That's all pretty solid advice. One thing that was always repeated to us over and over again was:
'Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them'
As in, make sure you give a clear summary at both the beginning and the end of the presentation. Most people have short attention spans and tend to best remember the beginning and end of things.
Make sure you've repeated the main points of your presentation at both the beginning and end to ensure maximum retention.
Don't use slide presentations for business meetings. Ever. Write a document or a memo instead. Every time.
Slides are ok as a backdrop for a talk, as long as that talk works as its own cohesive narrative. Slides are also ok as a last resort if it is what the audience demands. A sales meeting with people who expect slides. Or a pitch with investors too ignorant or lazy to demand the precision of a document instead.
But in general; a document will be much much better. This guide references Tufte's, whose own advice is to write docs.
I see this differently. If I go to a "business meeting" and someone has not taken the time to summarize their message in a succinct presentation, and instead hands me a document, I'd "nope" out of there.
"...too ignorant or lazy to demand the precision of a document instead" Wow. What a statement. How about time constrained?
"I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead" -Mark Twain
The problem is that presentations are not just short documents. I think GP would be fine with a short document.
A presentation is a sequence of slides, along with which comes many issues that prevent critical thought, such as the lack of random access, the lowered bar of evidence, and so on. You can convince anyone of anything as long as you craft your slide deck deviously to hide the lack of evidence and internal inconsistencies.
That is much harder with a document, even if it is short.
I'm strongly in agreement with this, presuming that you have the facts and thinking on "your" side. If you're trying to sell air or otherwise have unavoidably the skinny side of the facts, you are probably better off taking your chances with a flashy presentation than a long-form document (which is much more likely to expose the flaws in your thinking).
As the old aphorism goes: If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.
Completely agree, it's quite shocking that powerpoint still remains the de facto standard of business communication after all these years. I'd been hoping for better presentation tools to emerge, but it seems instead we've dumbed down our communication to suit the tool.
> One way that works well in most situations is to divide the story arc up in Situation, Complication and Solution. [...] I believe the structure was first created, or popularized by McKinsey, who depending on your views, have a core business of turning slides into billion dollar revenue streams.
It's actually the Hegelian dialectic triad (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) from the late 1700s [0].
- Always ask for a copy of a good presentation. You can reuse any visually compelling elements.
- Start with a personal story or an interactive set of questions.
- Think about who your audience is, and why they care. What is in this presentation for them?
- If critical stakeholders are going to review your slides offline, as painful as it is, consider putting all your talking points in the slide and just reading from the deck.
- Smile. Make eye contact. Be excited by what you have to say. Pause... for dramatic effect. Use your hands. Use your hands more.
Advice I was given years ago is 7 plus or minus 2. The average person is purportedly able to grok 7 things simultaneously. Some only 5, others 9 hence the plus or minus 2.
And so I build my deck with that rule in mind -
Never more than 7 slides.
Never more than 7 bullets per slide.
Never more than 7 words per bullet.
Also, if appropriate, I like putting only a single number onto a slide. No title, no explanatory text. An example might be an interest rate.
That allows the audience to listen to what I have to say about that data point. Because we either read a slide, or we listen to the presenter - we cannot do both simultaneously.
Lockdown meetings have taught me to compress presentation to 25 minutes total per week, across my group’s three regular meetings.
It’s fantastic because it obviously helps focus the presentation, but also because it’s nudged me into providing the presentation as a PDF at the start of each netting, Amazon style, with a five minute period in which to read the document.
(This in itself is a nice way of gathering attendees. “Here’s the PDF for the meeting” is much less aggressive than ”friendly reminder we have a meeting rn.”)
My only wish would be that AsciiDoctor / PrawnPDF handled PNGs and Pygments faster. 5s is too slow to build a 3 page memo with graphics!
Don't use sayings, cute phrases, or non-industry jargon. Plain, simple business text works better and you don't run into a possible offensive phrase. Unless you know every phrase that might be offensive, then don't risk it. If you cannot be a compelling writer with just basic language then get help. That's how you learn.
On that note, some organizations (e.g. The US Government) have cycles where words go from good, clued in meanings to bad, evil, outsider meanings. I realize this sounds like some high school clique stuff, but its so damn true. Its actually worse because there are many, many departments, and I'm sure many organizations have their own things. I had an aunt who was a grant writer and kept up with these things by volunteering to be a reader every so often. It kept her in touch with the trends. Now, you can follow other companies / governments social media accounts, request for proposals, and press releases for the phrasing you should use when presenting to them.
These days, unless it is organization photos, I really try to not have any people in my slides. I just don't think its worth it because you will offend someone. It might seem paranoid, but I really believe social media makes a lot of people from all sides overanalyze everything.
> On that note, some organizations (e.g. The US Government) have cycles where words go from good, clued in meanings to bad, evil, outsider meanings.
Quick anecdote: I remember the day when "Information Assurance" was out and "Cybersecurity" was in. Took a few years for it to fully propogate in policies and org names... but it did.
They don't even really have the same meaning, but nevertheless... we all had to Find-and-Replace.
I have seen this in the corporate environment just as much. It becomes somewhat clear after senior leadership changes: after a few months you will hear others use words that were previously only used by the new incoming leader.
It's not necessarily linked to what is "hot" right now. For example, I have observed German colleagues copy Italian phrasing in english.
It becomes somewhat clear after senior leadership changes: after a few months you will hear others use words that were previously only used by the new incoming leader.
Although this isn't always a good thing.
