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.

A “new” way to communicate

Many years ago, I used to work with a smart scientist Dennis Konasewich at the International Joint Commission (IJC). The Commission is a US/Canadian agency responsible for overseeing trans-boundary environmental issues between the two countries. One of Dennis’ two sons – Paul – worked at Microsoft for a time and then obtained his MBA from MIT’s Sloan school of Management. I knew him when he was a toddler. Now he is a smart young entrepreneur. 

Paul is the co-founder of a movement/technique  designed to help improve how people communicate. He calls it “supportive listening” . Since presentation and communication are closely linked and dependent on each other, Paul’s technique is germane to our blog here.

Go to his website and see if you can apply some of his concepts  in your presentation.

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.

What I would like to see in PowerPoint Design in 2009

Tell me a story

I was asked by Olivia Mitchell to write a blog on what I would like to see in PowerPoint in 2009. Here are my thoughts: 

 

Every PowerPoint presentation is a story. You are either telling your audience about something or you are trying to persuade your audience to do something.

 You introduce your story with five slides. These are the most critical slides in your presentation. Each slide should have just one short sentence as heading and a photograph that is relevant to the heading. NO bullet points. The first slide sets the stage. The second slide identifies the characters in your story. The third slide describes the starting point of your story and the fourth shows the ending point. The last of the five slides shows how the characters can go from the starting point to the ending point.

 

 Once you have introduced your story line, you then go on and use as many as you need to elaborate your story.  Forget about those rules that say you must present no more than three points in your story. It all depends on your story. If you have 100 points to make, use 100 slides. If you are telling a story about the Ten Commandments, you are going to have more than three points to make in your presentation.

 The conventional wisdom says “rehearse, rehearse and rehearse”. I say “Not so fast”. Do not over-rehearse your presentation. Familiarity breeds contempt. Many people over-rehearse their presentations to the point of memorizing the script. The end result is that they will make a stiff and robotic presentation and the audience will see through it. When you make your presentation (tell your story), you need to show passion. You need to show the audience that you actually believe in what you are saying. Focus your time and energy on learning the topic of the presentation instead of the words. If you know the topic well, your presentation will be received by the audience as genuine and sincere and believable. It will come from

Theory of Relativity

your heart and not your brain. If you are not comfortable with the topic or you do not understand the topic, you have no business making the presentation. Any fool – given enough time – can memorize Einstein’s Theory of Relativity word by word and give a presentation. But can that fool answer a question from the audience?  

 

 

To sum up: No bullet points, one point per slide, use as many slides as you have points to make, know your topic, do not memorize your presentations.

 

What to say when you don’t have the answer to a question?

It happens to all of us at one time or another. Someone in the audience ask us a question about our presentation and we do not have the answer to it. What should we do?

The answer is clear: Just say “I don’t know.”

This is a much better strategy than to ham and haw and try to evade the question and give a non-responsive answer. All that bobbing and weaving is not going to do you one bit of good because the audience is doing to see right through you. So it is much better for you to just confess your ignorance AND ask if anyone in the audience has the answer.

In his seminal book “Moving Mountains”, Henry Boettinger says “quibbling and evasion produce disgust. If you don’t know the answer, say so directly.”

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.

How to manage a three-ring circus

At our last webinar, someone mentioned during the Question and Answer period that sometimes his firm has over 10 people on their presentation team to their potential clients. With this large number of speakers, you really need to do a good job in coordinating the presentation to prevent it from turning into a 10-ring circus.

I would spend no more than a few minutes introducing the team members specific background and expertise that are RELEVANT to sloving your clients’ problems. Do not allow them to talk ad nausea about themselves when they get their turn. The only time they talk about their past would be somethign like:”I just finished a big project that is very similar to yours and our clients ars saving millions of dollars as a result of our work.” 

There will have to be a leader in your group to direct questions from the audience to the one with the most experience and best oratory skill. Jump in any time when the answer is not heading in the right direction and re-direct it or answer it yourself. Sometimes you may have to speak to the overall understanding of the question and ask the most technical person in your team to supply the nuts and bolts portions of your anseer.

Another thing to watch for is continuity of lack of it in most presentations with multiple speakers. There is nothing more irritating and disjointed to hear five persons speak to the  point of their expertise without makign reference to one another’s presentation. As the Master of Ceremony, you must make sure Speaker A explains how his topic relates to what Speaker B is about to say. 

Rememvber: Every presentation is a story. You must have Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3 relate and feed to the main thrust of your story.  Instaed of spending you time rehearsing each speaker’s talk, spend your time rehearsing the transition.

How to keep your audience focused on you!

I did a 2-day presentation to a group in Virginia Beach last week. The topic is a rather dry one – how to stay in compliance with environmental laws andregulations. Instead of giving the audience a copy of the presentation material at the beginning, I gave each attendee a 4-page summary containing 3 key points to remember for each of the 11 sessions. There is room on the handout for them to take their own notes and to add more points to remember. At the end of the 2-day conference, I gave each participant a copy of a CD that contains a 400-page PDF document that is both searchable and printable. This document has all the topics that I covered in technical detail.

The arrangement worked out remarkably well. The attendees were able to take notes AND pay attention to the presentation. There was nothing for them to read ahead of my presentation so they focused on the presentation.

By the way – no one fell asleep. Many just noticed the presentation was “more refreshing” than the usual presentations they had been exposed to. They just enjoyed it. They didn’t even noticed there were no bullet points until I pointed that out to them.

An initial review of “The Back of the Napkin”

Dan Roam has written an interesting book on visual thinking. I had posted a video on some of his thinking on this blog. I read Dan’s book on the plane as I flew from Seattle to Virginia Beach. This is an initial impression of his book. There will be more postings to come.

The book starts off by showing how to draw simple diagrams to illustrate ideas and points. The concept is very elegant and SIMPLE. Remember: simplicity = beauty. Half way into the book, Dan presents an MBA-like case study by applying his virutal thinking concepts to “real life” situation. This is where things start to go awry. His simple (and beautiful) diagrams in the case study evolve into some hand sketched diagrams that look like some organization charts from the federal government. And we all know how bad that can look. His diagrams are worse than those awful PowerPoint slides we see in Coca Cola’s presentation.

So instead of a bunch of PowerPoint bullet points, he ends up with a bunch of diagrams. When I get back to my office, I will scan a few examples of his virtual thinking diagrams and post them here.

One of my readers complained that I mixed typed text with hand sketches in my virtual thinking sldies. To go along this line of thinking, Dan should have written his entire book by hand. By the way, some of his sketches are so small that you almost have to have a magnifying glass to read. This is due to the fact that the fonts are small and the book measures about 4 by 4 inches instead of the usual size.

My take of this book? It is a mixture of simple elegance and awful clusters of almost unreadable diagrams. More later. Any comments from anyone? 

If people are turned off by clusters of bullet points (and they are), why would it be different with clusters of diagrams?

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.