beyond bullets

Keeping Your Media Human

When you use projected visuals as a persuasive backdrop to your communication, they become much more than "visual aids" tacked on to your spoken words. They can summarize your point, frame your ideas, and influence mood and emotion.

But one downside of using media is that it can become too absorbing, and create a level of detachment that shuts down the human connection between presenters and audiences. 

In order to keep your person-to-person communication experiences more engaging, here are three things you can do to break the media formality:

1. Black out the screen.  This is probably the simplest and most powerful technique - to simply hit the "B" key and turn the screen to black. The image-filled screen creates such a powerful presence, that its sudden absence focuses attention intently on you. Use this when you want to emphasize the most important points in your storyboard. In the Beyond Bullet Points method, you would black out the screen during each of the storyboard frames that correspond with the 5-minute column in the story template.
2. Write on the screen using a Tablet PC. I'm not someone who gets excited about new gadgets, but I've had the IBM ThinkPad X41 for a few months now, and it's become a powerful new addition to my toolkit to help me engage my own audiences. Whenever I begin a workshop, I show this slide (Download humanize.ppt)  that features a PowerPoint box.  When I present it, I ask the audience, "When I say the word PowerPoint, what words come to your mind?"  As I call on audience members for their responses, I repeat what they said, and then write their response directly on the screen with the stylus that comes with the Tablet PC. This makes a powerful statement that this is going to be engaging, I am going to listen to you, and we are going to create this experience together.
3. Use hand-sketched graphics. Especially these days when the graphical trend is toward 3-D, gradients and hyper-stylized backgrounds, adding hand-sketched graphics is an effective way to make your presentation style more human and down-to-earth. If you have a Tablet PC then you can sketch your graphics directly on the PowerPoint slide with a stylus; otherwise you can sketch on paper then scan the images and add them to the slides.  If you're more of a scribbler than a sketcher, ask one of your colleagues to lend their sketching talents to your slides.

Try one of these techniques the next time you present, to break the media barriers and make sure you keep your presentations appropriately sociable.

Join Me for an Oct. 5 Online Workshop

If you're interested in taking your storymaking or storyboarding skills to the next level, join me in an online workshop tomorrow, Oct. 5, at 9am PT or 5pm PT.

Based on the techniques described in my book, Beyond Bullet Points, the first workshop, Story Template 101, explores how to use the 3-act story template to define and refine your communications. The second workshop, The PowerPoint Storyboard, builds on the basics by exploring a range of visual techniques to apply to your storyboard.

Using the Microsoft Office LiveMeeting web seminar service, you'll be able to view the materials in a browser while we discuss it by phone, and the sessions are recorded for you to view at a later date.  Workshops are $25 per person, and are limited to the first 12 people who enroll, in order to keep interaction levels high. If you can't make it tomorrow, there will be more workshops coming up.

Learn more, or sign up through a web page here.

PowerPoint 2.0

Larry Lessig has been called a PowerPoint virtuoso, and his approach recently inspired Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identify, to use a similar film-inspired approach in his recent presentation, "Identity 2.0" at a conference called OSCON 2005.

You can view his presentation at this link.

It's very creative, visually interesting, and makes great use of visual humor. You're sure to be inspired to try some of the techniques he used on your own storyboards; and it's a good example of a completely bullet-free presentation.

From a delivery perspective, Dick would have dramatically improved his performance by using a remote control instead of being chained to the keyboard of his computer to advance his slides.  And from a structural perspective, I don't recall the 3 or 4 main points that Dick wanted us to remember and apply after his presentation.  But those are relatively minor quibbles, in light of the innovative and engaging visual story that Dick told.

Although the content of Dick's presentation was "Identity 2.0", I think that the form of the presentation really demonstrated "PowerPoint 2.0", or technically since he was using Apple presentation software, "Keynote 2.0".  Whatever you call it, it presents the much more interesting future that we have to look forward to.

Sprechen Sie PowerPoint?

I got word today that Beyond Bullet Points is now being translated into German, and will be released in Germany in October 2005. 

Here's the mockup of the book cover, titled Erzählen statt Aufzählen: Neue Wege zur Erfolgreichen PowerPoint-Präsentation.

