PowerPoint Rules
By Michael W. McLaughlin
Not long ago I read another diatribe on the evils of Microsoft’s PowerPoint. The ubiquitous presentation software was called to account for its egregious impact on the state of human communication.
Even graphic design guru, Edward Tufte, sternly wags his finger and says that the cognitive style of PowerPoint “profoundly corrupts serious communication.”
Oh, please.
It’s obvious that PowerPoint has evolved into the default method for communicating to groups. Whether it’s a business meeting or a middle school science project, most likely someone is firing up a PowerPoint presentation. In fact, estimates are that audiences sit through 30 million PowerPoint presentations each day around the world.
That’s a lot of slides. After you’ve endured a tedious, slide-laden presentation, it’s easy to blame the software for putting you into a trance.
But the real problem isn’t with the software at all. Blaming software for a poor presentation is like saying you don’t like a painting because the artist used the wrong kind of paint brush. The software, like the artist’s paint brush, is simply one tool for doing a job. What really matters is the speaker’s insights, preparation, and delivery.
Unfortunately, speakers aren’t just leaning on PowerPoint for presentation design ideas, like colors, graphics, and slide layouts. Too many people use one or more of PowerPoint’s canned templates to create their presentation structure and flow. And that can build in limitations. Once you lock into a lame outline for expressing your ideas, it doesn’t matter if you’re Winston Churchill, the audience probably won’t get your message.
One clever person, armed with a standard PowerPoint template, converted Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address into a slide show presentation to demonstrate how easy it is to sap the life from even great oratory. The hilarious rendition of Lincoln’s speech is so painful to read that it’s a chore to get through the short slide deck.
Resist the temptation to apply someone else’s notion of an outline to your best ideas. As you pull together any presentation, don’t trade off clarity for convenience. Find a structure that works best for your ideas, even if it takes longer to prepare than using a stock template.
To guide a client organization from its current state to a desired one is the hallmark of an influential—and, most likely, a successful—consultant. That skill is founded on a consultant’s ability to influence the course of events as a project unfolds. Keeping a project on track while managing the dynamics of a client organization demands a host of skills, including the ability to move clients to action with your words.
Most PowerPoint slides do very little to spur action. Sure, you can display a set of facts on a slide that support your case, or illustrate the imperative for change on a snappy, animated slide. And that information may help swing a client’s mindset to support your call to action. But people follow other people, not bullet points.
What really matters is that you’ve got a compelling, well-articulated, and relevant core message. So, before you click on that PowerPoint icon on your computer, test each idea you plan to present for clarity and precision. Few things will derail your ability to influence a project outcome more than a muddled, disorganized message.
Get your ideas on paper and let your presentation approach emerge after you’ve settled on what you want to communicate. The next time you’re tempted to go straight to PowerPoint for an outline, think about what it did for the Gettysburg address.
A Story Is Worth a Thousand Pictures
Ask a good professional speaker to reveal the secret to high impact presentations, and you’ll hear that telling stories is high on the list, if not at the top. Too many presentations stick simply to facts, conclusions, and recommendations, and fail to connect with the audience in a way that inspires thought and action.
Of course we need facts. After all, our recommendations must be based on something concrete. But the manner in which we communicate our facts and ideas can be enhanced with stories.
In one client meeting, a consultant told an engaging story of how far the client’s employees went to help customers with returned merchandise. The consultant took the audience through an employee’s journey to serve a customer who wanted to return a defective truck tire, and find a replacement.
As the story unfolded, a client executive interrupted and said, “Your story is preposterous. We don’t even sell truck tires!” The room fell into an eerie silence. The consultant excused himself and returned a moment later, rolling the offending truck tire into the conference room, which was properly tagged with the client’s returned merchandise label.
The consultant went on to illustrate how several operational improvements would reduce the cost of managing the client’s growing merchandise returns problem. A generic, bulleted list of findings wouldn’t have come close to creating the impact of that single story and the truck tire.
A well-told story opens the imagination, making us receptive to the power of new ideas. So consider new ways to stir your audience by embedding stories with your facts and recommendations.
Focus on What Matters
In a recent presentation, a speaker began by asking for patience. “I just got a new computer and software, and I’ve used every presentation feature I could master. I hope you’ll bear with me.”
You could hear the collective “uh-oh” from the audience.
What followed was a painful hour of slide fade-outs, animations, and bouncing bullet points. I’m still not sure what I was supposed to take away from that meeting. Like almost everyone, I really want speakers to succeed. It’s painful for both audience and speaker when a presentation bombs. But I expect any speaker to observe rule number one: design for the audience’s enlightenment.
Laying on the special effects, especially if you design them yourself, squanders the precious time it takes to perfect an animated slide show. Immerse yourself in the sparkle, and you’re likely to be tap dancing through the content.
Most audiences would rather listen to a great speech supplemented by shadow puppets than sit through an ill-prepared one with glitzy graphics. So hold those design ideas. Practice your speech, get it just right, and then design your slides—assuming you need them at all. Remember, just because you can use slides doesn’t mean you have to.
The PowerPoint bashers have totally missed the point. Of course, no one wants to sit through a boring, off-the-mark presentation. And it’s hard to argue that most presentations are good. But once we indict a piece of software for causing lackluster speeches, we’ve let ourselves off the hook for the quality of what we deliver from the front of the room.