Today, people spend a lot of time developing the “right” slides, making sure that the slides can work whether or not there is an actual speaker behind them. After all, as more and more presentations are sent via e-mail and not given live, the issue of presentation is becoming less and less important.
But beyond slides and pitch, there is another part related to structure and argumentation, which is a very different area of expertise. It has more to do with what you say than how you say it. This part requires skills in storytelling, speechwriting and scriptwriting, as well as an in-depth knowledge of what you are talking about.
Can one person become an expert in all of these areas? Can you become a universal expert today – a screenwriter, a designer and a master of verbal and nonverbal communication? If you answer in one word, the answer is yes. We publish a large selection of useful tips from the book “The Mastery of Presentation.
Communicate, induce, entertain
Aristotle, in his famous “Rhetoric,” said that there are three models of persuasion: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos appeals to the intellect, pathos appeals to the emotions, and ethos refers to the personality, which is made up of the qualities of the speaker. This was the case in the fourth century B.C.
In the following centuries, the masters of rhetoric perfected logos and ethos and did not pay due attention to pathos. What has become of our attitude toward pathos can be seen in the New Oxford Dictionary of American English, which defines the word “rhetoric” as follows: “A speech whose purpose is to persuade or impress an audience; often pompous and contentless.
Pathos has a bad reputation.
Yet the canons of oratory have always included emotion, entertainment. The classical Roman rule prescribed: docere, movere, delectare, which in Latin means “to inform, to induce, to entertain.” Although our civilization has made impressive progress in the field of storytelling over the last couple of centuries, today’s speakers (mostly scientists) are convinced that appealing to reason is inherently ethical and persuasive, while appealing to feelings borders on deception and is unworthy of a true educator.
Points in Line
The problems with the logos are well known. Such presentations seem very reasonable and even persuasive, but not motivating enough. People nod their heads and go about their business as if nothing had happened.
It is important that storytelling and factualizing are not mutually exclusive. Storytelling is and always has been the basis of business presentations. Storytelling is nothing more than lining up facts in a certain sequence and making connections between them. But you shouldn’t just use stories within your presentation, you should transfer the structure of the story to the whole presentation.
An intrigue has to develop according to certain laws-you can’t just insert some arbitrary episodes whenever you feel like it. Stories are the logic of life. The point of stories is to provide an explanation for events. They connect many disparate facts and ideas, thus giving the impression of coherence. They form a chain of cause and effect.
Speakers tend to draw a bunch of dots on the board that never line up. Not surprisingly, they have trouble following their own direction with this structure. They forget what they need to talk about next.
Can this happen when you’re telling a story?
Making sense out of chaos.
Stories are comfortable to tell, pleasant to listen to, and easy to remember. Real stories are often not as interesting as fictional stories, but the good news is that they are much easier to create. You don’t have to make up the facts (they already exist). Your job is to select the “right” ones and arrange them in a certain sequence.
Unfortunately, as a rule, time is always limited, and you are forced to talk about some issues and omit others. But in storytelling, this doesn’t mean that you have to exclude inconvenient facts from the story, but rather integrate them. Uncomfortable facts have the effect of surprise, and surprise is one of the cornerstones of a well-constructed narrative. So – no, storytelling doesn’t mean picking the “right” facts. It’s more about how you can make the “wrong” facts work together in the right direction.
Storytelling means extracting meaning from chaos.
The three principles of presentation
The craft of presentation is built around three principles. They have been known for quite a long time, they are universal and do not apply only to presentations.
- The principle of focus: every story, every slide and every presentation must have a major focal point that attracts attention.
On a slide, the focal point is usually the brightest, biggest or most emotional element in the composition that catches your eye (a human face, for example).
Why do we need a focal point? Simply put, because you can’t tell everything you know and the audience can’t remember everything you tell them. Audiences have their own cognitive limits. That’s why you need to prioritize and make certain elements of your communication more or less important.
How limiting are these limits? The values of short-term working memory limits on which there is now a scientific consensus: an average of four portions of information.
So, the principle of focus says: Build your communication around one central message and accompany it with three or four supporting ideas.
- The contrast principle: ideas become clear only in contrast with other ideas.
The problem with most business presentations is that they consist only of facts. The facts themselves don’t have any meaning of their own. They only make sense when they are juxtaposed with other facts. You need comparisons. Your audience needs to understand the correlation. It needs a backstory. It needs to see the change; it needs to see what’s in opposition to what.
