in Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen.

In a nut­shell Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen explains that what makes mes­sages mem­o­rable is some com­bi­na­tion of:

• sim­plic­ity
• unex­pect­ed­ness
• con­crete­ness
• cred­i­bil­ity
• emo­tions
• sto­ries

I wish I had learned these prin­ci­ples back in school — or at least, much ear­lier in my career!

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