As they say in Germany, that's wunderbar!

Shocked by Complexity

Have you ever been so confused by the complexity of a map, chart or diagram, that you didn't know where to begin to make sense of it?

If so, you may be a victim of "map shock" or "visual shock", according to Donald F. Dansereau, Ph.D., of Texas Christian University. Don is Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Scientist in the Institute of Behavioral Research at TCU, and teaches graduate statistics and cognitive psychology.

I've been intrigued by the concept of "map shock" ever since I first heard the term, so I thought I would find out more about it from Don.

It turns out that during his research on cognitive approaches for improving education, drug abuse prevention, and treatment, Don found that students often became "lost" upon first seeing a type of complex map. The results were a sense of "not knowing where to start or where to go next," he said. "This makes processing less efficient and may even bring it to a halt."

Hmmm - sounds like a familiar symptom of many PowerPoint slides I've seen, not to mention a good number of printed materials.

Read more about Don's findings on "map shock" and "visual shock" in my recent interview with him here.

"Beyond Bullet Points" on Trial

What would a PowerPoint presentation look like in a courtroom, if it used an approach Beyond Bullet Points?

According to the Fortune magazine article, "Stark Choices at the First Vioxx Trial", two lawyers used PowerPoint in "starkly" different ways in a heavily-publicized trial that began Thursday in Texas.  In the first of many trials involving the prescription drug Vioxx, plaintiff Carol Ernst is suing Merck and Co. over the death of her husband Bob Ernst in 2001.

Based on the following passages from the article, guess which one used the Beyond Bullet Points approach:

"Speaking in state court in Angleton, Texas, without notes and in gloriously plain English, and accompanying nearly every point with imaginative, easily understood (if often hokey) slides and overhead projections, (the plaintiff's lawyer Mark) Lanier, a part-time Baptist preacher, took on Merck and its former CEO Ray Gilmartin with merciless, spellbinding savagery...

"But in contrast to Lanier... (defendant Merck's lawyer David Kiernan) seemed to read much of his presentation and illustrated it only with stodgy, corporate headshots of Merck officials or hard-to-read excerpts from documents whose meaning was shrouded in medical jargon...

"The trial offers jurors a stark choice between accepting Lanier's invitation to believe simple, alluring and emotionally cathartic stories versus Merck's appeals to colorless, heavy-going, soporific Reason."

If you guessed that it was Mark Lanier's PowerPoint that was completely bullet-free, you're right. It turns out that Mark loves to use PowerPoint, and when he started working on his presentation he ordered all the books on the topic he could find, including Beyond Bullet Points. He liked it so much that he invited me out to Houston to give him a hand with his presentation.

We used the 3-step approach in the book, then Mark's flawless delivery took the experience beyond what I imagined was possible. He masterfully framed his argument with an even flow of projected images, and blended it with personal stories, physical props, a flip chart, a tablet PC, a document projector and a deeply personal connection with his audience.

It was my first time to put the Beyond Bullet Points approach on trial in a courtroom, but based on the feedback, the verdict of the day was clearly in favor of the plaintiff's PowerPoint approach.

(For more coverage of the opening presentations of the trial, see the New York Times article, "Contrary Tales of Vioxx Role in Texan's Death" and the Associated Press article, "Nation's First Vioxx Trial Begins" at Forbes.com.)

Show Me the Money Slide

If you put your conclusions first, people are more likely to stay with you until the end.

I recently analyzed a market research presentation, and its structure went something like this:

1. Background and methodology (Slides 2-6: charts, diagrams, bullets)
2. Key metrics summary (Slides 7-15: charts, diagrams, bullets)
3. Conclusions and implications (Slides 16-20: bullets)

Slide 20 was the "money slide", or the slide that recommended to the audience exactly what they should do based on the research. This slide was clear, concise and easy to put into action.

But why wait until the end to show the most meaningful slide?

Whenever we structure a presentation, we often want to walk people through the same steps that we followed in order to arrive at an answer. We might do that because we're proud of the thinking process that we went through, or we think it brings credibility by explaining the details before coming to the conclusion.

