A boardroom needn’t be a bored room.
If you’ve suffered through one PowerPoint presentation too many, you’ll know how sedating slides can be. But what’s the alternative? Can you present without them?
Organisations like NASA and the US military are increasingly saying ‘Yes,’ and even banning slides in important presentations. Spoken language, they argue, is more agile and if used properly, more interesting. Sometimes slides actually get in the way.
If you’re bold enough to fly ‘au natural,’ and brave enough to stand out from the pack, here are some simple tips to help you conquer your next presentation and rule the boardroom.
1. Orient Yourself Correctly:
Ask: What is my goal? Remember, you’re not just doing a data-dump. You are a sales-person for a message; a Crusader for an important idea. That’s a critical shift in thinking, and using this one principle as your starting point will simplify your task in creating the presentation and place you ahead of most presenters when you come to deliver it.
Every presentation is an argument for an idea. If anything fails to help your argument, it’s extraneous. Feel free to dump it. The same goes for lengthy company histories of the ‘In the beginning, when Moses founded our toupé factory’ variety. No one cares, and all additional filler weakens and softens the impact of your core argument.
Focus with laser-precision on making a clean, clear, effective argument. The more you’re able to strip it down, the greater the hammer-strike will be. If a fact or figure helps you to make your argument, it’s in. If not, march it to the guillotine.
2. Put Critical but Low-Impact Facts into a Hand-out:
If there are details that they must have, but which are terrifically boring to present (i.e., which soften the impact of your argument), their rightful place is in a hand-out, not on a screen behind you.
All of those lovely little dots and dashes, charts and graphs, dense paragraphs and squiggly lines may add legitimacy, but they needn’t be part of the oral delivery. They take up time and dampen impact.
The oral delivery is all about persuasion, not reporting of facts. Remember, you are there to deliver a message, which is ‘what you want them to think as a result of the facts.’ Merely delivering the facts themselves is relatively pointless; they could simply have been sent by email. What do the facts tell us? What should we do as a result of them? That’s your actual job.
3. Pick a Powerful Structure
Most presenters really just use PowerPoint in place of notes. They’re scared of forgetting what they wanted to say, and so they load the entire contents of Google onto the screen behind them. PowerPoint was initially meant to be a ‘visual aid,’ not a set of reminders for the presenter.
Using a powerful presentation structure will help you to remember your points easily, negating the need for text on a screen. There are many incredibly effective structures to choose from, but here are three of my favourites:
- Use PSA: Point – Story – Application. Make a point, tell a story, make another point, tell another story. This is a powerful way to speak. The PSA structure adds one more element, which is ‘application.’ Make your point, tell a story that illustrates the point, then show your audience how to apply the point in their lives. Repeat this formula for as many points as you may have.
- Use a central metaphor and sub-points: Scenario planner Clem Sunter is renowned for his riveting (and PowerPoint-free) presentations on ‘Foxes and Hedgehogs.’ After introducing a metaphor for a central idea, which is that ‘foxes’ are agile and explore many options, while ‘hedgehogs’ are old fashioned and cling to one doctrine, Clem explores various story-examples that illustrate this theme. He speaks for 60 minutes, using this one metaphor alone. Think of this structure like a MindMap: An interesting metaphor in the centre, with story-examples spiralling out from it.
- Use an A-versus-B structure: To make your idea come to life, contrast it with its antithesis. For instance, to make a series of points about how experts behave, contrast the idea against how amateurs might behave; to speak on ‘how rich people think,’ contrast your points against ‘how poor people think.’ This structure also works using ‘before and after.’ Speak about life before your idea, then create a mental picture of how things might be afterwards.
4. Use Theatre-of-the-Mind:
To belabor a point a little, the best presentations really are persuasive arguments, not information-dumps. To that end, the more you can get your audience to ‘live’ in the world of your ideas – seeing them, feeling them, truly becoming emotionally involved – the greater your effectiveness will be.
For that reason, it’s often effective to build tension around how unfavorable a world without your idea may be. This can be done in the form of hypothetical stories, in which you paint mental pictures and explore the cost of inaction. Equally, you want your audience to feel enthusiasm for your idea, which can be achieved just as well through the use of hypothetical stories, this time showing desirable outcomes.
5. Master a Few Public Speaking Basics:
There is no doubt that our own conviction in an idea is a significant aspect of selling it. Learning a few simple public speaking techniques will make you exponentially more compelling and far less dependent on slides.
There is no end of oratory techniques you can learn, but let me offer you one master-key to them all: Contrast.
The most compelling presenters know how to create contrast in a number of elements, including soft and loud volume, slow and fast pace, emphatic delivery and pauses. Animation is the product of contrast. Monotony is the result of its absence.
Do you ever practice in front of a mirror? Wander around your office delivering a pitch? Practice at a Toastmasters club? Excellent! Public speaking and presenting are all about what you do out loud, and quite often, the sort of language we use when we rehearse in our minds sounds awkward in a live delivery.
Out-loud practice is imperative. My personal recommendation is to use a mirror, and observe your own body language, posture and enthusiasm.
Good luck on your next big presentation, and remember this guiding principle: Having the information is only half of your job. Making it come alive for an audience is the balance.