Life After PowerPoint!

I’m a big fan of framing many technical presentations in a Problem – Solution format. You lay out a problem, analyze it, propose one or more solutions, discuss their pros and cons, and make a recommendation.

Of course, in real life problems are often complicated and messy and solutions are harder to come by. (Just ask the people at BP.)

When I’m called in to work with a team that is confronted with a serious problem, here’s a list of questions I draw from. Not all of them are applicable to all situations, mind you, but I like having them to prompt discussions:

1. Is it a problem, a situation, or a condition? A threat or an opportunity?
2. What is the problem? What is the nature of the problem? Does it involve people, processes, systems, technology, or tools? Is it acute or chronic? Isolated or systemic?
3. What do we know about the problem? What else do we need to know? What questions do we need to ask? How are we going to get the information we need? Who has the knowledge, skill, or experience to help address the problem?
4. When did the problem begin? How did it develop?
5. Who is most affected by the problem? Who has the most at stake? Who is responsible for resolving the problem?
6. What values, ethical considerations, laws, regulations, or relationships are at stake?
7. Where (in what physical location, system, department) did the problem begin? Where does it currently exist?
8. What is the cause or the source of the problem?
9. What problems (pain) does the problem cause?
10. How has the problem been addressed in the past? What was done, by whom, when, and to what effect?
    What is the probability of the problem resolving itself?
11. How much cost-in money, time, labor-will be incurred if the problem is left alone?
12. What solutions have the greatest probability of success? What are the pros and cons of each one? Which one do you recommend? What does your gut tell you to do?
13. Do the proposed solutions address the problem or the pain?
14. How much will each proposed solution cost-in money, time, labor-to implement?
    What risks are involved? What will happen if 1) we do nothing or 2) take this proposed action? What can go wrong? How will people-employees, customers/clients, the public, the competition-react? How probable and how serious are those risks? What can be done to mitigate them?
15. What are the benefits of the proposed solution? How can this problem be turned to an advantage?
16. What happens next? How long will it take to implement the solution and what is the timeframe?

Do you have any questions to add to my list? Which ones do you think are most important? Would you change any?

I often work with teams of technical experts (engineers or various sorts and programmers) who are preparing and rehearsing oral proposals on large — usually government — contracts. The contracts can range in size from twenty-five million to two and a half billion dollars, so there’s a lot at stake.

Depending on the size and complexity of the contract, the rules governing the length of the presentation and the number of slides that can be use, we can spend anywhere from one to four weeks preparing the presentation. We review the written proposal and its win themes, read the presentation guidelines, strategize the oral presentation, and create the PowerPoint slides and other visual aids.

I consider preparation an important part of rehearsing. If you know your message — what you’re going to say and why you’re going to say it — you’ve half-way home. But you still have to rehearse. There are a lot of factors that influence how often we rehearse and for how long, but typically we schedule one to three days.

I always start with a “wall walk.” (I don’t think I came up with the term, but I can’t find references to it anywhere else on the web.) Here’s how it’s done or, at least, how I do it:

1. Print out your slides, one to a page.
2. Tack or tape them to the wall in order. You may need to post a number of columns — five slides top to bottom in one column; then start another column.
3. Ask your team to stand in front of the first slides.
   (For the sake of this explanation, let’s pretend there are 100 slides broken into five sections.)
4. Ask the lead presenter to answer these questions as briefly as possible:
   What do you want the review board to do at the end of this presentation? (The answer should be something like “to award us the contract.”)
   What does the review board need to know and feel in order to do that?
   How does this presentation as a whole achieve that goal?
   (These questions should have driven the creation of the presentation in the first place so they should come as no surprise to anyone.)
5. Then go section by section — in this case through all five sections — through the entire presentation, asking the team or the person who will be briefing each section to answer these questions as briefly as possible:
   What is the purpose of this section?
   How does it advance the overall goal of the presentation?
   By the time you’re finished presenting the slides in this section, what do you want the review board to know and feel?
6. Once the team clearly has in mind the purpose and flow of the presentation at a high level, walk slide by slide through the entire presentation, asking the person who will be presenting the slide to answer these questions:
   What is the one central idea of this slide?
   What concern, problem, or goal of the customer does it address?
   How does it lead to the next slide?

That final question — “how does it lead to the next slide?” — is critical. Too often, people create a lot of slides and simply string them together. They seem to think that simply by presenting a lot of information that they’ve somehow made a persuasive case. They haven’t. What turns data or information into something compelling and useful is the connections, how you tie things together.

A wall walk with a team of five presenters and a hundred slides can take anywhere from two to four hours. It’s a great investment. If you work with teams, consider doing something like it before sending individual presenters off to rehearse their parts. Make sure everyone understands the presentation as a whole and their role in it. You’ll be surprised by how well everyone does.

Do you do something similar? What variations do you suggest?

