Focusing on What People Need to Hear
PowerPoint gets a lot of bad press. There’s nothing wrong with the software, but there’s a ton of bad PowerPoint presentations out there. I think PowerPoint allows a bad presenter to give bad presentations more easily. Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire does a great job of moving away from the horrific presentations we’re used to.
Cliff urges us to consider what the audience wants to know and how the information will help them. Then take that information and put it in a classical Greek story format so that you’re not just giving facts, but telling a story. Good stuff. Cliff has also set up a template to help people storyboard and turn their information into a story. As a trial lawyer, I appreciate Cliff’s structure and find it helpful, but don’t feel the need to follow it 100% of the time.
I’ve also been reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds recently. Garr uses the same concepts as Cliff; e.g. getting away from bullet points, working to focus on what the audience wants to hear and using carefully selected graphics to anchor the points. Garr is an American living in Japan and when focusing on simplicity he focuses on a zen approach. As Garr quotes "Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means." — Dr. Koichi Kawana
For trial lawyers this is important stuff. How do we get across information so that people will actually understand and accept the information? It’s not enough that we say things, it has to be understood, accepted and internalized by the juror or audience member. If we don’t have that, we’re just talking in the wind.
David, I think you're right about PowerPoint.
I read somewhere that the brain can handle 1.5 billion bits of information in a second. So, when you are making a point during any presentation, if it is visually enhanced, it has more power. It's that simple.
And, since most of those 1.5 billion bits go into the subconscious mind which is 90% of the mind, it is subconscious persuasion. Again, more power.
The biggest mistake people make is showing one slide and droning on for ten minues....and the one slide is just a few words and a bit of clip art.
I recommend that you show up to 5 slides a minute, each one with a powerful visual that reinforces your point.
Good points. I'm a fan of the zen approach (in fact I think I refer to it in my own presentation skills site's blog rather more often than I should! :) ) and the comment you make above - "focus on the audience" - rings bells from the big mantra we use on our public presentation skills courses, namely Presentations aren't about telling people what you know! They're about telling people what they need to know, in the way they need to know it...."
