WANT TO BREAK OUT OF THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH to developing and delivering presentations? Here’s the first in a series of 10 exercises to help you be more compelling and effective with your presentations. These exercises can help anyone who works with PowerPoint — sales executives, marketers, product managers, CXOs, keynoters, teachers, et al.
One of the problems with most presentations is that there are just tooooo many slides, and tooooo many slides about “Me”. To break out of that mindset, here are your tasks for this lesson:
[1] Graphics Only
How would your presentation be if you couldn’t — or wouldn’t — use any text? Would you use a different picture or clip art for each slide or even each bullet? Hopefully not for bullets, and perhaps not even for every slide. Maybe you’d let one image express the message for several of your current slides? Try it and see how different (and more compelling) your presentation becomes.BTW: You can use single words, in large size, as graphic elements. Garr Reynolds at PresentationZen has a great post on this.
[2] No Slides
What if you couldn’t use PowerPoint (or similar program) at all? How would you get your story across? How would you burn your message in your audience’s brains and move them to action?This is a really important exercise, because it forces you to look at the big picture of what you’re trying to get people to understand, and then find a way to express that idea without the crutch of electronic tools.
Go through this before you develop your next presentation. Beyond helping you make a stronger, more focused case, it could save you big-time if the power goes out or your PC explodes.
[3] Let Them Tell It
Wouldn’t it be great if our audience would do our presentations for us? They would certainly be invested in the outcome! You can’t ask them outright to do it, but you can create the atmosphere for it. You start by setting the context for the discussion, and then asking them a series of questions that take more than a “Yes” or “No” answer.You could have a huge deck of slides at the ready, but if you only start with one slide and then get them talking, it will seem like you have none. Then, if they raise a point or ask a question which can be explained or enhanced with one of your visuals, you can go to that specific slide.
Taking this approach requires several things: 1) knowing your material and your audience’s needs thoroughly; 2) having your deck set-up so you can easily find and jump to a specific graphic; 3) having the confidence to just have a conversation (versus a monolog that steers them to your desired conclusion).
For other posts on these ideas, check out Ban “Safe” Presentations and Blue Ocean Presentations, part 2.
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To see the other parts of this series, find the heading EXERCISES in right column of The YouBlog. It’s between “Recent Posts” and “Categories”. You can do them in any order you like.
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