Avoiding Death by PowerPoint

Selling ideas

We spend our time selling ideas.  We invest hours persuading people to give time, energy and resources to our projects.  Then we spend more time letting them know how those projects are going.  Ensuring that the all important funding and investment keeps on coming…

The weapon of choice

It doesn’t matter where you work  — with the odd notable exception — the way we sell is with PowerPoint.  It is flexible, easy to use and comes ready installed on every corporate PC.  When you want to bore everybody else in the room, accept no substitute.  Powerpoint is the ubiquitous method for presenting information.

Powerpoint isn’t boring

There is nothing inherently dull about the programme.  But that is a like claiming that guns don’t kill.  In the wrong hands, PowerPoint will suck the life out of an audience.

When did you last sit through a PowerPoint presentation and think, “that was interesting”?

The most riveting people turn into dull automatons in the hands of a PowerPoint deck.  Why is that?

The default setting

The road to tedium starts with PowerPoint’s default setting.  A title and some bullet points.  Unsurprisingly we default to the default setting.  This can be a good thing, (if perhaps the default setting is to opt into a pension, or become an organ donor).  Unfortunately Powerpoint’s default setting is to be dull.

PowerPoint tells us to write titles and bullets.  So we write titles and bullets.  Bullets that become smaller and less intelligible as we add more and more detail.

Most of us have an eye for design (if we didn’t Giorgio Armani wouldn’t be so wealthy).  The default setting looks dreadful.  Instinctively we want to make the slides look more intellectual and professional.  So we add boxes and colours and subheadings.  Making sure that we use all the valuable slide space.

Until we end up with something that looks a lot more like this.

Put yourself on the receiving end

The second a presenter puts up a slide like that an unstoppable series of events unfolds:

• The audience starts to read the words on the slide (that is why the words are there).
• They struggle to understand because the font size is small and hard to read.  The acronyms don’t help.
• They become confused by all the different boxes, where should they start to read?
• The presenter forgets the detail on the slide and starts to panic.
• He turns his back on the audience so he can read it.
• Eye contact is lost.
• The presenter starts to talk.
• The audience tries to concentrate on reading and listening at the same time. (Near impossible).
• They become over loaded with information and lose the plot.
• Boredom sets in.
• The conversation is over.

Tell me it isn’t so…  It is hard to engage with somebody who isn’t even looking at you.

There is a better way

Assertion and evidence

Don’t write titles and bullet points, make assertions and back them up with evidence.

The assertion is the idea you’d like to get into your audiences heads.  Put that in the header.  The evidence is the way you prove the statement.  Put that in the body.

This method has lots of benefits.

• It forces the presenter to be clear about the point he wants to get across.
• It minimises the amount of information on any single slide, giving the audience a chance to keep up.
• The audience will understand the point and decide if they agree with it or not.
• They will say what they think. (Feedback helps understanding.)
• The presenter is far more likely to remember his point and look at the audience.
• He will learn from the audience’s reaction.

Advanced points

If you want to wow your audience, write all your assertions out as a set of sentences and read them back.  If they make sense as a paragraph then you are onto a winner with your presentation.

The Grand prize

Would go to Bill Gates if he changed the default option to:

I don’t suppose that is going to happen anytime soon.

Isn’t it odd that a man can make so much money by making everybody who uses his product look dull?

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Image by Ron