What compels so many people in the business world to deliver so many horrible presentations?
You know the drill: A hot, stuffy conference room, an ill-prepared presenter, ugly slides that look like eye charts. Research suggests that 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created every day. Most of them are about as entertaining as root canals.
No wonder more than four out of five businesspeople surveyed by Perzi.com admitted that they shifted their focus away from the speaker at the last presentation they attended.
It need not be so. Here are the main reasons presentations fail, and some pointers on how not to inflict needless pain on your audience.
Spewing Facts Instead of Telling a Story
Death by PowerPoint usually comes in the form of a presenter reciting a series of data points – often verbatim from words on slides – in a sequence that only an automaton could love.
The key to delivering a presentation that people enjoy and remember is to view it as a storytelling challenge. In a recent study, nearly 90 percent of businesspeople said that a strong narrative, or the story behind a presentation, is critical for maintaining engagement.
Your best guide to creating a good presentation is to follow the fundamentals of storytelling. This means bringing a narrative to life with experiences that resonate deeply with your audience. It requires you to invoke interesting people, distinctive places, and gnarly problems. Then, through the process of struggle and resolution, your audience will feel the emotions and derive for themselves the wisdom embedded in your narrative.
Relying on PowerPoint
I worked at Microsoft for 27 years. PowerPoint is my friend. But it’s only a tool. Asking it to deliver a presentation is like asking Google Docs to write your next big memo. Don’t be tempted by templates and pop-up suggestions. Well-intentioned though they may be, they can take you down the road to disaster.
The dangers of PowerPoint (or any of its worthy competitors) are legion. Dense blocks of text, pointless visuals, color schemes out of a bad acid trip – the list goes on.
Stick with simplicity. For starters, go to your favorite deck and remove half the slides and half the words. For each slide, include no more than three bullets; six words max per bullet. Use only one font type, and only two colors max. Learn to love white space.
At its best, PowerPoint is the canvas for the essential visuals that propel your narrative. If a picture, table, chart, graphic, or word does not directly serve your story, don’t use it.
Winging It
When I worked as an executive speechwriter at Microsoft, my big challenge was often to get a busy leader to practice for an important presentation. Too often, an exec would say, “I’ll review the deck on the flight to the event,” which I came to understand as either, “I don’t actually care,” or “I’m so awesome I don’t need to prep.” Either way, some brand of disaster was assured.
The impact of your presentation is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend perfecting it. There’s no natural talent, no magic pill that can substitute for this painful but essential truth.
Steve Jobs, arguably the most brilliant presenter in the history of commerce, was legendary for the obsessive preparation he put into his seminal keynotes. He spent hundreds of hours practicing, browbeating his staff, pushing himself to get every detail right. Then, when the spotlight turned on, he delivered a narrative so natural, so relaxed, it was as though he was your best friend sharing ideas that had just popped into his head.
If you’re going to deliver a 15-minute presentation that matters, plan to spend 15 hours on it. Draft the narrative, re-draft, and draft again. Then practice it completely at least 20 times in the three days preceding delivery – more if possible. Practice for your friends, your coworkers, your dog. Record yourself, then watch it. Practice it in the shower, in the car, in bed as you fall asleep. Own the narrative so deeply that you could no more forget it than you could forget the day you met your perfect love.
Then, you’ll be ready.
