The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

Deadly mistakes #s 5 to 7

Here are the final three mistakes in the Seven Deadly Mistakes Presenters Make series:

Mistake #5. Presenting your information in the order that makes most sense to you.
Typically, presenters put their material into some kind of logical order, an order that makes sense—to them. For example: background, opportunity, strategic imperative, competitive environment, financial implications, human resource implications, etc., etc. Boring. Begin your presentation with a pressing problem that your audience has (see Mistake #2) and then tell them your proposed solution. Here’s the important part: to decide where to go next, ask yourself: “If I were to stop right here, what is the first question that would come from the audience?” That will tell you what your next slide should say. Design that slide, and then repeat the question. This way you will progressively design a presentation sequenced in the way your audience wants to hear it, not in some arbitrary order that seems to make sense to you.

Mistake #6. Using color, sound, and clipart to make your presentation look professional.
Adding all the embellishment that PowerPoint allows you to may make you feel more professional, but it harms your communication. The research is unambiguous here also: any added color, sound, or image that does not directly reinforce the specific message on your slide will distract your audience from that message. Animated slide transitions, in particular, are almost universally destructive.

Mistake #7. Using your slides as prompts
Perhaps the very worst example of developing a presentation for the benefit of the presenter rather than for the audience is the use of slides to prompt the speaker. You’ve seen this kind of presentation: slide after slide of bullet points, so that the poor presenter won’t forget what he intended to say. Yet extensive research confirms that when you project slides filled with bullet points while speaking at the same time, your bullets and your voice compete with each other, with the result that your communication effectiveness is worse than either if you projected your slides and asked your audience to read them (while you keep quiet) or if you spoke without any slides at all. If you are going to use visuals, make sure that they support, rather that vie with, your spoken comments. One way to do this is to use more graphics and less text (several research studies conclude that while voice and text compete with each other, voice and graphics reinforce each other). Another way is to ensure that every slide you design passes the “squint test”: if you squint at the slide, so that none of the text is legible, the layout of the slide alone should communicate or at least reinforce the main point of the slide.

If you want your audience to listen to you and act on what you say, then every aspect of your presentation should focus on them and serve their needs.

Good Ballroom style presentations - Presentation Zen

A couple of days ago I mentioned the important distinction between Conference Room and Ballroom style presentations. This blog is mostly about Conference Room style presentations - presentations of complex information to smaller audiences, with the purpose of getting the audience to act on your information. For Ballroom style presentations (for sharing information with larger audiences), in my workshops I have been recommending Garr Reynolds' blog Presentation Zen, and now his excellent new book.

Presentation lessons from the art of Edward Hopper

I had the pleasure of viewing the Edward Hopper exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC this past weekend.  Hopper is best known for "Nighthawks," posters of which were apparently almost ubiquitous in college dorms at one point. 

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942.  Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

What struck me is Hopper's use of both Drama and (Relevant) Detail.  Look at almost any picture and it makes you want to ask "what is going on there?"  The drama - the story - is a big part of the appeal of his paintings. 

   

Edward Hopper, Two on the Aisle, 1927.

My four year old son--who is more at home climbing trees than visiting art galleries--pointed to Two on the Aisle and asked "Dad, what do you think is going to come on when the curtain opens?"  Even a child is drawn in by the drama. 

The other lesson from Hopper is his use of relevant detail.  His paintings contain all the detail they need to draw us into the story--and no more.  He is not afraid of detail, of making his paintings seem "too busy."  But neither does he paint in any irrelevant detail.  My brother, who was also with us and is himself an artist, tells me that this is because Hopper drew sketches on site and painted in his studio, so in his studio he could only paint the detail that he captured in his sketches, and nothing more. No matter the reason, the lesson is a good one for presentation slides--enough detail to draw in your audience and tell the story, and no more.

Ballroom vs. Conference Room Style Presentations

Two years ago I blogged on the importance of presentation idiom, and on the two main presentation idioms, Ballroom style and Conference room style. I think the difference between the two styles is critically important and not well understood, so I am repeating that post here, with some minor edits.

Each presentation situation calls for a particular presentation idiom—a form of expression and a set of design principles. Contrary to the popular complaint, the problem with PowerPoint™ is not that it forces you to design a presentation in a particular way. On the contrary, it doesn’t. And that's the problem: PowerPoint allows you to mix design elements from different idioms, which, I believe, accounts for much of the ugliness and ineffectiveness of most presentations.

There are two fundamental presentation idioms, which I call Ballroom style and Conference Room style. The Ballroom style presentation is what most typical PowerPoint presentations are trying to be: colorful, vibrant, attention-grabbing, and (sometimes) noisy. They typically take place in a large, dark room such as a hotel ballroom.

The Conference Room style presentation is much more understated: less use of color, more details on each page, printed rather than projected, and more suited to your average corporate meeting or conference room.

