Wake Me When It’s
Over
Alternatives to Mind-Numbing PowerPoint®
Meetings
by
Carla Kimball
©2005, Carla Kimball
All rights reserved.
It’s 9:30 in the morning and you’ve made
it to the third presentation of today’s marketing meeting. Sam has
a deck of 40 slides that he must cover in 30 minutes. He is pretty much
reading word-for-word from the slides, which are mostly bulleted items
and dense with words, with an occasional chart or graph thrown in. You
have no interest in the topic, and to keep from falling asleep you are
taking this opportunity to proof-read some documents for a pressing deadline.
You realize you are missing about 75% of the material… but you have
all the slides on a handout which you know you can refer back to you if
you need to. The meeting feels like a complete waste of time and you have
this important deadline…
Okay, rewind: Consider this scenario instead. Sam has a deck of 10 slides.
Three of the slides are charts showing some really interesting relationships
of data. Two slides have images that seem to capture the essence of the
issue at hand and the remaining slides have a series of bulleted keywords.
These keywords give you a sense of the overall organization of the presentation,
helping you keep track of what has been covered. They also seem to serve
as a roadmap for Sam, keeping him on track with what he needs to cover
next. In his presentation, the slides aren’t everything. In fact,
Sam tells a couple of really interesting stories that capture your imagination
and help you understand the material in a very different way.
In this scenario, Sam is comfortable with the material and speaks quite
easily, almost conversationally. When Sam is talking about a topic not
on the slide, he blanks out the screen. At the beginning of his presentation,
Sam announced that he will hand out a document at the end that covers
most of the material. Everyone in the meeting seems engaged and you actually
find yourself becoming interested in the topic. Even though you will have
the handout to take with you and your pressing deadline still awaits you,
you are drawn into the conversation and forget about the proof-reading.
You can take care of that over lunch.
Microsoft PowerPoint® is ubiquitous
and has become part of the very fabric of how we do business. But why
is this? Why is it that the first thing we think about in preparing for
a presentation is to develop a slide deck? Why is it that if we don’t
show up with a deck of slides we are looked at suspiciously? And why do
we keep insisting on showing slides when most people in the audience are
bored to tears… when they take advantage of the reduced light to
take a much needed nap… when you know how deadening it feels to
sit through a presentation that is entirely dependent on the slides?
When I ask people to describe the best slide show they have ever seen
they either explode with cynical laughter, talk about a time when there
was a technical glitch and the presenter had to wing it without slides,
or they cite a particularly effective picture, one that captures the imagination
and instantly conveys the message much more powerfully than words could
ever do.
People use PowerPoint to organize their thinking before a presentation,
but the software is actually a very clumsy tool for this purpose. There
are far better software tools out there to help you think through your
talk (my personal favorite for planning and organizing is Inspiration,
www.inspiration.com, which lets you easily map your thoughts and outline
your ideas).
People fill their slides with way too much information because they don’t
want to forget anything, and the mind-numbing consequence is that they
often end up reading the slides word-for-word. A few select keywords are
far more effective at reminding us where we want to go next and keeping
the audience on track with our talk.
People often design the slide show to be used as a handout as well, but
what is most effective as a handout is very different from what will support
the audience in understanding the message during a talk. Why not prepare
two separate packages? One, a slide show that enhances the messages of
your presentation and the second, a document that people take with them.
Don’t get me wrong. There are very powerful and effective ways
to support a talk visually through the use of software like PowerPoint.
But it should be played like a fine instrument, with subtlety and finesse,
rather than used as a club to be applied to every aspect of the presentation.
The next time you are putting together a slide show, ask yourself on each
slide: Is this slide for me or for my audience? Will it really help them
better understand my message or just serve as a distraction? How can I
remember what I’m going to say without putting the entire text on
the slide? What can I do to simplify the slide so that only essential
information is displayed? What do I really need to do at this point in
the presentation to engage the audience and enhance my message? Is a visual
the best way to convey the information or could a story do a better job?
Using ideas like this, your talk will be much stronger and your audience
will be engaged and awake.
Click here to
get a free copy of 10 Tips to Powerful PowerPoint®
Presentations, with Carla's recommendations for how to
most effectively use PowerPoint to support your presentation.
*******
Carla Kimball, M.A., M.B.A. is a speaking
presence coach, workshop facilitator and president of RiverWays Enterprises.
Over the past 18 years she has presented and coached on a diverse set
of business, stress management and communication topics to thousands of
business and service professionals. Client companies include leading financial
management, health care, and accounting firms.
Carla offers a selection of regular public speaking presence
and presentation skills programs
and coaching services for individuals as well as for corporate
groups. Carla works from inside-out and helps people become more confident
speakers while establishing a strong relationship with their audience.
Carla is a prolific writer on public speaking topics
and currently offers a 26 week subscription to The
ABCs of Presence in Speaking, Leading, and Life!, a newsletter
which presents one article and exercise a week organized alphabetically
with a unique perspective on public speaking issues. She has also distilled
her approach to public speaking presence into a workbook/audio set entitled
the SpeakingPresencesm
Toolkit.
Carla is based in the Upper Valley region of Vermont
and New Hampshire at the intersection of Interstates 91 and 89 and centrally
located to all of New England, including Boston, Western Massachusetts,
Connecticut and Maine.
* * * * * * * *
POWERPOINT®
IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF MICROSOFT CORPORATION.
RIVERWAYS ENTERPRISES IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH MICROSOFT CORPORATION IN
ANY WAY.
(You may freely copy and distribute
this article as long as you keep the content intact and unchanged including
title, author, copyright notice, text, author biography, contact information
— www.riverways.com — and this
entire notice. )
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We
are centrally located in the Upper Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire
close to the intersection of Interstates 89 and 91. As such we are in
in the heart of New England and close to Boston and all of Massachusetts,
Vermont, Connecticut, New York and Maine.
Travel time from:
Albany, NY — 2.75 hours
Boston, MA — 2.25 hours
Brattleboro, VT— 1.25 hours
Burlington, VT — 1.5 hours
Concord, NH — 1 hour
Hartford, CT — 2.5 hours
Portland, ME — 3 hours
Portsmouth, NH — 2 hours
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