The No-Presentation Rule for Presentations
I often wonder what meetings and presentations were like in the business world before there was PowerPoint. I believe that PowerPoint can be effective when used properly, but why is it that 95% of all presentations are boring with some monotone person standing in front of the room reading off bullet points?
A colleague, Dan McWeeney, and I have been trying to follow a new rule we made called the no-presentation rule for presentations; it states that:
If I can send you my presentation and you can understand it by reading through it, then you don’t need me to waste time by presenting it.
Since then, I stumbled upon a blog by Garr Reynolds called Presentation Zen. It is a great blog with a lot of good tips. I found that Dan and I are not alone with our no-presentation rule. Here is the second presentation tip listed on Garr’s personal site:
The best slides may have no text at all. This may sound insane given the dependency of text slides today, but the best PowerPoint slides will be virtually meaningless with out the narration (that is you). Remember, the slides are meant to support the narration of the speaker, not make the speaker superfluous.
Many people often say something like this: “Sorry I missed your presentation. I hear it was great. Can you just send me your PowerPoint slides?” But if they are good slides, they will be of little use without you.
Thanks Garr, I couldn’t have said it better myself. In my college presentation skills course, PowerPoint slides and transparencies were termed visual aids. At what point did slides become the entire content and the speaker minimized to be an audio aid only? Most people that I talk to prefer slides that have very little text, very few bullet points, and are not up on the screen for more than a minute. Amazingly enough, we do not always create slides for our own presentations the same way we would prefer to see them if we were sitting in the audience.
Recently, Cote asked his readers whether he thought agenda slides were appropriate for presentations. The responses that surprised me the most were the ones that stated agendas were good so that the audience participant could know early on whether he wanted to leave or he would at least know how long into the presentation you were along so he could decide whether he needed to stay. The question that comes to mind for those responses is how did that person get invited to the presentation if it didn’t concern them in the first place. It’s safe and easy to invite everyone to your meeting, but in the end, you only wasted their time and yours. If you stay focused on the point, speak and not read, and keep the length to a minimum (preferable 6 - 15 minutes) , then most people won’t have the need to constantly refer to the agenda wondering when they can get the hell out of there.
As we sit in our standard template, bullet-point ridden, text filled presentation hell, hopefully there lies ahead a future where we see more of the likes of Lawrence Lessig, Steve Jobs, and Guy Kawasaki. All of these presenters are not just audio aids, they actually make their presentations enjoyable and interesting. What a crazy thought that a presenter would actually be essential to a presentation. So do your part the next time you have a speaking opportunity and try to apply the no-presentation rule for presentations.
Source: www.ewherrmann.com