Ballroom style presentations should be used when the objective is to inform, impress and/or entertain the audience. The information flow in a Ballroom style presentation is primarily one-way, from presenter to audience. This style is appropriate for audience sizes from a few dozen people to several thousand.

The look that you are trying to achieve with Ballroom style is that of the evening news: visually rich and thoroughly professional. To do this, you will want to project your presentation rather than hand it out, so that you can make extensive (but always appropriate) use of color, animation, and sound. (Color, animation or sound is appropriate when it is used to convey or emphasize information; it is inappropriate and should be ruthlessly eliminated when it serves only to embellish or distract). The length of a Ballroom style presentation should be approximately 1 slide per minute of presentation.

Conference Room presentations are more suited to meetings where the objective is to engage and persuade your audience and change their behavior. Information flow in this idiom is expected to be two-way, and this style is therefore more suited to meetings with smaller numbers of people, say two to 25. They can be used with larger audiences, though: I have used this idiom to support an interactive conversation with as many as 80 people in an amphitheatre-style classroom, or 200 people on a teleconference.

A conference room presentation should look more like an architectural drawing than something you’d see on television, and it is best delivered on paper. Paper has the advantage of allowing much greater resolution and therefore more information on each page; you can use font sizes as small as 9 point without difficulty, whereas in Ballroom style 24-point is usually the minimum safe size. More information on each page also facilitates more productive conversations, because it helps avoid the “turn back 2 slides – no, 3, what was that point there?”-type of confusion since all the information for the discussion of the moment is right in front of everyone on a single page. Paper delivery also allows people to write on the presentation, so that they can engage with your content better and communicate back to you any suggested changes. Also—as Edward Tufte notes—it sends a message that you are confident in your content, because you are allowing your audience to walk away with it. Because Conference room style presentations contain so much more detail on each page, they tend to have significantly less pages – from about 12 to as few as 1 page per hour of meeting time.

Mixing idioms – like mixing metaphors – is a recipe for confusion and deficient communication. Understanding when to use Ballroom style and when to use Conference room style, recognizing which elements are proper to each idiom, and never confounding the two, will lead to clearer, more attractive, and more effective presentations.

Feedback Requested: Business, Government, and Military Problem-solving hierarchies

I am working on a book on the Extreme Presentation method of presentation design. In fact most of the writing is done. But there is a piece that I am still wrestling with. Part of the Extreme Presentation method involves understanding what problem your audience has that your presentation will focus on. For business audiences I use the Business Problem-solving Hierarchy to help identify the audience problem. You start at the top of the diagram, with the most general problem (which for business is basically inadequate returns: not making enough money on our investment) and then work your way down the tree until you find the specific problem that is most relevant to your audience. Is the problem with investment levels, or profit levels? If the latter, is this because sales are too low, or costs too high? And so on. Here's the Business Problem-solving Hierarchy:

So far so good. But one of the reviewers of the book manuscript has suggested that it would be good to provide similar hierarchies for non-business situations, namely government or other not-for-profit, and military. So here, with the help of friends in the Pentagon and the Federal Government, are preliminary drafts of Government/Not-for-profit and Military Problem-solving Hierarchies. (Click on each image to see a larger version; pdfs are at the bottom of this post).

I am very interested in receiving feedback on these two. If you current work in Government, Not-for-profit, or the Military, let me know:

- Is this how you think about problem-solving?
- Are the structure and terminology right?
- What would you add, change, or delete?

You can reply by commenting on this post, or by emailing me directly: a.v.abela(at)gmail.com.

Thank you for your help.

And here are pdf versions of each:

Download Business.pdf

Download GovernmentNFP.pdf

Download Military.pdf

Deadly mistakes presenters make, 3 and 4

Some more details on the seven deadly mistakes presenters make:

Mistake #3. Focusing on what you want from your audience.

Most of the time, you deliver a presentation because you want something from your audience. You are selling a product, an idea, or a new set of skills; why else would you go through the bother of writing and delivering a presentation unless you wanted something from your audience? But that’s your motivation for being there, not theirs. What is their motivation for listening to you? The only reason your audience is listening to you is that they are hoping for some information that will help them do something better or solve one of the many problems they are facing in life. If you want to capture and keep their attention, focus your entire presentation deliberately and undividedly on solving an important problem of theirs.

Mistake #4. Only including evidence that supports your recommendation.

It is tempting to include only facts and arguments that support your case in your presentation, because you want to strengthen your case, not weaken it. However, all the empirical research confirms that audiences will find you more credible—and more convincing—if you also include the arguments against your recommendation (and then carefully rebut each one of them.) Lawyers call this “stealing thunder”: if you bring up an objection first, that objection has far less force than if someone in your audience does.

Good presentation examples and resources

Meryl Evans posted a long list of good presentation examples and resources