Up Your Game and Give a Great Presentation
You’ve been there. You’re sitting in a meeting room, and a presenter gets up and announces that he has 72 slides to get through in 45 minutes. A collective groan ensues. You know that you’re in for an interminable 45 minutes.
Presentation software has taken over our corporate lives. In the before times, internal presentations rarely included anything more than a flip chart or whiteboard. If your presentation called for something more formal, you would have slides made. Your slides would have to be designed by a vendor or an internal group. It was a time-consuming and costly process that did not allow for multiple revisions or edits. This made people judicious when it came to their use of slides.
By the late 1990s, PowerPoint and portable projectors became common office technology. Thus began the era of Death by PowerPoint. Nowadays, the missive “We need a deck” means that the creator of said deck can expect to spend hours making 3D exploding pie charts, timing slide transitions, and even setting the presentation to music. It is out of control.
You don’t need a slide for your every thought. In fact, the more slides you have, the more disengaged your audience will be. What you need to focus on to build a great presentation is the story. Conceptualizing and framing what you want to say is vital to preparing your presentation.
We all know humans are wired to listen to stories, and metaphors abound for the narrative structures that best engage people. If you frame the presentation as a journey, the biggest decisions are figuring out where to start and where to end. To find the right place to start, consider what the audience already knows about your subject and how much they care about it. If you assume they have more knowledge or interest than they do, or if you start using jargon or get too technical, you’ll lose them. The most engaging speakers do a superb job of quickly introducing the topic, explaining why they care so deeply about it, and convincing the audience members that they should, too.
The biggest problem with most presentations is that they try to cover too much ground. If you try to cram in every detail, your narrative will disappear into abstract language that will alienate your audience. Limit the scope of your presentation to what can be explained through examples.
For any presentation, regardless of length, limit your number of slides. Ensure the slides are succinct and crisp. While exploding charts and flashy transitions can look cool, they do nothing to add to the content of your presentation and only serve as distractions. Audiences do not respond well to or remember much when they are overloaded with information on a screen. Assume your audience is intelligent. Let them figure some things out for themselves. Let them draw their own conclusions. Focus on what is important, which is the journey you take your audience on.