CHAPTER FOUR
Most people hate doing presentations. And most business presentations are about as interesting as a snail race.
There is only one way to persuade your audience to listen carefully and make decisions: you grab their attention and tell your story. If you don’t, you will lose them.
There are several rules to follow.
The first is to be absolutely clear what your message is and what you want to say. Everything hinges off that.
The next step is to organise it into three sections. First comes the summary of all your points. It’s short, but gives your audience an idea of where you’re going. This allows them to connect the details that follow to the broad overview.
Then comes the main body of the talk, which makes all your points. This is followed by the conclusion, which is the summary again.
This structure is central to all good presentations; it’s the plotline for your story.
When you start, make sure it begins with an attention-grabber. There are two ways you can do this, and it might depend on the talk itself. The first is to pose a question for your audience. It’s totally rhetorical (for example, how many of you had this experience? How did you handle it?), so don’t expect an answer. It just sets the framework for your presentation. Another, and more popular way, is to start off with a joke. The timing here has to be spot on and it can’t be long. Keep it short and to the point. Also, it has to be safe for this particular audience. Practise it many times and try it out on others. If you are going to be funny, get it right. Don’t improvise. If jokes don’t come easily, don’t even try.
Don’t read from notes. You will look like you don’t know the material and you won’t sound convincing. Your posture and tone of voice are completely different from standing there and speaking without notes. Reading is not the same as speaking, and the audience is likely to pay it a different sort of attention. If you want to persuade them, you need to speak from the heart and not from notes. Memorise it.
This will allow you to carry off another trick of the trade of the best speakers. When you are making a point, look at one person. Give them eye contact, but only for a few seconds. Then move on to the next point, and the next audience member. One point, one moment of eye contact.
With your slides, make sure you confine it to one idea per slide. Put little text on the slide — the less the better. If you have a lot of text on the slide, people will be reading it, which means one thing: they won’t be focusing on what you have to say.
Slides need to have short titles. Don’t use small fonts; whatever text you use should have the same structure and font, and use spell check: one spelling mistake can ruin everything. They are more likely to remember that than the content.
Photos, graphic illustrations and animation look good. Pastel backgrounds work better than white backgrounds. Strong colours work well for the important stuff. For less important points, go for the pastels.
Remember, timing is absolutely critical. When you get to an important point, slow it down or even stop so that the information sinks in.
Finish it off with a conclusions slide that has all your main ideas, all the points you want the audience to remember. And remember, this has to be the last slide of all. If you have any more after that, it will undermine your conclusions and the message you are trying to get across.
Listen to the questions carefully, and answer them respectfully. Don’t treat your audience as if it is ignorant, they’ll pick it up. If you don’t know the answer, tell them you will find out and get back to them. Timing is absolutely critical. When you get to an important point, slow it down or even stop so that the information sinks in.
Be enthusiastic. Don’t be afraid of acting your talk: ask rhetorical questions and give flourishes. Don’t assume that the audience remembers everything you have said. The best speakers recap their main points time and time again.
Also do not go over the time limit because it throws the schedule out completely. Even going five minutes over can wreak havoc because the five minutes will be multiplied many times over by the time the event finishes.
When it is time to present, there’s nothing that draws your audience into your presentation more than a good old fashioned smile. Be happy; you’re about to teach everyone attending something they didn’t know before.
So should one use PowerPoint? It’s a program that needs to be treated carefully and is often best avoided.
PowerPoint can have a lot in common with the linguistic fraud of business jargon. Like the worst jargon, it can mislead. Worse still, it can corrupt serious thinking and analysis. It invites listeners to be stupid.
This should be a concern for managers, because successful management is about effective communication. With individuals or groups, in writing or in spoken words, bad communicators make bad managers.
Unfortunately, relying too much on the technology just highlights these shortcomings. Worse still, PowerPoint has a cognitive style that undermines rigorous analysis, facilitates superficial presentation, and allows the mediocre to hide their flaws behind a facade of smooth presentation. Translating Martin Luther King’s famous address, one of the most powerful and eloquent speeches of the 20th century, into PowerPoint shows up the defects of this all-too-standard method of presentation in corporate, academic and government bureaucracies.
King, who was up until 4am on the night before delivery, writing it all in longhand, understood exactly how to use the majesty of spoken words for a cause.
PowerPoint does the exact opposite. King’s spine-tingling and elegiac sweep of language is vaporised.
All we are left with is a series of unconnected bullet points, dashes and parentheses.
Peter Norvig, the director of search quality at Google, produced a similar result when he turned PowerPoint loose on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (www.norvig.com).
Yale professor and graphic designer Edward Tufte calls it PowerPointPhluff. In his savage critique, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Graphics Press, 2003), Tufte says the aim is to “replace serious analysis with chartjunk (lots of graphs, pyramids, lines etc), overproduced layouts, cheerleader logotypes and branding, and corny clip-art”.
In this triumph of form over content, the material is turned into a sales pitch, sliced and diced with inexact pronouncements, catchy slogans and insignificant evidence and overgeneralisations.
It’s just one slide after the other, making it difficult for the listener to understand the context and evaluate causality.
This compressed language of presentation relies heavily on bullet points, tools that reduce complex situations to apparently neat line items. Bullet points might help speakers get themselves organised, but they also dilute information that can be critical to a presentation.
As Tufte points out, it’s all “faux-analytical”.
In a 1998 study in the Harvard Business Review, 3M’s Gordon Shaw and University of Minnesota academics Robert Brown and Philip Bromiley argue that bullets encourage us to be lazy in different ways.
First, they are too generic and ignore specifics. Secondly, they leave critical relationships unspecified and list only three logical relationships: sequence (first to last); priority (least to most important and vice versa) and simple membership (where the items relate to one another in some unstated way).
Because a bullet point list can only display one of these relationships at a time, and because it can’t specify critical relationships among issues, people cannot see the whole picture.
Admittedly, I have seen very good presentations on PowerPoint.
Okay, just one or two, but they were good.
Still, that was because these talks involved a fine speaker with great content.
Actually, these people were so good they did not need slides.
The stuff they had enhanced the presentation; it was not a crutch.
In the end, doing a good presentation has nothing to do with technology like PowerPoint. The technology at best is a crutch but in the end it comes down to delivery and engagement. Follow this chapter’s simple steps and you’ll soon be making compelling presentations that get your message over.