24 THE MEETING PROFESSIONAL MAY 2016

PEER TO PEER

YOUR POWERPOINT IS SHOWING—and it’s scaring everyone out of the room. Your slides are preventing any hope of getting in-side your audience’s head because everyone’s brain has left the ballroom.

Not you? Then it’s your boss, your direct reports or your col-leagues. It’s someone at your company because I keep seeing it and so do you.

Because I value your time as much as my own, I’ll give you the secret right now: Help people remember, not understand.

THE PROBLEMMost presenters are guilty of over informing, over supporting and over complicating on screen. I’m so con ident that you agree with me that I’m willing to buy you lunch if you don’t. Seriously. I will buy you lunch.

Before a presenter even steps on stage, he or she is compet-ing with context and attention span, not to mention the second screen. If your PowerPoint is confusing on the big screen, it will be even more so on the small one.

The single most important objective every presenter seeks regardless of whether his or her talk is informational, persua-sive or inspirational, is engagement. The problem is, many ex-ecutives’ visuals disengage. But it’s not their fault; it’s ours for not helping them. Executives are not designers and were not hired because they’re experts at creating visuals, nor were their

assistants. It’s our job to help them make better presentations. This doesn’t mean creating their slides for them, it means offer-ing them ideas and solutions to help them engage.

The obvious ixes—reducing the number of slides, the amount of information on each one, better font and color choic-es—are a great start, as these common mistakes will undermine even the most well-rehearsed delivery. But the less obvious cor-rection is to use slides to help the audience remember. If you want your content to change behavior and live on after you’ve inished presenting, your slides need to amplify your points in memorable fashion.

THE SOLUTIONWhen you’re preparing a presentation, you should irst deliver from notes, not visuals. Be so clear and simple in your presen-tation that you can tell the story with zero support on screen. Then determine the main point of each paragraph or chart you would normally make into a slide and consider how else you can memorably convey it: a simpler graph or chart, a fun photo, ive words instead of ive lines. Sometimes the best slide is no slide.

Less information on each slide makes it easier to communi-cate and remember. You can make details available in other ways in advance of your talk or afterwards. Bullet points are supposed to be bite-sized so don’t choke your audience.

But the most important guideline I can share with you is to

PowerPoint: The Secret No One Knows

May Peer to Peer.indd 24May Peer to Peer.indd 24 4/22/16 12:57 PM4/22/16 12:57 PM

MPIWEB.ORG 25

make your slides instantly gettable. People can’t immediately process information you’ve studied for days or a career. So, if you use simple, memorable words or graphics that enhance your point, there’s a much bet-ter chance you will not only engage the au-dience but also help them remember what you told them.

To the extent possible, connect content to your key takeaways. Three is enough. People aren’t going to remember more than three or so points. Use your mouth to help them understand, use slides to help them remember. The best PowerPoint presentations aren’t the ones with the most information; they’re the ones that are remembered for a few key points.

If your subject matter is complex that’s even more of a reason to simplify. Every spreadsheet, chart and graph tells a story. What is that story? Think of a way to communicate it in a picture, a sin-gle word or another more memorable fashion. It’s not wrong to show a chart; it’s wrong to display one with so much detail that it overwhelms. At least break it down into manageable bites.

The single best PowerPoint presentation I’ve seen was given by the CIO of a tech company. It was mostly photographs. Each inancial point he conveyed took the form of a beautiful widescreen image that didn’t force people to understand; it enabled them to remember. This top inance guy didn’t take the expected approach of drowning people in numbers they wouldn’t remember. He used pictures they wouldn’t forget.

The Super Bowl halftime show contains an inordinate amount of stimuli but you can pro-cess it because a stadium and the sky above it provide an enormous canvas. A ballroom screen or mobile device offers the polar oppo-site. Get small. Get simple. Get to the point.

Slides should be immediately accessible and memorable, like a logo or popular song or the name of a sports team. Think bumper sticker, not white paper. Broadway shows such as Wicked, Chicago, Annie and Rent are named with a single word because they’re easy to remember. And if you don’t use a sin-gle word, audiences will often do it for you: Phantom. Don’t make them work too hard.

Get your audience paying attention to you. Coco Chanel famously said “Dress shabbily and

they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman.” You want people talking about you, not your mind-numbing slides. In all my years, I’ve never overheard an attendee talking about how incredible the slides were. So, if you’re going to use slides, use them to your greatest advantage.

Here’s a bonus secret: It’s much harder to prepare a simpler presentation; it takes more time and thought to deconstruct information into less words and simpler visuals that have memorable impact. To paraphrase the famous quote about writing a shorter letter: “If I had more time, I would have created fewer slides.” It will take more time to make a better presen-

tation but it won’t cost more. Some presenters hide behind PowerPoint and would rather you

look at the screens than at themselves. Others are tempted to convey everything they know about their topic in one presentation and ev-erything about each point in one slide. Help them resist this urge. Not only is there not enough time to address every nuance but people can only process so much. TED talks are 18 minutes for a reason. And if you’re going to read every slide, just link me to the deck and I’ll read it on my own time.

You’ve heard it before: Less is more, a picture is worth a thou-sand words, and so on. Apply this thinking to PowerPoint to help your presenters make more compelling presentations. At the very least, we can help them avoid boring or confusing their audiences

and undermining engagement.

THE FINAL WORDWould you rather your audience understand your presentation or remember it? You want both, of course, but it’s the presenter’s job to help his or her audience understand. It’s Pow-erPoint’s job to support those points, not to convey each and every detail such that the slides detract from or compete with the speak-er. Anyone who relies on PowerPoint to do the heavy lifting is going to wind up hurting them-selves.

Build slides that amplify your points rath-er than make them and to help reinforce what to remember more so than understand.

Contact me for a summary of these points and others that you can reference for yourself and forward to your presenters. ■

Ken Kirsh (MPI Philadelphia Area

Chapter) is an award-winning live

event producer of business meetings,

concerts, broadcast and special events.

He is branch director at PSAV and a

regular contributor to The Meeting

Professional, and has conducted sem-

inars at the World Education Congress

and numerous local chapters. Contact

him at kkirsh@psav.com.

Less information on each slide makes it easier to communicate and remember. You can make details available in other ways in advance of your talk or afterwards.

May Peer to Peer.indd 25May Peer to Peer.indd 25 4/26/16 9:06 AM4/26/16 9:06 AM