After a UK company I worked for was taken over by a US company, we started to get these nauseating "all hands" propaganda calls, hosted by the senior executives. The rank and file staff were indeed later using words previously used only by the incoming leader: they were the butt of just about every office joke for weeks, and demonstrated the raw contempt that the people doing the real work had for the empty rhetoric the executives delighted in making us all sit through.
Maybe it was some 4D chess thing intended to boost morale after the takeover. Yes, I'm sure that was it. :-)
1) make the presentation interesting to sit through
2) have something that you are convincing the audience to do, you should be telling them to "do X" not just tell them "about X".
Whether you have page numbers (I don't) or builds (I do) or executive summaries (I don't) is not going to meaningfully add to the chances of your presentation landing.
Structure is key. The "Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em; then tell ’em; then tell ’em what you told ’em"[1] method works well.
The Duarte Method's[2] "Big Idea"[3] is a good approach:
> A big idea is that one key message you want to communicate. It contains the impetus that compels the audience to set a new course with a new compass heading.
Presentations without a key message are just somebody standing there and talking at you.
Your audience isn't going to be giving you their full attention while you walk them through Phase 1, because they've trying to understand the whole process think through it themselves.
Instead a build would use animations or duplicated slides to present this flow:
Now you are controlling the visibility of each step. It's very quick to author: create one slide, duplicate it twice, delete content off those two slides.
The slides should be there to reinforce your point. You shouldn't be showing a slide and then reading over the content.
It's one reason that some of my decks have a lot of slides, some may only be shown for 5-15 seconds.
Working in consulting, I have a similar list of lessons learned from where I could feel I had lost control of the meeting, or the clients attention, or both.
The biggest one I have fits around 9 and 10. No numbers until the end. As in don't show data, tables, (a group of) numbers, graphs etc. until you are ready to cede the floor.
As soon as numbers appear, people's brains start analyzing and trying to make sense of what they are seeing, naturally this can/will lead to an inordinate amount of time discussing provenance, methodology and other associated aspects, or silent thinking i.e. not listening to your analysis.
Of course this doesn't apply to every type of meeting, but I always ensure I get everything else in up front first. Leave the detail in the back, don't bury the lead.
“Invariably” is an uncommon word to be honest. Also “nature” in this context is uncommon as well. Kind of archaic. It’s pompous because it uses a whole bunch of words to say nothing. Use of the active voice instead of passive voice would have helped as well. Add in unnecessary words such as ”ergo”, a frilly web font, and people assume the author just wants to show off.
I've another one, especially when dealing with managers who say "can you put this into no more than X slides?" when the subject matter is complex:
If you're trying to diagrammatically convey something complex on your slide, make the order of reading obvious. When the information is 2-dimensional, readers will zig-zag across the slide trying to make sense and then give up until you walk them through it. If there is a linear order (numbering, arrows), they'll follow it.
I'd go even more drastic here, don't use words or only use nothing more than a few words in very very big font. The rest should be just data, visuals helping you to get to your point.
And don't make presentations to be hands-out. You can't serve both purposes at the same time.
Animations and transitions are very easy to abuse for sure, yet I've also seen them used very effectively in delivering a message. (Just was in a data presentation today where, without the animation, would have been very hard to grasp.)
Very good. All of that makes sense to me. Well almost
Can't make heads or tails out of point 12 though. Who's including homework (??) in slides and making some assumption about it? Very "failed to communicate" meta.
I believe point 12 advises to avoid slides that try to impress by obscure complexity.
An offending example might be a slide showing complicated equations that remain unexplained by the presenter. I've observed many presentations where such slides are introduced as "this is the equation used to derive value X from earlier, but I am just going to move on to the next slide..."
I would add "do not use fancy ligatures or loud typography". I just read the web page and you know what stuck in my mind the most? The fancy R's and K's. Also I kept waiting for a Q.
Wanted to change the typography myself as well, but didn’t want that to be an excuse for not writing. Thanks, the next version of the blog will be simpler!
I was annoyed by this as well, but the author appears to not be a native English speaker, so I withdrew my objections. Much better job than I’d do in German, which is the only other language I know to any degree.
Author here: late night writing, wanted to push it out. Was expecting it to be ignored completely on the internet. Editing today — real good feedback here. Thanks!
The first image, of people having a meeting, is stolen. It has a link saying "Image Attribution" (which should really say the name of the attributee) which goes to the Flickr account of some random portrait photographer who doesn't seem to specialize in anodyne stock photos at all.
It's very frustrating for hard working stock photographers who already only get 20% of the sale price to see Flickr enabling copyright violations by displaying images as Creative Commons when an algorithmic search of the two most popular stock photo sites shows it is not original.
Years ago I knew a pro photographer who loved getting ripped off, because he made more money than if he’d licensed his images. How? He just had his lawyer send a friendly letter to the offending party.
Thank you. I would suggest changing your "Image Attribution" text to actually say the name of the person or organization you're attributing to. Right now it's just a link which is less valuable to photographers than having their name written out (yet takes about the same space), and is subject to link rot as seen on another one of your posts: http://www.jilles.net/perma/2014/10/03/introducing-graphite-...
The embedded Corbis watermark is an issue. That said the fact Getty is selling an image isn’t proof in itself that can not be freely used. They regularly “license” works that have made freely available by the creators.
Sorry, TinEye links expire very quickly! Rather than posting another link which will expire again, I'll just give you the direct link to the image from Flickr: https://live.staticflickr.com/5519/14565350736_09ac87154b_o_... - put that into TinEye and you should see 600+ results, some dating to 2013, a year before it was uploaded to Flickr.
So instead of “tire wear vs miles driven” it should say “tire wear increases with miles driven”
It saves people, especially non-technical ones, from having to read axes, look at the lines, and come to a conclusion while listening to you talk.