Many companies are addicted to Powerpoint. Yes, addicted. Whether for internal or external audiences
meetings revolve around passing the projector cable back and forth so “speakers”
can show their slides. How many of us
have asked the question, “can I get a copy of the slides?” Similarly, how many people will read even a
two page WORD document, unless it’s a list of bullets?
As stated in a previous post, ADD (Attention Deficit
Disorder) is a global phenomenon. That’s
not going to change and will likely accelerate.
Hence the need to think in term of the billboard metaphor also stated in
a previous post.
The problem is not with Powerpoint itself, it’s with the
slide creators. Powerpoint is quite
powerful and overtime has eliminated the need for Photoshop for many simple
functions. There are many issues
affecting the quality of a slide and of the presentation. Time being a main issue. To create truly amazing slides takes a lot of
time to both learn the software and to create each individual slide. A large company I worked for would outsource
the actual slide creation. This would
cost upwards of $5000 per slide! Yes per
slide. The slides were truly amazing. Yet, the average .PPT file grew from 5Mbytes
to 20Mbytes in 5 years.
Another main issue is the purpose of the presentation is
often forgotten. The art of storytelling
is becoming a lost art. With the above
noted slides being “so good” people would naturally reuse them. Their presentation would then be made up of
beautiful slides from a number of presentations. The problem being that there was enormous
amount of redundancy from slides to slide.
For example, slide 1 would make points A, B and C. Slide 2 would make points B, C and D. Slide 3 would make points C, D and E,
etc. Since the slides were so good and complex no one
would want to alter them. The result were long presentations that
wandered making the story line hard to follow and comprehend.
How many have seen the following slide deck:
Slide 1: Logo, title,
name and date
Slide 2: Overview of company and/or presenter
Slide 3:
If you have, you know you immediately experienced shock and
awe. Here the presenter didn't follow
the basic rules of storytelling. There was no lead in or build up to the punch
line. How many jokes are funny if you
only tell the punch line? Presenters
need to understand that while you have prepared for the meeting your audience hasn't. They've come from another
meeting or another activity and need to be grounded in your discussion. If they don’t understand or don’t know the joke
they certainly won’t get the punch line.
The lemma to this problem is when the presenter spends too
much time building up the punch line.
Slide after slide of “market data”, “industry trends” and other “look
how smart I am” slides will quickly have your audience checking their
email. It’s true to assume that your
audience doesn't know the subject as well as you do, but don’t assume they’re
complete moron’s either.
Two last points for this post. One, does anyone actually care about the number
of slides? Some slides may only be on
the screen for 10 seconds as a segue or for re-grounding. Some slide may be on the screen for 10
minutes to illustrate (simply I hope) a complex concept. It’s
about telling a story.
Two, how often do you linearly deliver a slide show from
start to finish in a lecture mode. Yes, there are time such as when giving an actual lecture or presenting at a conference. However, many times your slides are there to
stimulate a conversation. A really good
slide regardless of the visual quality could be one that you leave on the
screen for 30 minutes and use as a reference.
Presenters, learn to "zig and zag".
Know your slides well enough where you can jump back and forward to keep
the conversation flowing. Combine that
with good meeting management skills and you will rock.
Give me a shout if you'd like to discuss.
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