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As part of the
presentation skills training services our company provides, we
ask participants to send copies of recent PowerPoint files they
have created for our review and editing.
Hence, we see literally thousands of slides each year.
Very few do an acceptable job of aiding Knowledge
Transfer.
In fact, in the 10 years we
have been in business, we have seen a slow and steady
degradation in the quality of on-screen visuals from all
industries. No
sector seems to be immune. As
PowerPoint has grown to dominate the boardroom, ballroom, and
even the classroom, its overall contribution to the persuasive
arts has been continually diminished by its increasing
misapplication.
Now before you start
thinking that this is just one more rant against another evil
product from Microsoft, hear this:
Our firm not only believes that PowerPoint is a wonderful
piece of software, we claim that, overall, it can serve the
purposes of true knowledge transfer better than any other visual
presentation tool available.
And we don’t blame the poor souls who create most of
the incomprehensi we see – most businesspeople are
simply issued a laptop and a copy of PowerPoint and ordered to
go forth and multiply the company’s revenues, with little or
no thought to training them how best do so.
The real culprits here are
found not in the field, but rather back in the main office, from
whence, being at least once removed from the actually
application of their misdeeds, THEY can comfortably issue edicts
of what one shall and shall not do with the design and
construction of presentation slides.
If you’ve ever been subject to edicts handed down from
the Department of Presentation Regulations, you know what we
mean.
So when we see a slew of
equally bad slides from different people in the same
organization, we’re fairly certain that the company has a slew
of workers in a Presentation Regulations Department working
feverishly to hamstring any attempt by an employee to make their
slides understandable, much less compelling.
Our first such encounter
with THEM was while training a large consumer products company
in Pittsburgh, where class participants presented us with slides
that for the most part looked like full-page Excel spreadsheets
copied and condensed to (barely) fit within the projectable
borders. Can you
imagine how much fun it is to try to read 8 pt. Arial font
that’s been compressed lengthwise by, say, 20 percent?
Halfway into explaining why
its best to not go much below 20 pt. type when projecting images
at the current maximum resolution of 96 dpi,
one student raised her hand to explain that they had to
use very small type to get all the information they were
expected to deliver in the maximum of 8 slides THEY allowed.
In other words, Regulations had ordered a limit to the
number of slides – not the number of minutes (a
perfectly acceptable limit) one had to present.
When we redo a
client’s presentation to conform to the rules of
comprehension, we often take 10 slides and turn them into, say,
24 – all for the purpose of being able to deliver the
presentation less ambiguously, in less time.
With properly designed visuals, there is usually an
inverse relationship between the number of slides and the time
it takes to deliver. Know
this: keeping your presentations short is almost always a good
thing. Few people
ever complain that the presenter simply didn’t drone on long
enough.
After numerous inquires by
both letter and phone, we discovered that the 8-slide maximum
was part of a larger policy that, among other constraints,
limited middle-managers to the number of slides they could
present based on their company grade level.
So managers in the 50-65 level could deliver 8 slides,
70-85’s were allowed 12, 90’s and above could have as many
as 20. No mention of
the harshness of the penalties for any transgression, but
evidently nobody was willing to go head-to-head with the
company’s Prohibitor General.
Amazingly, a few letters later we learned that the source
of most of these dictates had actually left the company four
years prior, but her successor was unwilling to mess with
corporate policy.
And that, it seems,
is how many of these immensely damaging protocols come from –
people long removed from accountability, who together form that
great entity THEY, by whom all things are denied.
Only after we were given
the opportunity to present one of the redone presentations to an
open-minded senior VP was the policy changed – but not without
his using up some of his political capital to make it happen.
(He has since left the company, too.)
Although we also believe
that for purposes of branding, or, say, when an executive needs
to get similar information on different topics from different
direct reports, having consistency in presentation design
throughout the company can be a good thing.
Our argument is with those who command consistency over
quality – and quality in presentation design is all about one
thing: do the slides add to the process of knowledge transfer?
For the most part we see slides that work diligently
against knowledge transfer because they must first conform to
protocols that only THEY can dream up. And
to change policy, you first need to achieve the impossible:
finding THEM.
As consultants we often
work as agents of change within organizations, and sometimes
that means stirring things up here and there.
We believe that in large organizations its often more
productive to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, so we
urge participants in our classes to stand up to THEM, and create
slides that persuade rather than simply conform.
As often as not, THEY never discover the difference until
its too late and the culture’s already changed!
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