Life After PowerPoint!

A great post from the people at CreativityWorks about metaphors and their misuse got me thinking. It is truly worth reading. (I’m using some of its insights and going off on my own tangent, so don’t blame them fo what you read here.)

Metaphors would seem to be the antidote to business buzz words, which are often abstract and imprecise.

Take ROI as example. “Return on Investment” once had a very precise meaning in financial services. It meant — and still means — according to Investopedia: “A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio.” There’s even a formula you can use to calculate the ROI.

Now days ROI has lost its specificity and people in all different fields use it simply to mean “making more money (from your investment, your project or program, your effort, your time) than you put into it.” It has become, in other words, corporate speak.

You would think that metaphors, which are by their very nature concrete and specific, would be more effective and powerful. But they’re not. At least, not the ones that are so commonly used in business.

A good metaphor compares one thing — an unknown or ill-defined or abstract thing — to something else — something the listeners know, something that is concrete and specific. A good metaphor doesn’t need to be explained, since its very purpose is to explain or illustrate something else.

Which brings me to the metaphors that business people love. They all conjure up images, which is the idea of a metaphor, but they all too often fail to add insight. Their meaning isn’t immediately apparent. Here’s my rule: If you need to explain it, it’s not a good metaphor.

The 800 Hundred Pound Gorilla

My list of poor, overused, or trite business metaphors includes (in alphabetic order):

• 800 pound gorilla
• best of breed
• blue sky thinking
• boots on the ground
• bring our ‘a’ game
• carrot and stick
• down in the weeds
• drink the kool aid
• eat what you kill
• gone off the reservation
• level the playing field
• low-hanging fruit
• move the needle
• on the same page
• push the envelop
• raise the bar
• rubber hits the road
• step up to the plate
• stick to your knitting
• stir the pot
• take it to the next level
• tear down the silos
• the bleeding edge
• the learning curve
• think outside the box
• throw under the bus
• under the radar
• who moved my cheese?

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree that metaphors shouldn’t have to be explained? Do you take exception with any metaphor on my list? What metaphor would you add?

Photo courtesy of Weiter Winkel at Flickr.

Academy Award acceptance speeches tie with a president’s State of the Union address (any president’s State of the Union address) for boredom-inducing silliness and lack of purpose. Every so often, of course, there are exceptions in both categories, but they are rare and they only highlight how pointless all the other ones are.

(For a delightfully wicked and profoundly cynical take on these speeches, go to the “Academy Award Acceptance Speech Generator.”)

Still, it’s hard to blame the Oscar winners. (I was going to write that theirs is a thankless task, but it seems that giving thanks is all they do.) The winners are, after all, set up to fail. For any number of reasons.

First, the pressure is on. Even the calmest, most restrained and balanced person–is anyone in the movie industry calm, restrained, or balanced?–would have a hard time keeping his or emotions in check. Yes, it’s a good thing to be passionate when you’re speaking, but there is such a thing as too much passion. At least, for a speaker. (If you doubt me, watch Gwyneth Paltrow’s speech as she gasped and wept her way through her acceptance speech for her role in Shakespeare In Love.)

Second, there’s the time limit. Short speeches are the hardest ones to pull off–especially when the pressure is on and your emotions are running riot. And these speeches are or are meant to be very short.

Third, the event itself is an unholy mess. It’s long, disjointed, and uneven. And that’s not even taking the commercial breaks into account. How do you get people’s attention, establish rapport, and be in the moment, when the entire event conspires against you?

But I think there’s another reason why the vast majority of Oscar speeches are so painful to watch. And it’s this: they’re pointless. They serve no purpose.

Under normal circumstances, when you’re given an award and asked to say a few words, that’s exactly what you do. You say a few words. You thank people for recognizing your accomplishment or contribution. You thank those who helped you. And you leave the stage or sit down. Your goal is simply to be gracious in response to other people’s and the audience’s kindness.

But that’s not the purpose of an Academy Award acceptance speech. And that’s not what the winners do. The ceremony would be even more boring than it invariably is–imagine such a possibility–if winner after winner simply followed that formula.

Every speech is or should be driven by a goal–what the speaker wants to accomplish. And that goal, in some way, has to address the audience’s needs. And that’s where I think these speeches fail. Most winners haven’t figured out or haven’t even tried to figure out how to say something that will have some effect on the audience.

The purpose of these speeches is not to thank everyone who has ever been kind or helpful to you. It is, I think, to be entertaining. People are watching and listening in the hope that someone in an entirely too long evening will say something that engages their hearts and minds.

These speeches don’t have to be comical or clever. Heartfelt is fine. So is witty. Self-deprecating humor would be nice. Insightful or intellectually penetrating would be a bonus.

Your thoughts? Did any speech or any moment stand out for you?

Usually talking back to the boss is a career-limiting move. But there are times and situations when it’s not only called for, but necessary and beneficial.

I don’t call it talking back, mind you. I call it reporting back. Here’s when and how to do it.

