The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

Use the PowerPoint Luke...

The final battle briefing from Star Wars... in PowerPoint. Norvig's Gettysburg Address it ain't, but fun nonetheless.

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Detailed checklists for planning conference presentations

Jessamyn West at librarian.net has some useful checklists for planning conference presentations.

Comics and the Art of Presentation

One insightful way to marry "simplicity of design and complexity of data" is to learn from the art of comics. I have been a fan of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics for about five years now, and I continually find it a source of insights. I first heard about it through a marketing exec at IBM, who told me that Anil Menon, a VP of marketing at IBM, and a one time marketing academic whose work I respect very much, recommended it to all his staff.

Garr Reynolds has a rich post on learning from McCloud here. Reynolds notes the apparent tension between simplicity and complexity, when he shows a "before and after" example of a slide he drew:

In some ways the revised slide on the right is more complex, but from the point of view of its Gestalt, it's more powerful, simple, and easy to grasp quickly.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, though, the ideal for presentation design is to combine both simplicity and complexity on the same slide, to achieve (and I'm now paraphrasing Tufte slightly) simplicity of design and complexity of detail. (The earlier post is here).

The Squint Test: Creating Simplicity of Design and Complexity of Data

Among the many interesting things that Edward Tufte has written about in his four treatises on information display, none is more powerful, to my mind, than his two key elements of graphical design. Tufte writes:

What makes for such graphical elegance? ... Good design has two key elements:

Graphical elegance is often found in simplicity of design and complexity of data.

(p. 177 of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, facing the page that displays Minard's graphic of the Napoleon's Russian march and retreat, which Tufte has made famous).

Simplicity of design and complexity of data. These two elements, it seems to me, are at the heart of everything that Tufte teaches. And I think that the second one - complexity of data - explains much of his dislike for PowerPoint. PowerPoint, used in the usual way, does not encourage complexity of data.

The challenge, of course, is how do you combine simplicity of design with complexity of data? One answer, I think, lies in what designers call the "squint test": when you squint at your page, so that you cannot read any of the text, do you still "get" something about the page?

The layout of your page or slide should communicate, or at least support, the main point of the page. So, for example, if the point of your slide is that you audience is facing two alternatives, why not lay out the page with the two alternatives, one on each side? Squinting at this page, one would see that there were two things placed apparently in opposition to one another. The squint test simulates the very first thing to hit your brain when you see a new page or slide. If the very first thing you see introduces the main point of the page to you, then the rest of the communication will flow easily.

Here's another example. Say you're making the point that a bunch of things are coming together to create a new situation. Lay out the different things that are coming together around the page - in this example, in the four corners of the page - and then put the new situation in the center of the page. The "things" can be represented by pictures or graphics ideally, but even if all you have is bullet points inside each of the squares and the circle, the audience will still get the point that you have a number of things converging towards one thing.

Or if you're explaining how you've screened a number of ideas and selected one. Lay the different screens out across the page, name each, and perhaps list the ideas that were screened out at each stage, and the ones that made it all the way through.

There are potentially an infinite number of layouts. We've developed 36 so far, and I plan to show more of them in a subsequent post. These were inspired by the work of Gene Zelazny in his book Say It With Charts.

Harry Langstaff, in memoriam

Harry Langstaff passed away on September 2, aged 86. Harry was the heart and soul of McKinsey's Introductory Training Program for an unbelievable 30 years, helping to form generation after generation of new consultants in the values of client service and One Firm. Harry was born in India, served in the Royal Artillery, where he rose to the rank of Brigadier, and then joined McKinsey in 1964.

Ian Davis, managing director of McKinsey:

Harry was the first person I met at McKinsey. The impact he made then on me (and I know on so many others for whom he was also their first McKinsey interaction) was remarkable. The searching questions, the clever exploration of your profile and achievements and the probing twinkling eyes that radiated his innate sense of humour and humanity, made a deep impression, both of the man and of the Firm he represented. That initial impression was confirmed over and over and over in the subsequent twenty-seven years that I got to know Harry – the Brigadier – as a colleague, mentor and friend.

May he rest in peace.

A study of the average PowerPoint presentation

How many slides does the average PowerPoint document have? What proportion of them have images on them? Or animation, or transitions? My students will answer this question comprehensively in an upcoming research project that they are running as part of my market research class. As our sample frame, we will use the .com, .org., .edu, and .mil domains on the Internet, and we have developed an approach to gather a large, genuinely random sample of a few hundred PowerPoint files, which we will then analyze. We are planning to execute this later this month (September) and then post the results here.

In the meantime, if any of you have any characteristics that you'd like us to add to the research, let me know, in the form of a comment to this post.