Sports games in which two teams cooperate with each other are not very popular. There is no TV show, play or movie without conflict, drama or struggle. Conflicts attract people’s attention. Conflicts have unpredictable outcomes. They are interesting to watch.
But the typical business presentation is not rich in conflict. That’s why the audience falls asleep.
The same can be said about the slides. Watching something being compared in parallel is always interesting. Charts showing change are the best proof. A chart showing the “reds” at war with the “greys” will never be boring.
You need contrast on an aesthetic level as well. You need to separate the headings from the rest of the text. You need to distinguish important data from ancillary data. You need to separate the text from the background.
- Unity is the hardest principle to explain.
A story has certain parts that are psychologically satisfying. If you guide your audience through the right points, people will get the feeling that they have found something beyond their journey; something transcendent; something that changes themselves.
The principle of unity states that when constructed correctly, the conflicting parts create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
In our journey, we pass through difficulties (contrast) as we approach the main goal (focus). It is a memorable experience. When people listen to a masterfully crafted story, they remember it almost word for word. Now the story lives on independently of you. Unity is when certain frameworks are laid out, sometimes quite willfully, and followed to the end. It’s when everything is in harmony, though not perfect. It is when you are human.
Problem
What is the most important part of your presentation? Most people will say it’s the description of the product, solution, or discovery. After all, that’s what you’re doing the presentation for, right? Wrong. The most important part of your presentation is the problem.
If you don’t take care to describe the problem, you’re likely to lose your audience in the first five minutes. By outlining the problem, you create a conflict between two forces: the problem and the solution. This conflict is what will make your story interesting and get people to follow it. Clarifying the problem is the main prerequisite for a successful presentation.
Four types of problems
- Moral or psychological problem.
This type of problem is admittedly extremely difficult to present. It is hard to observe the inner struggle from the outside. Among other things, no one is likely to care about your internal problems. In cases like this, you should first show some external problem and then show how the solution to that external problem depends on the solution to the internal problem. Demonstrating an internal problem works well. It acts as the icing on the cake. But you can’t present just one icing. You need a cake.
- Conflict with another person or company.
This type of problem is simpler. In 2008. Steve Jobs began his MacBook Air presentation by saying that Apple had taken Sony’s TZ series laptop as a reference product and tried to improve on it. He then compared his product to a competitor, winning on almost every measure. You have to admit that it wasn’t exactly fair, since the developers of the TZ series obviously had other goals in mind, and yet it worked.
So, if your product has no analogues, you should take for comparison the closest analogue that you can find. To speak badly of competitors in all cases is not a good idea, and the line is very thin. In many countries, such comparisons are expressly forbidden in advertising.
Most importantly: mentioning a competitor shows that you are not afraid of comparisons. You may think that your company has no competitors because you follow the blue ocean strategy and have found yourself a wonderful little niche. But if you want to explain what your niche is, you have to compare yourself to others. If you don’t want to call them competitors, don’t. Competition is not important, but comparison is.
- Conflict with the dominant paradigm, with the status quo
This is probably the best strategy. The easiest way to mention your rival, while avoiding a direct attack, is to name as many competitors as possible or to contrast yourself with a larger rival. That one should be so large that any direct attack seems like suicide. In this way, you stand in opposition to the status quo and portray yourself as the outsider. You tell the audience a variation on the story of David and Goliath, in which the audience’s sympathies are invariably on David’s side.
You can’t fight the abstract status quo. Someone has to personify it, someone concrete! If you can name it, that’s great. Otherwise you get bogged down in an abstract rivalry, like the commercial in which a brand like Tide compares itself to ordinary laundry detergent. Frankly, this is a very bad cliché, but if you play it with humor, it can work, too.
- Conflict with “forces” (nature, the economy, even fate) – with so-called “objective challenges”
How do we put this processor in this building? How do we move this building? How do we fight obesity and/or hunger? If you want to fight obesity, the best way to illustrate your idea is to use the story of the guy who managed to win that fight and the guy who didn’t. The challenges when dealing with this kind of problem is that you need to generate compassion for both sides. Not only should there be “Oh, cool, Apple!” but there should also be “Oh, poor Sony!” (or vice versa, depending on your personal preference).
