The Presentation Charade
Every day in boardrooms and conference centers across the country, thousands of people are acting out a charade they rarely talk about. Speakers deliver PowerPoint presentations, pretending that their audiences understand and enjoy them. Meanwhile, those watching the presentations play their own parts, pretending to pay attention, to comprehend, and to care.
Maybe it’s time to finally admit what almost everyone knows: the emperor has no clothes! The majority of PowerPoint presentations are boring and unintelligible. Very seldom do they promote any kind of understanding and ultimately, learning.
Then why do so many smart people continue to play the game, knowing that for both presenters and listeners, it’s a waste of time? They do it because everyone else does it that way, it’s always been done that way, because that’s the way their company or organization expects it to be done, and especially because to change will take more time and effort.
Ban Bullet Points
The main problem with boring PowerPoint presentations is bullet points; slide after slide filled with bullets, sub-bullet points, and sub-sub-bullet points. Unfortunately, PowerPoint (and Keynote) templates encourage that mind-numbing format by leaving placeholders for titles and bullets.
According to the findings of John Sweller at the University of New South Wales, Australia, people cannot read and listen well at the same time. He calls it the cognitive load theory.
“It is effective to speak to a diagram or chart, because it presents information in a different form,” Sweller told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007. “But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”
Ditch the Data Dump
Richard Mayer, an educational psychology professor and researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reports similar findings. Our working memory (or short-term memory), the part of the mind focused on a presentation, briefly holds information while working to integrate it into long-term memory. But working memory is limited and can only absorb information in small chunks.
Unfortunately, the average PowerPoint presentation dumps huge amounts of data in a short period of time, assuming that once that information is sent, the listener will receive and remember it intact. But delivering a presentation that way is like sending a fire hose full of water to an audience that has the capacity to drink only drops at a time.
Create Three Presentations in One
So how do we make our presentations more interesting, understandable and effective? First, think of your PowerPoint as an audiovisual aid, not an audiovisual crutch. The slides aren’t there for your benefit, to help you remember your presentation. Instead, they should help guide the audience by supporting visually what you are saying orally.
Ideally, a presentation will have three different parts. First are the slides that the audience sees, containing visuals and as few words as possible. These slides should never be able to stand alone. If they do, there’s no reason for you to be there. Instead, just mail it in.
The second part is the notes that only you will see. This is where you list the points you want to make and supporting information, the stuff that used to be in your bullet points. You can have the notes in front of you while you deliver the presentation.
Third is the written handout you give to the audience. This can include the main points as well as more in-depth information and back-up data that is too detailed and complicated to include in your presentation.
Stop Making “Slideuments”
The only way to improve PowerPoint presentations is to stop creating what Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, calls a “slideument,” a combination slide and document. To save time, people want to plan their presentation so it can serve as both projected visuals and stand-alone handouts. That way they can kill two birds with one stone. But as Reynolds says, the only thing “killed” is effective communication. You end up with a bad slide and a bad document.
It’s difficult to fight this disfunctional culture of PowerPoint. It’s engrained in our workplaces, our churches, our schools. But I sense the movement for change picking up steam. You have a choice: continue to feed the problem with PowerPoints that don’t do anything but bore the audience; or work to change the way things have always been done by creating presentations that engage, enlighten and entertain.
