A very important presentation
I attended a power meeting yesterday. Lots of highly paid consultants in blue suits and incredibly shiny shoes came to tell us where we are going wrong.
I sat there for an hour, looking at the screen.
Slide after slide after slide passed me by.
They were very impressive slides
The technique is to place 4 slides onto one. Don’t waste a single square inch of presentation space. It demonstrates how deeply you have assessed the problem and how strategically you think.
If you haven’t come across the approach yet it looks a little like this…
It is coming to a PowerPoint deck near you soon.
There is a problem with all this deep strategic thought
I am too old and too stupid to understand it.
I see a mass of diagrams, clip art, corporate colours and close-packed text, unfortunately they mean nothing to me. I have got to the stage where I can only hold one (sometimes two) lucid thoughts in my head at anyone time — perhaps it’s the gin. My ability to concentrate is deeply limited.
The good news is it isn’t just me
Watch the video below and you will see what I mean.
We can only really concentrate on one thing at a time. It is something to do with the prefrontal cortex. This is a biological limitation you should know and understand, particularly if you are pulling together a PowerPoint presentation.
Here are a handful of very simple rules…
There is no substitute for clarity
- Only present 1 idea per slide
- Write the idea on the slide, (sometimes called the “what is the point of this slide” test)
- Add supporting data
- Make sure the next idea / slide builds on this one
Of course, I make the rash assumption you want your audience to understand you…
As for the consultants
Their slides looked very pretty, but even though I thought about it all night, I still have no idea what they were telling me. They must have been deeply strategic. I hope we are paying them lots of money.
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Image by donnaidh_sidhe
Hello James,
Thank you for the video, I love the way that they have updated it to point out that the fundamental issue at hand. Once you have a fixed point of view, and fix on a particular point of view/content, then you will miss the bigger picture and all that shows up in it.
Put differently, there is price to pay for focus. Focus is not all it is cracked up to be. Arguably the companies that focus the best on existing operations, existing realities, existing best practices…. these are the companies who are likely to miss the opportunities and dangers arising in the world, right now. And thus eventually, get taken over or disbanded.
All the best
maz
An interesting thought Maz, maybe all companies die at some stage for that very reason.
Though I think it is more to do with short sightedness and complacency
James
James,
You wrote that ‘Their slides looked very pretty’. Really?
There is a quote that variations of have been attributed to Pascal, Locke, Benjamin Franklin, Thoreau, Cicero and Woodrow Wilson. It goes:
‘Forgive me for writing a long letter, I did not have time to write a short one’
I have worked with consultants like these in the past. In fact, I could say that I have been one, once.
It’s lazy thinking, lacks courage and shows that they think ‘value’ equals number of words and number of slides.
Adrian
Lazy thinking
I think that is precisely the point Adrian.
Thanks for your comment