Objective challenges are handy. They create a wonderful context: people suddenly discover that they have something to fight about, but the drama still unfolds between people. At the same time, the problem must be serious enough to be worth worrying about. The answer to the question, “What happens if we don’t solve this problem?” should be frightening enough. What will happen if they don’t build a lightweight computer? Then you’ll still have to carry your three-pound monster on your back!
Second Act Syndrome.
Telling the problem at the beginning of the presentation is very easy. Really easy! Many people do, but the catch is that people voice the problem and then resolve it almost immediately. The tension fades and the story ends, and they continue to list the facts they think they need to list all the way through. What a disappointment.
The salvation from second act syndrome is to keep the problem unresolved until the very end. In this way, you can maintain an emotional rhythm. This does not mean that you necessarily have to save the information and keep the audience in the dark.
But at least one important question should always go unanswered.
Slides
When you already have a story in the form of a set of talking points or mental or written down as a regular text, it’s time to start creating slides. The important question is: Why do we need slides at all? Why can’t you just say what you need to say and walk away? There are four reasons, four functions of slides, why you should take the time to do them.
- First, slides serve to remind the speaker what to talk about next. If you hand them out to the audience after the presentation, they will also remind the audience of what the speaker was talking about. Textual slides do this task quite well.
- Second, slides are impressive. Images have a stronger impact than words, and they are better remembered. This is why people often use pictures and drawings to illustrate their ideas.
- The third task of slides is to explain. Thus, diagrams are used to simplify the understanding of complex processes, connections, etc.
- The last and most important function of slides is to persuade. There are many types of arguments and evidence, among which statistics are perhaps the most powerful. “Most powerful” in this case does not mean “most convincing.” The most powerful means “the closest to scientific evidence. Probably the most persuasive arguments are often those based on examples rather than statistics. People still prefer to listen to stories rather than derive meaning from data.
Zen and Vajrayana presentations
Vajrayana is a very complex system of beliefs and practices within Buddhism, which in some ways is the opposite of Zen. Zen is a minimalist Buddhism. It has very few texts and methods that need to be studied. Vajrayana, on the other hand, is a kind of Buddhist supermarket, offering countless different practices, teachings, texts, etc.
Vajrayana Style Slide.
This approach can be summed up in a few sentences: “I’m going to collect everything I have here because I might need it. Also, my boss told me to use at most five slides. So I’m going to cram everything I have into five slides. Sure, it’s going to get a little confusing, but I have a limit of five slides.”
Zen Slide
A “zen” style presentation is said to work well when the presentation is done live, but it doesn’t work when you put your slides on the Web or send them out via e-mail. It is true that there is a huge difference, but it has nothing to do with the “zen” style. Yes, it’s true that if you post “zen slides” from your presentation online, people are unlikely to be able to tell what you were talking about from them. But that’s not a presentation problem; it’s an expectation problem.
When you put your zen slides on the Web for your audience, insert a disclaimer that they are not intended to be heard without a voiceover. This solves the expectation problem.
Text slides.
For a text slide (more so, probably, than any other type of slide), you need a focus. The biggest problem with text slides is that they are distracting. If there’s a little more text than necessary – you’re gone. And besides, you don’t want people reading your slides before you do. (Note. Just do not make the classic mistake – do not read your slides out loud. There’s nothing worse than that)
But here’s the good news: people don’t want to read your slides. People have already stopped reading even documents. They don’t have time. Instead, they try to go through them quickly to make sure they haven’t missed anything important. So if you design your text slides more for quick scanning than for reading, you’ll get more attention as a presenter.
Take a look at the following three slides. The first one is not very original, but it’s not bad either. It has a clear focal point in the header with the bullets clearly placed below it. It’s worth looking at this slide, and we instantly know what it’s about. The pattern is good. The background is a gradient, dark blue. The white text is clearly visible. The header is in a large font.
The second slide is much worse. First, it has exactly the same header. If your next slide has the same headline as the previous slide, it’s a sign that all is not well. This is where the audience loses focus. You used to know where to look to grab the point, but now you don’t. The audience needs to find a new focal point. That will be in the center of the slide, where the numbers are in bold. But the focus is not there. The numbers in the list make no sense unless you look up and read the word “HELP”, which is in thinner type. Also, the phrase “less than 1%…” in a smaller typeface looks like a footnote. And footnotes, as you probably know, have a very bad reputation – avoid them if possible.