Fear of Public Speaking?

In response to yesterday's post about Prof. Mehrabian's research, Nan Peck emailed me another example of false generalization of research.  She wrote:

The other example is related to speech nervousness. Too many people cite a 1973 Bruskin survey published in David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace's book, The Book of Lists. Bruskin's group asked 3,000 Americans to list their greatest fears. Respondents (41 percent of them) reported that their greatest fear is speaking before a group. This fear was followed by a fear of heights, insects, financial problems, deep water, illness, death, flying, loneliness, and dogs. Unfortunately, Bruskin's report has since been cited as sufficient support that Americans consider public speaking a fate worse than death. Do you imagine that more Americans would rather jump out of an airplane, undergo serious surgery, or spend a month in a prison than give a formal presentation? [By the way, Bruskin's 1973 study also revealed that 20 percent of Americans admit that they have never suffered from stage fright at any point in their lives!]

In 1993, the Bruskin/Goldring Report followed up on this research with a survey asking 1,000 adults "about the things of which nightmares are made..." Again, speaking before a group made the top of the list. But dreams about public speaking, financial problems, heights, and deep water are quite a different matter than reporting what we fear most. [In both surveys, men reported having a greater fear of financial problems than of speaking in public.]

Thanks Nan.  Let's keep debunking these myths. 

Postscript - March 17, 2008: That said, it appears that many people are in fact very afraid of public speaking. So here's a helpful thought.

Doing what you love to whom you love

It is easier to be passionate about your work - and the presentations you make - if you are doing what you love to do. Kathy Sierra has an interesting post about how to redefine success in terms of doing what you want to do.

I recently gave a talk to some new teaching assistants on what works for me as a teacher. I believe that you have to love not only your own subject, but also the art of teaching, and your students themselves. I think this applies to any type of work: love your industry (e.g. software), your function (e.g. marketing), and your clients/customers. In the latter case, sometimes your mind has to lead your feelings here: you have to want to love them first, even if they do not appear to be very loveable initially. But if you care enough about helping them, you will come to love them over time.

I have found that reflecting on these three aspects of my career (what I'm doing, where I'm doing it, and for whom I'm doing it) has paid big dividends over the years. After making a number of mid-course corrections (quitting McKinsey & Co. at age 30 to study theology; returning and then quitting again to do a Ph.D. in marketing and ethics 3 years later), I am now 41 and doing what I love: teaching marketing, consulting to great companies, and spending lots of time with my family.

I won't say it's easy; there some are serious tradeoffs to make. (Paul Graham has some suggestions about how to deal with these). But I think it's worthwhile to spend the time reflecting on what you'd like to do, where you'd like to do it, and for whom.

How do I make boring data interesting?

Last night I heard the young tenor Juan Gambina sing here in Washington DC. It was a small gathering, and so we were able to sit close to him. What caught my attention - in addition to his great voice - were the intensity of his facial expressions, and particularly the range of movement of his eyebrows. I am not trying to contradict yesterday's post, and argue for increasing the importance of body language. Instead I want to suggest that his face and body expressed a passion for the music that was inside him, rather than something he does primarily for effect.

But it's easy to be passionate when your material is inherently fascinating - in this case some of the most beautiful music the world has ever heard. What do you do when you're dealing with boring data?

And the answer - I think - is that the interest is not in the data itself, but in what it allows your audience to do. Every presentation you make should be focused on helping to solve a problem that your audience has. Instead of just presenting some research describing customer preferences, for example, concentrate your presention on explaining how your audience's products aren't currently meeting customer preferences, and what they can do about it. If you're trying to solve a problem for them, then whatever you give them is going to be interesting to them.

93% of communication comes from non-verbal signs... or does it?

Have you heard this one before? "Only 7% of communication comes through words, the rest comes from non-verbal communication: 38% from tone of voice and 55% from body language." Did you ever wonder whether this was actually true? It seems a little extreme: is a wink more effective than hard facts when you're pitching a proposal to some senior executives?

Interestingly enough, the claim is false. As Dale Emery explained some time ago, its origin is in some research published by Albert Mehrabian in the late 1970's and early 1980's. The thing is, Mehrabian's work was focused exclusively on personal communication about feelings of like or dislike: when people are talking to one another about how much they like/dislike each other. In Mehrabian's own words, from his website:

... this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.

Robert Befus provides an indepth analysis of this as part of his Presentation Facts series.

So to apply this finding to every other form of communication, and particularly to business communication, is a gross misrepresentation of the research.

Whenever you hear someone attempt to perpetuate this hoax, set them right.