tellingpeople

Laura Bergells’ Maniactive blog is a load of fun and as full of sensible stuff as you can reasonably expect! I want you to remember that because a lot of this post is going to sound rude (and I’m not being: I really, really like the blog!). I usually end up being pleasantly surprised that I’ve agreed with her too, which helps!

Recently she blogged (ranted? ) about the “Less is more” school of thought with regard to PowerPoint slides. In a sideways swipe at the whole Presentation Zen philosophy, she points out that people are complicated creatures and require both emotion and information in their presentations – and accuses the pictures-not-words approach of several sins (many of which are even real! ).

Unfortunately there’s an irony implicit in the post. Laura doesn’t back her point of view up with any data to support it, just assertions. Shooting in the foot, anyone….?

Note that this doesn’t mean she’s right or wrong – and I happen to largely agree with her point. Personally though, I think she over-states the case by setting up what we’d call in the UK an “Aunt Sally”…… that is, pretending (or assuming) that slides which are visually simple are automatically associated with simplistic presentations. That idea forgets that the slides are less than the whole of the presentation and in a good presentation they’re less than the whole by a long, long way. In reality there’s nothing to say that a simple, clean visual slide with a picture and only one or two words at most isn’t going to be accompanied by erudite, thorough and comprehensive spoken words and/or handouts.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I use Jungian theory a lot when I’m working – particularly the ideas of “Introversion vs Extraversion” and “Sensing vs Intuition”. The latter concept is that some people are orientated around fact, figures and their senses. They like and trust what they can see and feel. Alternatively, Intuitive people (like me) are more orientated around concepts, potential, links and patterns. I’m not good on detail and procedure – about half way down a shopping list I begin to lose the will to live. (If you need/want more information about this, search for MBTI and be prepared for more sites than you can read in a lifetime.)

If you provide all the facts and figures necessary to satisfy those people with a Sensing (detail) preference, you should know there’s a serious risk you’ll bore the hell out of those with an N preference (concepts and patterns). Unless your audience consists entirely of one type of person (and I’ve never known that happen to me!) you’ve got a bit of a problem there as a presenter because you have to present things in two, mutually exclusive, ways.

The research I’ve read (reference to follow when I can find it, honest! ) suggests that presentations aren’t good at providing your audience with detail that they can remember. If you need to give them details (facts and figures) your best medium is what a friend of mine calls “dead tree format” – ink on paper. What presentations are good at however, is allowing the presenter to interpret the data, to explain the data and to get his or her audience excited about the data. The data itself should be in your handouts – the job of the presentation is to get people interested enough to want to read the handouts (if they need to).

As Einstein said: if you really understand something you can explain it to a ten year old. That’s what your presentation should be doing. Those who need to know it at a more ‘data intensive level’ should be signposted to where they can get that. Handouts therefore should not be your slides (and sometimes not even based on your slides!).

I know I could be accused of disliking Windows as an OS (I only use mine for games) and for not liking PowerPoint in particular (not because it’s inherently evil, just because it’s not well written) but it seems to me that this post

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=69720

just about sums up what’s “wrong” with PowerPoint – it’s all in the Microsoft psyche.

Firstly, did we really need that much research to tell us that people who watch presentations online skip bits? Frankly, I suspect not.

More importantly however is the hubris of the conclusions: presenters who are going to be viewed online should change their presentation style to do X, Y Z. Errrr…. no. Sorry guys – or at least not unless the audience is only going to be online.

I’m a strong believer in giving and audience what they need (in the way that they need it) so I’ve got nothing against changin the style of a presentation to suit your audience, but I’m a bit old-fasioned too. I’m old-fasioned enough to think that the audience in front of you, the ones you can smell and who will applaud or not are the ones you should prioritise when it comes to designing your presentation. They’re the ones who’ve made the phsyical effort to be there and listen to what you have to say, after all.

I can see the reasoning behind suggesting that authors put as much structural information into the titles of slides, given that people skip forwards (and perhaps back, too) for online presentations but that’s that kind of information a good presenter should be giving all the time anyway – and frankly the title isn’t the place to do that.

I think I’m probably over-reacting, but it does seem to me that the ‘ethos’ of the approach is sterile and – given that presentations are about people – therefore also futile. Presentations aren’t about words; they’re about influence and effect. If people want the data they can get that afterwards (perhaps in your handouts, for example!)… the job of the presentation is to make people want to do exactly that but the presentation itself is a different matter!

But maybe I’m just suffering a Christmas hangover!