The only problem is that if you wait until the end to present your conclusions, you make it much more difficult for your audience to stay with you. In the outline above, you're forcing the audience to hold 19 dense slides of information in their working memory, before you get to slide 20 where you tell them why it's important to them in the first place. 

But when you flip the outline around and present your conclusions first, then your audience knows up-front where you're going, and they can pay attention to the reasons why or how they should decide to do what you recommend.  You still present the same information, but present your conclusions first and your reasoning second.

The BBP story template introduces a discipline to help you restructure a presentation this way so that it's easier to understand. The Solution statement forms the basis for your "money slide", where you clearly state what you recommend; and the 5-minute Column statements form the basis for the 3 or 4 slides that explain your top-level reasoning behind what you recommend.

When you use a presentation structure like this to clearly focus on the conclusion first, you're much more likely to help your audience profit from the meaning of your work.

Presenters are from Mars, Audiences are from Venus

How wide is the gap between how you see yourself as a presenter, and how your audience sees you? Probably very wide, according to a survey conducted by Andy Goodman for his new book coming out in December, When Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes.

In a survey of 2,500 people described in his recent PDF newsletter, Andy tallied the percentages of respondents who rated typical presentation elements “good to excellent” for presentations they give. Then he tallied the percentages of respondents who rated the same parts "good to excellent" for presentations they attend. The results:

 

According to Andy:

"As you can see, respondents consistently gave themselves higher marks, with nearly half believing their presentations fell into the good to excellent range overall. They were far less generous to their colleagues, however, with less than a fifth earning good to excellent scores. These numbers suggest that audiences are frequently dissatisfied with what they see, but presenters simply aren’t getting the message. And that may be one reason why bad presentations continue to plague good causes."

This is important information that should give all of us PowerPoint pause, as we step back from the remote and start thinking about how to close the gap between perception and reality.

The CEO's Secret PowerPoint

If CEOs count communication skills as central to leadership, how much do you and your organization invest in developing them?

The cover story of the July 2005 issue of Business 2.0 magazine describes an unpublished set of business guidelines in an article titled, "The CEO's Secret Handbook":

"It started decades ago as flashes of insight scribbled on loose scraps of paper. Then it morphed into a PowerPoint presentation that distilled years of business wisdom into a handful of easy-to-remember aphorisms. Last year it became a 76-page spiral-bound booklet clad in a plain gray cover. Eventually, Warren Buffett received a copy -- and liked it so much that he asked for dozens more to give to his CEOs, friends, and family.

"The tiny handbook has become an underground hit among senior executives and management thinkers. Written by Bill Swanson, CEO of aerospace contractor Raytheno, Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management is part Ben Franklin and part Yogi Berra, with a dash of Confucius thrown in."

How often do communication skills pop up in the list? Out of the complete list of 25 rules, here are at least five:

1. Don't be timid; speak up. Express yourself, and promote your ideas.
2. Practice shows that those who speak the most knowingly and confidently often end up with the assignment to get it done.
3. Strive for brevity and clarity in oral and written reports.
4. Be extremely careful of the accuracy of your statements.
5. Cultivate the habit of "boiling matters down" to the simplest terms. An elevator speech is the best way.

With at least 20% of the top 25 skills directly related to communication skills, it makes sense for any organization to invest at least 20% of its training budget to developing them.

The Slide-Free PowerPoint

When your PowerPoint process helps you to clarify your ideas, it turns out you can make an effective presentation whether you use your slides or not.

Garr Reynolds tells a great story about someone who used the Beyond Bullet Points approach to structure a presentation. When the presenter met with his potential client, the conversation naturally transitioned to the main points he wanted to cover, and before he knew it he had won the business and the meeting was over. He left disappointed that he didn't get to use his slides, until his wife reminded him that closing the business was his objective, not showing the slides!

Where does your own center of confidence reside -- in you, or on your slides?  When you undergo a critical thinking process that clarifies your ideas in your mind, it shifts the center of confidence from your slides to you. With the center where it belongs, you will be clear no matter what tool, technology or medium you use to expand your ideas outward.