The beauty of simplicity

One of the worst features about Microsoft’s PowerPoint software is that it has far too many bells and whistles. It offers far too many “things” for the presenter. You can have those awful  bullet points fly in from the top, fly in from the bottom, fade in and fade out, fly in from the left or fly in from the right. You have an endless supply of cheesy clip arts to choose from. You can have your huge corporate logo and your name on every slide. I have seen slides where these junk takes up a third of the real estate.

Try to keep your presentation slides simple. One idea and one picture. The rest are just distractions.

I recently purchased a 12-cup coffee maker from a big box store. It costs $10! And it has only ONE button. That’s the on/off switch. The coffee tastes the same as that from a programmable high tech coffee making machine that costs 10 times as much.  

Simplicity is the key.

The use of technical jargon and acronyms in presentations

Many people use a lot of technical jargon and acronyms in their presentations because it gives them a sense of superiority over the common folks. This is particularly true with scientists and engineers. They like to speak “a language of their own”. That’s fine if everyone in the audience has the same training and understanding of the topic being presentation. But that is never the case.

You should use acronyms sparingly and only if the terms they represent are going to appear throughout the entire presentation. But many presenters use acronyms only once in their presentation. They end up offering an alphabet soup to the audience that is hard to digest with the inevitable result.

How NOT to present scientific data in a presentation

When presenting scientific or technical data, many people make the big mistake of treating the presentation as the oral form of a scientific or technical journal. That’s why they jam every possible number and footnote onto a single slide thereby making it totally unreadable to the audience.

The way to do it properly is to pick out the essential points of the topic and focus on them one point and one slide at a time. You can include all your footnotes and references in a handout AFTER the presentation. Or you can tell the audience where they can download the information from a website.

Never throw a bunch of numbers up on a slide. Never show a big matrix of rows and columns of numbers in a presentation. If you intend to demonstrate a trend, show a simple graph or bar chart. and the key word is “simple”.  You need to do the number crunching for the audience. In other words, do not expect the audience to sit there and figure out a trend from your raw data. They won’t do that. And if they do, they will definitely not be paying attention to you. 

Your slide should not be any more complicated than the slide to the left. Any more words or numbers on that slide would make it too busy to read. 

Simplicity is the key to any PowerPoint presentation.

More horrible slides!

In this post, we look at a couple of incredibly horrible slides prepared by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. These two slides come from a stack of some 193 slides in a presentation that analyzes a proposed Senate Bill on climate change. This topic in and of itself is an exceedingly complicated scientific subject to discuss. Just imagine the poor audience who sat through those 193 slides.

I defy anyone to read any of these slides.

Apparently people no longer prepare written reports. Everything - no matter how complicated – is presented in PowerPoint slides loaded with bullet points. 

 

Captivate your audience

In an interview with Olivia Mitchell, Rowan Manahan mentioned that during an effective presentation, the audience should be “captivated without knowing why”.

When you do a PowerPoint presentation without those dreadful bullet points, you will find that your audience will pay attention to you and at the end of the presentation, they will come up to you and compliment you on keeping them awake.  But very rarely will they notice that they have not been bombarded with bullet points. They just know they you have captivated them and they don’t know why!

This happened to me when I did my 2-day seminar on environmental regulations in southern California a month ago. The topic of environmental regulations can be deadly dull. An attendee came up to me at the end of the two day seminar and said:” I don’t know what you did. But I was paying attention to you all two days.”

So – try it. Try it without bullet points and see the results! You will like it and your audience will like it even more.

Information is best presented in bite-size chunks

Here is another good reason why you should not jam 10 bullet points on a single PowerPoint slide:

Multi-media research has shown that people learn more and retain more when information is presented to them in bite-size chunks.

Quickly – What do you make of this: WIFIIBMCPAIRSCIAKGBYMCA? This is what happens when you lump too much information on a single slide.

Now what if you separate them into bite-size pieces like this:

WIFI IBM CPA IRS CIA KGB YMCA.

I rest my case.

The problem started many years ago …..

Company executives started replacing reports with PowerPoint presentations (loaded with bullet points) over 15 years ago. The executives would speak at length on each bullet points. That was fine albeit half the audience would be in a coma.

The REAL problem came when the PowerPoint slides were passed on down to the lower level staff for implementation. There were no backup documentations. No detailed analysis. Nada. These lower level people never attended the executive meeting and never heard the presentation. All they had was a bunch of bullet points and that’s where everything started to go wrong: misunderstanding, misinterpretation, miscommunication, hallucination….etc.

Millions of dollars of mistakes have been made because of this problem.

The disasterous consequence of bullet points – a real life example

When the Columbia space shuttle broke up upon re-entry to earth in 2003, the President appointed the Columbia Accident Investigation Board(CAIB) to look into the causes.  

As part of the investigation, the Board looked into how engineers and contractors at the National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA) transmit their technical information to their management.  When NASA discovered that a piece of foam had fallen off the shuttle during take off and had impacted its wing, a team of engineers and scientists began a series of analyses to assess any risk that such impact would have upon re-entry. The concern was that the damage done to the wing during take off might impair its ability to withstand the tremendous heat that would be generated when the shuttle began its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. That turned out to the fatal cause of the incident.   

On Day Nine of the mission, the engineering team presented the results of its risk assessment findings to NASA management in a PowerPoint presentation while the shuttle was still in space. One of the critical slides used in the presentation contained six levels of hierarchy. The Board hired Dr. Edward Tufte – a Yale Professor who is an expert in information presentation – to analyze that particular PowerPoint slide (shown on the right).

 According to the Board, important engineering information was either “filtered out or lost in the small prints within the bullet points.”  

The CAIB further concluded as follows: “When engineering analyses and risk assessments are condensed to fit on a standard form or overhead slide, information is inevitably lost. In the process, the priority assigned to information can be easily misrepresented by its placement on a chart and the language that is used. . . . As information gets passed up an organization hierarchy, from people who do analyses to mid-level managers to high-level managers, key explanations and supporting information is filtered out. In this context, it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation. . . . The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical reports as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.” 

The Board also observed that “generally, the higher information is transmitted in the hierarchy, the more it gets ‘rolled up,’ abbreviated, and simplified. Sometimes information gets lost altogether, signals drop from memos, problem identification systems, and formal presentations. The same conclusions, repeated over time, can result in problems eventually being deemed non-problems”.  

One avenue by which information gets “rolled up” and confused – according to the Board –  was through the technology of PowerPoint presentations.