As some of you may have noticed if you’ve evern looked at the Curved Vison homepage (rather than just this blog), you’ll know that Curved Vision is now part of Aware Plus Ltd. Being part of Aware Plus means we can access a much wider range of courses. However, we’re still doing the old things we did and as a special we’re-still-doing-it offer, we’d like to offer the last four places on next Friday’s (19th) public training course at half price!

Can’t say fairer than that!

You can see the full details of the course – pictures and comments etc – on the course website… and if you want to grab one of the four places, drop us a line from that site, or comment here! We’d love to see you there.

Simon

PS: The course is at Blackfriar’s – one of Newcastle’s absolute top restaurants!

Sometimes the medium is the message – or at least close enough to it as to make no difference. Perhaps another way of saying it is ‘It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it’… so perhaps that’s why so many people confuse PowerPointing with Presenting. The fact that I can turn PowerPoint into a verb and you know what I mean should tell you volumes about how ubiquitous it has become as a means of presenting information.

And yet as often as not (if not more!) PowerPoint isn’t the best method for your presentation. For example, when I’m training people I often have to explain what the ‘fight or flight reflex’ is and I give a brief outline of the main hormones involved. I could, of course, have a slide which explained it all, but it’s more useful for people if I use a flipchart at that point – because hormones are organic and seeing me writing is also an organic process… the audience sees the word ‘grow’ as I write each letter out. That fixes things in people’s minds more than a simple click-and-there-it-is slide.

When should you be thinking of using PowerPoint then? Any why do so many people use it when they shouldn’t?

I suspect that much of the answer lies in the sheer ubiquity of PowerPoint as software. The vast majority of people use the versions of Windows that come pre-installed on their computers (which means they tend to think of the Operating System as ‘free’) and the habit of using PowerPoint is subconsciously drawn into the mind along with using Word or Excel. Which of course is exactly why Microsoft do it….

But this goes further than simply, passively making something available – it subconsciously normalises its use. When you add to that the culture of using PowerPoint because everyone else has been normalised in a similar way and you get a self-reinforcing mind set.

There are other reasons for using PowerPoint of course, not all of them valid.

For example people tend to use PowerPoint as a substitute script – reminding them of what they’re going to say. Unfortunately, this leads to bad slides with too much text and not enough imagination. There’s simply no substitute for deciding what you want to say and taking your time to learn how to say it. Reading off a script on the slides (either literally or metaphorically) will simply mean you give such a bad presentation than nine times out of ten, you’ve wasted your time. Worse than wasting your time is that if I’m in your audience, you’ve wasted my time too!

PowerPoint because “it’s expected/demanded/required” seems to be another so-called reason for PowerPointing. Conference organisers often email my clients asking for their presentation to be sent a week or so in advance. (Okay, so it’s good practise to do a technical check well in advance of your actual delivery.) That makes presenters, particularly nervous or inexperienced presenters, feel like if they don’t have a PowerPoint then they’re not presenting properly. They make something up just so that they don’t look too different from everyone else. (I’m not sure who they’re nervous of looking different in front of – the conference organisers or the audience!)

A variation on that theme would be expectations or demands placed on presenters by their boss. Time and time again I see people who have got into the habit of using PowerPoint by default because their boss wanted it. Some, in fact, have even been asked to write the presentation for their boss – by which, he (or she) meant “Create my PowerPoint for me while I do other things”. (As an aside, I’d suggest that except in exceptional circumstances, this can’t be done well because if the PowerPoint slides contain enough information for your boss to deliver it without lots of practice, it almost certainly means that the slides contain too much information for the audience.)

Okay, rant over – there are times when PowerPoint is the way you should be thinking with your presentations. For example, if what you’ve got to say can be said much more effectively by simple, clear visuals. A picture paints a thousand words, as they say. Sometimes that’s not an exaggeration, either!

design them instead.

I find that I’m continually being asked by people for advice on how to write their presentations and almost inevitably these people are wedded to the million-words-per-slide-in-lots-of-bullet-points school. It’s got to the point where I can almost tell who’s going to be of this school of thought when they use the words “write a presentation”.

The very words imply something in people’s head about presentations being wordy.

Good presentations, of course, do contain words – they contain as many words as necessary (but no more!) but I’d like to suggest a wholy different way of thinking about getting your presentation together. Don’t think about writing it at all – think about designing it.

That way you’re more likely to think visually – images and so on – rather than a gazillion words.

It’s a whole different mindset!