The third slide is a disaster. Its purpose is to remind the audience of something the speaker mentions only in passing. It gives people a choice: read or listen. If they choose to read, they’ll miss part of the presentation, and they can’t read the slide fast enough because there’s too much text. Listeners don’t have time to absorb the information.
Visually about scale.
Objects are easier to appreciate in comparison. A visual example is in the NASA chart that compares the planets of the solar system. If you don’t happen to know what 2003 UB is, it’s that dwarf planet later called Eris. It is located behind Pluto and yet larger than Pluto. Its discovery eventually led to Pluto being stripped of its planetary status, apparently because it was easier for astronomers to remove a planet from the list than to add another, “extra” one.
We can more accurately estimate the true size of a planet by placing it next to other celestial bodies. Once we do this, it is immediately obvious that Pluto is too small to be a planet.
Steve Jobs used this method beautifully in a series of presentations to explain the size and weight of his company’s MP3 players. When it comes to MP3 players, both weight and size make a huge difference because people carry them in their pockets all day long. How do you know if a particular MP3 player will be too heavy, too light (this can also be a problem, especially with cell phones), or just right?
In 2001. Steve Jobs compared the size of the first iPod to a deck of playing cards. He also described it as “lighter than most cell phones.” In 2005, when introducing the iPod shuffle, he compared its size to a pack of bubble gum and its weight to four 25-cent coins. In both cases, he didn’t just say that, but showed slides that showed a deck of cards, several different packs of chewing gum, and a neat stack of four coins.
Tables
Do you have a matrix larger than 2×2? Then it’s a table! Actually, a 2×2 matrix is also a table, only very small. Tables are a wonderful analytical tool. However, they are amazingly unsuitable for presentation purposes. They hold too much data to be covered in one glance. They require a thoughtful attitude. Tables require people to scrutinize, and that takes time.
Do you really want your listeners to think that much? Maybe you need to demonstrate some excerpts from the report? Here are some tricks on how best to do that.
- Make the headlines really stand out (contrast between headline and content).
- Group related ideas together and try to organize them as much as possible.
- Eliminate anything that isn’t really necessary.
- Alternate colors to increase contrast between rows. If you don’t need the table grid for some serious reason, hide it. Seriously, try it. If you turn off the grid display, it won’t make the table fall apart. Alternating colors fulfill the same role, only much better.
- Visualize everything you can.
- Apply an animation to show the table gradually, or use
translucent mask to direct the audience’s attention.
The picture shows essentially the same table, just “before and after.” The rows that weren’t needed have been removed, and the four main categories have been created. It still takes time to understand the table, but much less time than before.
Slide design for non-designers.
What do you really want from your slides? You want them to improve your communication, to make it clearer and more understandable. You also want to make an emotional impact.
By some coincidence, that’s exactly what your audience wants, too.
They don’t want embellishments. They want clarity, they want to stay “conscious” during the process. So design has nothing to do with embellishment. It has nothing to do with adding some pretty and meaningless stuff. Design is about following simple rules and ruthlessly removing anything that doesn’t fit.
There is a very effective solution to the problem of chaos when people use millions of fonts, colors and image styles. The solution is this: just use a white background, black letters in Arial font, minimal illustrations, and no additional colors for diagrams.
This will give the slides a very austere look and the much desired unity. By the way, if you don’t want to know anything about design, then this is the best approach you can take. It works. It’s definitely not the best approach, but it makes it clear that you’re more concerned with the point. Some people appreciate that.
But as good as this approach is, it has one important drawback: it doesn’t evoke emotion. It doesn’t take advantage of the “beauty = usability” effect. It robs you and your message of the opportunity to stand out from the masses. This approach suggests that while you care about substance, you don’t pay attention to design. And today, if you don’t pay attention to design, it’s taken as a sign that you don’t care about selling your ideas.
What exactly do you as a non-designer need to know? At the most fundamental level, you need to remember three rules. They may sound familiar – they are focus, contrast and unity. Sure, “the devil hides in the details,” but if you follow these three principles, you’ll be safe most of the time.
No, safe is not the right word. The right word is comprehensibility. You will be understood.
Prepared from the book The Mastery of Presentation.
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