Can’t Hear the Forest for the Trees

THE NEXT TIME YOU’RE TEMPTED TO USE A BULLET-SLIDE, try this test.

1) Get your smart phone or other device that can play music through a speaker. (The more sketchy the quality of the speaker, the better.)

2) Queue up a song that has a strong beat and a catchy lyric. (The more well-known the song, the better.)

3) Crank up the volume, then find an unsuspecting colleague to try this on.

4) Start to tell your colleague about a particular idea, and then hit the play button on your music player. Keep talking, while the music cranks away — and watch the confusion on your colleague’s face. They’re struggling to listen to you, while their mind really wants to sing along with the music.

You know what? That’s exactly the dilemma (minus the singing) that happens to your audience every time you throw up a bullet-point slide. They want to listen to you (we hope), but their minds are forced to read, read, read. We’re all hard-wired to act that way.

And when they’re reading, reading, reading they are NOT listening to you. Even if they’re all fast readers, their connection to you has been broken. Maybe not irretrievably, but broken nonetheless.

To remedy this, cut out the extraneous noise — which would be most of your bullet-point slides. Then, if you’ve got one set of instructions or key bits you really want them to remember, go ahead and do a list or bullets.

If you only give them one or two bullet slides in your whole presentation, the items on those slides will have much greater impact because they haven’t been preceded by a lot of lesser bullets and text.

Have fun with this exercise!