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The Secret of Healthcare Reform — Visualized

October 8, 2009 •

As this slideshow from Dan Roam reveals, the health­care reform debate is really a debate over insur­ance reform: who pays for health­care. His slideshow dra­ma­tizes who the play­ers are in this debate, what are their moti­va­tions, and how this impacts the Amer­i­can con­sumer (and tax payer).

This is the best resource I’ve seen to help clar­ify the dimen­sions of the debate and what’s at stake. Its clar­ity is due to Dan Roam’s mas­tery of visual think­ing as a means to orga­nize and focus the key aspects of com­plex top­ics and then com­mu­ni­cate those insights in a sim­ple and straight­for­ward man­ner that is eas­ily grasped. As I wrote a year ago, I loved Roam’s book on visual think­ing, The Back of the Nap­kin: Solv­ing Prob­lems and Sell­ing Ideas with Pic­tures. This slideshow is a great exam­ple of the power of visual think­ing.

Health­care Nap­kins All
View more doc­u­ments from Dan Roam.

This debate mat­ters to me because I own a small busi­ness and there are no good, afford­able alter­na­tives for small busi­nesses. I hope that this slideshow helps to illu­mi­nate the issues, and help the gov­ern­ment reach a con­sen­sus that serves the con­sumer and tax payer, with­out con­tin­u­ing to enrich the pri­vate insur­ers at the expense of the con­sumer (which is the sta­tus quo).

Just the Facts, Ma’am — Wrong!

April 9, 2008 •

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.

Bored-with-meeting

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,  Presentation Zen book

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)?Back of the Napkin book

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 Simple-visualssite).

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!

For Your Bookshelves

The Power of Clarity

April 8, 2008 •

At some point in most con­sult­ing engage­ments, some­one will ask, “Is every­one else as screwed up as we are?” The answer, of course, is yes. Most con­sul­tants’ busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties are cre­ated by their clients’ inabil­ity to solve (or com­mu­ni­cate) vex­ing prob­lems or chal­lenges.

And now there’s a decep­tively sim­ple busi­ness book that can help you become less depen­dent upon con­sul­tants’ help, if you learn how to apply visual think­ing to prob­lem solv­ing and group com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Image of

This book is writ­ten espe­cially for peo­ple like me and you who think they can’t draw. It focuses on help­ing you see dif­fer­ently, explore and think things through visu­ally, and then con­vey the insights you develop by this visual think­ing tech­nique.

In its own way, this is a prac­ti­cal guide for peo­ple who want to “Think Dif­fer­ent.”

Simply Powerful

Besides its charm­ing stick-fig­ure sketches, the secret to The Back of the Nap­kin is its sim­ple but pow­er­ful frame­work and the expla­na­tions on how to apply this frame­work to real-world prob­lems:

  • “see­ing” prob­lems in terms of the clas­sic 6 W’s: who, what, when, where, how and why;
  • explor­ing what’s most impor­tant to under­stand and then con­vey — for you as prob­lem solvers, and for your audi­ence (or the peo­ple you’re try­ing to con­vince) — via 5 key dimen­sions the author calls “SQVID”;
  • dis­cov­er­ing insights or fresh alter­na­tives through the pat­terns that emerge from your visual com­bi­na­tions;
  • and then apply­ing the best com­mu­ni­ca­tions approach given the audi­ence and your objec­tives.

As evi­dence for the power of his frame­work, the book’s author, Dan Roam, cites sci­en­tific research that reveals the brain is “hard-wired” for fast pro­cess­ing in response to the 6 W’s, when infor­ma­tion is con­veyed visu­ally.

As an anti­dote to “death by Pow­er­Point,” I highly rec­om­mend The Back of the Nap­kin: Solv­ing Prob­lems and Sell­ing Ideas with Pic­tures, by Dan Roam.

[Read more…]

About This Blog

Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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