The problem(s) with PowerPoint

I am one of the lucky ones: I never use PowerPoint.

It’s just not my style.

However, after over a decade of teaching communication skills in the corporate world, I understand that in the corporate world? It’s used a lot. It’s expected. And, yes, sometimes it makes life easier and, ok, yes, can actually be useful.

But..

But… but… but… I see PowerPoint being used so painfully-badly so often that if you must use slides, I’d like to offer you some opinionated advice about how to use PowerPoint well.

But first…

Before you boot up the beast, I think we need to start with the problem(s) with PowerPoint.

The problem with PowerPoint is we went to school

And some of us college or university. And we got rewarded for good essays. In fact, a large part of our education was learning how to write essays that got good marks.

And what was the point of essays?

To show what you knew. To dazzle the examiner and allow them to tick the boxes on their scoring sheet that allowed them to say that, yes, you did understand the role of blindness in Shakespeare’s King Lear, or the role of amylase in the digestive process, or the history of Object Oriented programming. Or whatever.

Work is so much like school. There are desks, often in rows. There are people in charge who tell you what to do. It starts in the morning and you have to be there until late afternoon (if you’re lucky!) and you get a lunch break, and, at least here in England, a bit of a break in the morning and a bit of a break in the afternoon. The younger people generally have less prestige that the older people.

You know, school.

But what most people are doing with presentations, and particularly with their slides, is treating presentations like they are essays.

They seem to be using them to demonstrate what they know about the topic, thinking that the more detail there is, the more they are showing mastery of their subject.

WRONG!

The point of a presentation in the corporate world is to get people to take action. We don’t care about how much you know. We want to know how what you’re saying is relevant to us, what you want us to do, why doing it will make our lives better, and, maybe, how we go about doing it.

Even the ‘Project Update’ presentation still shouldn’t be a brain-dump. You might not want people to take direct action today, but you want them to feel a certain way about your project so that, when you DO want them to do something, they feel inclined to do so. That is not achieved by throwing every stat you have at them.

Solution: Structure your presentation not around what you know, but around what your listeners need to know in order to be able and motivated to take action.

The problem with PowerPoint is it makes us feel too certain

One of the major problems with PowerPoint is that one slide follows another.

No, really, that’s a problem.

The world is complex, with many factors contributing to a situation and many factors leading to possible solutions.

PowerPoint can fool us into thinking we have a simple solution to a problem. In fact, it’s very difficult to discuss complex situation using PowerPoint as it channels most presentations into lists of points or ‘Step one… step two… step three… solution’-type formats.

Solution: Well, giving a one-line solution to the problem of complexity seems to be a little ironic. I suppose part of the solution here is to respect complexity and check to see if things are being over-simplified just to make neat slides.

The problem with Powerpoint is it ties us to a sequence

The ideal presentation, in the real world, is one where you can adapt the sequence to the real people in front of you. I worry about deciding in advance exactly how your presentation is going to go – it doesn’t allow for changes on the day.

Solution: There are ways you can make that less of a problem. Blanking the screen when you don’t need it helps. More radically, you can create a deck of possible slides you might need, and then use them in the order that makes the most sense on the day, rather than blindly following an established sequence.

The problem with Powerpoint is we are 98% chimpanzee

What’s the worst Powerpoint sin? That’s right: reading out the slides.

I totally understand where this comes from.

As Scott Berkun talks about, when you give a presentation, your animal nature kicks in because you are (a) in an open space (b) you have no weapon (c) all the animals are looking at you.

Having something  (brightly-lit slides) that makes the animals look away from you can thus only be a reassuring thing.

And when all that adrenalin is running around your body, anything that helps you remember what you’re meant to be saying is bound to be pounced upon.

And that’s one of the big problems.

PowerPoint masquerades as an aid for your listeners, but really it’s so widely used as it serves so many emotional needs for the speaker.

I also sense that often the slides break your connection with the audience – people tend to look at each slide as it changes and, to me, anything that draws the attention away from you is something that decreases your influence.

Possible solutions: Do your preparation so that your nerves are reduced. If you can, put yourself in the middle of the space as you present and the PowerPoint to one side. Tell stories and make things ultra-relevant so people have more of a chance to bond with you. Have separate notes so you don’t have to rely on the slides to remember your points. Have fewer slides so people can focus more on you. Blank the screen when you can. Smile, keep eye contact, be conversational.

The problem with PowerPoint is that we are not designers

Two main failings with most PowerPoint slides produced by us ordinary non-information-design-type people are (1) the ‘design’ we have ‘chosen’ is inefficient at communicating information and (2) they are ugly.

There is a lot of information out there about how to design nice-looking slides (this book and blog by Garr Reynolds], this book by Nancy Duarte, this blog , this book on design…) and even a whole field nicknamed ‘attentionomics’ about how to help people to pay attention to the part of the information you want them to pay attention to.

Thing is, because it’s not (probably) something you do an immense amount of, and (I would imagine) you’re not either a design specialist nor an expert in attention design, designing slides takes an age.

Time I think that would be better spent thinking about the real presentation: the one that happens in the heads of your listeners.

And that’s without the double-edged sword of corporate PowerPoint templates.  (Shudder)

Possible solutions: Make very plain slides. Plan the content and sequence of your points first so you could deliver the presentation without slides. Then set a definite time-limit for creating the slides, so you don’t get carried away with tinkering.

The biggest problem with PowerPoint is that it distracts us from the real presentation

The real work of a presentation is thinking about the people you are talking to, what you want those people able and motivated to do as a result of your presentation, the context of the presentation…

Having said that…

…by definition, the slides are the most visible part of the presentation, especially afterwards.

So. bearing all the above concerns in mind… how do you decide what to put on the slides?

Well… that’s the next article.

 

Other articles you might be interested in:

1. Why the first question you’re asking should be the last question
2. How to reduce your nerves by planning your presentation in the right way
3. How to create an impact like Hans Rosling