The following post offers advice about how you can avoid common mistakes buried deep in many corporate cultures, to make you a more focused, engaging and flexible presenter.
These comments originally appeared in my February update (Vol.4 Iss. 1).
Slideware Limitations
Check Your Deck
You may know of Yale professor and visual communication guru Edward R. Tufte, as a declared enemy of slideware.
When his opus, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, came out in 1982, the Boston Globe called it “a visual Strunk & White.” His rant continues through several books and a Wired essay, ‘Powerpoint is Evil.’
Though the Obama administration pays for his views, the world largely ignores Tufte and goes on churning out trillions of ‘decks’ a year. Even though no-one wants to see another slide, Tufte was never going to win the war.
For those who want to become better presenters, some of his thoughts, a little rephrased here, are worth considering:
- Ask yourself, ‘Do I need slideware at all?’ Remember other options for aids include flip charts, whiteboards, hand-outs, props, music, video.
- Think of slideware as a supplement to your presentation, not as the presentation itself. The software is not the presenter, you are.
- Don’t use slides as speaker crutches at audience expense. Why should your presentation punish your audience?
- Be careful. Slides, by their nature, subjugate content to their linear format.
- Slide after slide of bullet points becomes rigid, predictable, boring, maybe even pushy.
- Relentless spurts of information in sequence and stacked in time, prevent comparative visual analysis and limit understanding of context and relationships.
- Messy and simplistic data treatment — ‘chartjunk’ — obfuscates rather than clarifies.
There is a lot to discuss on this topic. We still see clipart, poor quality pics, cutesy builds, people reading slides, etc. The same misuses seem to occur in Keynote, Presently and Prezi.
What do you think?
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Tabletop Presentations
That Go Awry
Meeting around a workplace table to talk through a presentation document is common place.Doing it effectively is less so.Four common problems are:
- Not accurately orienting and focusing. Whenever someone says, “What page are we on?” or “Where is that?” time is wasting. If someone is trying to locate info in a document rather than listening to the speaker, attention is divided and understanding, along with patience, may be at risk.
- Wrong information density for the context. Having too much information orally, textually or visually, makes it hard to distil key points. Verbal flow without supporting detail can erode credibility.
- Poor information architecture. Each tool and material has a different purpose and capability. Slide or document? Graph or table? (The graph above is no good. Among other problems, its unintentional Necker illusion flips the two back panes to the front.) Presentations and culture ought conform to our goals, not to software limitations.
- Mumbling. This happens when someone ‘talks to the paper’, rather than to the humans in the room, maybe because of low self-awareness, low confidence or because clear vocal articulation didn’t come naturally and wasn’t taught.
Information processing is not a random act. We can’t take it for granted that people will come along with us, reading our minds, extracting fine points out of voluminous detail or understanding key issues only vaguely referenced and never repeated.When we unthinkingly conflate visual data with text and spoken words we lose sight of the strengths and limitations of each medium. Untangling ourselves from our tools and regaining mastery over them is a great start to better communication.
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