The goal of any speech or presentation is change.

Last week I wrote about changing your audience’s feelings. I concluded, in brief, that you can and should change people’s feelings during your presentation. But I also cautioned that changing their feelings is a short-lived phenomenon. By their very nature, feelings come and go, rise and fall, intensify and dissipate. What people feel during and shortly after your speech, they won’t be feeling tomorrow or the next day.

So what else can you change in the relatively brief time you’re speaking?

You may be able to change your audience’s actions.

The question I most frequently ask my clients when they’re strategizing their talks is, “What action do you want your audience to take as a result of listening to your talk?”

Do you want them to approve your budget? Give your project the green light? Use your procedure? Buy your product? Make an appointment to speak with you about your services? Give you their input? Join your organization? Volunteer their time? Go to your website for more information?

The more specific and immediate the action, the better. Why? Because you increase the odds that people will do what you want them to if they know exactly what it is you want them to do and if they can do it while it’s still on their minds.

(Andrew Lightheart, in a post titled Focusing on your Outcome without Manipulating People, raises some good questions about taking this approach. He rightly points out that it makes it sound easy to people’s actions, when doing so is actually quite difficult. And he’s also concerned about manipulating people, which I agree, would be an issue if you’re going about it in a covert or sneaky way. But I suggest you be upfront and honest about your intentions. Say, in effect, “Here’s what I want you to do and here’s why.” People always have the choice–you’re not coercing them–to do or not to do what you want them to.)

Although I believe you can and should change your audience’s actions, I’m more skeptical about your chances of changing their behavior.

An action is a one-time thing. “Do this [approve my budget, buy my product, call me to set up an appointment] now.” And that’s often a good thing. (If the selection board, for example, awards your company a multi-million dollar contract as a result of your oral proposal, pat yourself on the back.)

But behavior is an ongoing pattern of acting. It’s a habit. And people rarely, rarely, rarely change habits in response to a one-time event, such as a speech.

You might think, from last week’s post and today’s post, that I have a limited opinion of what a speech or presentation can change. But I wouldn’t be a speaker or a speech coach, if I thought that were true. 

I actually think you can accomplish a lot–even in a single speech. But I think you do so by changing how people think, because if you change how they think you also change how they feel and act. Not just for a moment, but for years to come. Maybe for a lifetime. How you do that is the subject of a future post.

What do you think?

Photo courtesy of HeyPaul at Flickr.

As an orals coach, one of my happier experiences is going to a win party. Which I did last week. A team I had coached in the spring finally got notified that they had won the bid on a job that’s worth 35 million dollars over the five year-term of the contract.

If you’re not familiar with the process, this is how it works. The customer—in this case the Department of Homeland Security—puts out a request for proposal (RFP). Companies submit proposals. Some of them are chosen—it’s called being down selected—and are asked to send in a team to make an “oral proposal.” Depending on the customer’s specifications, the oral proposal can be a one-hour to two-day presentation. I work with teams that are sent in to make the oral proposal.

At the win party the program manager told me what the customer representative said he liked about the team’s oral proposal. The reps comments sum up what I consider to be three of the most important aspects of a successful technical presentation.

Clarity

Clarity is the most important quality of any technical presentation. Being clear doesn’t always win you the audience’s approval or cooperation, but being confusing will inevitably win you their resistance. (A friend of mine puts it this way: “A confused mind always says no.”) Being clear isn’t about “dumbing down” your content. It’s about constructing a logical argument and presenting only as much evidence as necessary to illustrate, explain, or substantiate your points. When it comes to presenting information, less is more. (If people want more information or more detail, they can ask for it during the Q&A.

Audience Centric

“Most presentation teams come in,” the customer representative said, “and tell us all about themselves and how good they are. Which is a real turn off. Your team had clearly taken the time to learn what we want, and they told us what they could do to help us achieve it.” A presentation is NOT about what you know. It’s about using what you know to help your listeners solve a problem or achieve a goal.

Human

“Your people were real,” the rep said. “They weren’t slick or robotic. And they didn’t have a love affair with their slides. They spoke to us, not at us.” An oral proposal is a strange type of presentation. It is both a technical presentation and a job interview. The customer wants to see and hear the people who will actually be doing the work. (That’s why the customer always says to send in the technical people who are bid as part of the job, not to send in sales people.) So for an oral proposal you definitely want your presenters to be as real as possible. They are as much a part of the presentation as is their material. And the same is true for any technical presentation (or for any presentation at all). Who you are—your character, personality, experience, knowledge—is an integral part of any presentation. Don’t make yourself invisible. Don’t stand off to the side in semi-darkness. Don’t act as if the material on your PowerPoint slides is the real stuff and you are its adjunct. Let your personality come through in what you say and how you say it.

What are the qualities you look for in a technical presentation? Are any of them more important than clarity?