Better Presentations

Good Books: (via Emergic) Cliff Atkinson book Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire. is about how to improve presentations using PowerPoint. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and reviews. I really learned a lot.

Here is one of Cliff Atkinson’s blog posts entitled Center of Gravity:
Whenever I look at a PowerPoint presentation for the first time, I go to Slide Sorter view to get the lay of the land: Can I see a clear story across the entire experience? Then I'll shift to Notes Page view: Are the projected visuals and spoken words planned together? And last I'll go to Normal view: Can I easily understand the main idea of this slide?

It's usually the case that the answer is No to all three questions. More often than not, the presentations are very difficult to understand, packed with more text and data than anyone's cognitive ability can process; and little if any narrative structure. What I commonly find is that any single presentation is actually multiple presentations that are yearning to be liberated. Where we might try to load up the slides to save time by creating a one-size-fits-all presentation, we actually end up with a situation where one-size-confuses-all. One solution to the problem is the discipline of completing Act I of your story template. When you write the statements that form the headlines of the first five slides, you are making purposeful decisions that will sort, distill and structure information in a way that makes sense to your specific audience.

Franz Dill of IFTF Future Now writes:
Atkinson's approach is very nicely tailored for important, complex presentations. His model is that of telling a story ... storyboard it, use minimal text (no bullets), engage the audience. He picks a board presentation scenario and goes through it in some detail. Very thoughtfully done. I also like the fact that he covers other parts of the process ... how you present the slides, pacing, and how to tailor it for later emailing to people that could not attend, now a very common situation. I have been saving presentations for reference for some time, and am often amazed at how incomprehensible a slideshow can become. In fact the latter situation has often made me use more text and slide detail than I would otherwise.

Lars Bergstrom adds in a review on Amazon: I believe that the book's greater contribution is pointing out that most people structure presentations as a dump of data rather than taking into account their audience and the goal of their presentation -- why are people there? What do you want them to do or believe after you're done presenting? Even if you disagree with Cliff's convincing points on removing bullets from your decks, you should take to heart his framework for developing concepts and decks.

Cliff Atkinson said in an interview with Management Consulting News:
When we start talking about text on a slide, it’s important to begin by affirming the research: presenting text that is identical to narration actually harms the ability of the audience to understand. Removing the text from the screen improves the ability of the audience to retain the information by 28%, and improves their ability to apply the information by 79%. Keeping in mind the imperative to minimize text on the screen, the bulk of writing text for a PowerPoint presentation should be in the headlines that form your story structure. Then you write the narrative explanation of each of those headlines in Notes Page view. Because the words have already been captured in the form of the headlines and notes, the screen is much less dependent on text to convey information and more dependent on you to communicate it with your spoken words and expressions. With this approach, the PowerPoint screen becomes a much more creative and interesting tool that can hold a few words, or no words at all.

Dave Pollard has an excellent analysis of the process:
What this book does is provide a process to supply the pictures to go along with the story, so your presentation becomes "a blend of movie and live performance". The process has three steps: Writing a script to focus your ideas, storyboarding the script to clarify the ideas, and producing the script to engage the audience. My previous posts have told you about the art of crafting a good story. The storyboard for a movie script is actually sketches of visuals, but for purposes of this book it's merely parsing of the critical parts of the story onto successive slides. Then you use graphics -- and few words -- to reinforce the key points of the story with memorable images.