Say your boss tells you or the team you’re leading to do something. He wants you, maybe, to make an improvement in a product or a process. He’s pretty firm about it, but he’s not real specific.

Ask him questions. Listen. Take notes. Instead of immediately working on a solution, think about what you think he’s thinking. Ask yourself or yourselves questions.

I suggest, for starters, working through the basics:

• Who? Who else is involved in this project? Who is in charge? Who is affected by it? Who knows the most about it?
• What? What is the current situation? What about it does the boss find unsatisfactory? What does the boss want changed or improved? What is the extent of the change? What is the desired outcome? What is the level of effort to be invested?
• Where? Where will the work be done? Where are the people or resources located? Where will the product be produced?
• When? When is deadline or expected delivery date? When is the start date?
• Why? Why does the boss want this change? Why did he put you in charge?
• How? How will he judge the finished product or project? How will you know what you’re doing meets with his approval?

Be especially clear about the assumptions you’re making. For example, you might be assuming from the way he talked about the project that it’s high priority and that you’re to drop everything and get right on it.

You don’t have to answer all these questions in detail or in writing. But you do have to surface issues that need clarification.

Then, go back to your boss and tell him you’ve thought about the project and you’d like to make sure you’ve understood what he wants. Give him a brief, but detailed summary. And state your assumptions. Ask, “Is that what you want?”

It’s surprising how often your boss will make modifications to what you’ve said, even if you’re simply echoing back what he just recently said.

This process — reporting back — will save you all a lot of grief. It will help you understand more precisely what you’re being asked to do. And it may even help your boss think through what he wants.

What do you think of this process?

I came upon a great article, The Humble Flipchart - a Project Manager’s Best Friend by Tom Ferguson. It lists the benefits of using a flipchart to facilitate brainstorming:

1. Provides focus for the team.
2. Records and displays our thoughts so far
3. Communicates more than words and sometimes what words cannot
4. Invites participation and when participants see their ideas up there in print, this encourages even more and better participation
5. Leverages the diverse knowledge, skills and experiences in the team towards specific objectives
6. Captures the thoughts of all and not just your own
7. Provides a platform for all to refer to and work from
8. Verifies that all contributions have been accepted, understood and are of value
9. Allows fast forward and rewind back and forth to add to or reposition a particular point
10. Pages can be reordered easily with the help of tape or bluetack

I think that many types of presentations can reap the same benefits.

You wouldn’t want to use a flipchart if your presentation is predominantly a one-way transfer of knowledge, where your goal is to communicate content you know to people who don’t know it. And you wouldn’t want to use a flipchart in a large room where people would be unable to see it. But you might want to use a flipchart, when you’re trying to facilitate a sharing of information or a group process (like brainstorming).

Using a flipchart encourages audience participation and interaction more effectively than just about any other process or tool that’s available. Audience members aren’t just responding or adding to the content on a slide someone else (i.e. you) created and displayed. They aren’t simply asking questions, which keeps them in the learner mode. They’re actually creating content. They’re generating ideas. They’re taking ownership. They, in effect, are acting like adults, which is — to my way of thinking — to be encouraged.

Do you use flipcharts? If so, what suggestions or reservations do you have about doing so?

In Emotional Structure: A Guide for Screenwriters, Peter Dunne makes an interesting distinction. He writes: “The plot provides the action: the film’s motion. And the story provides the reaction: the film’s emotion.”

Plot is what happens to the main character. Story is what the character becomes as a result.

GI Joe Cast

Action movies — think Transformers, GI Joe, X-Men — are heavy on plot. One action careens into another, sometimes logically, sometimes not. The characters may or may not change, but whatever change they do make is relatively minor and always subordinate to the action.

I make a similar distinction. I think that a speech’s content is its information and ideas: what the speech is about. And its message is what the content means: how the information ties together in a way that the audience can understand and use.

Technical presentations can be a lot like action movies. They are often heavy on content: more PowerPoint slides that can possibly be adequately addressed in the time available and — always — too much information for the audience to understand and absorb. Too often the message, if there is one, gets overwhelmed by the content. How many times have you walked away from a presentation wondering what it was about?

You — and your audience — should be able to sum up your message in one sentence. The content is there to substantiate, illustrate, or explain your message.

What do you think?

I work with a lot of technical teams as they’re preparing oral proposals for large contracts. The contracts may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Scores of people may be engaged in the process for weeks or months on end. And the presentations may involve hundreds of slides. Somewhere along the way someone — usually the capture manager or the person in charge of shepherding the proposal through the process — will ask “What’s our story?”

I’m not quite sure what the question means.

This much I know. People who ask “What’s our story?” are not thinking about story the same way I do. I think of a story, in its most basic form, as a narrative about a person (a character) who goes through a series of actions (a plot) that results in a change of some sort (the resolution), usually to the character but sometimes to the situation.

When people involved in a large technical presentation talk about its story, they’re talking about something else. (I believe that even — or especially — highly technical presentations can be improved by telling a story in the sense I described above. But that’s the topic of another post.)

Here’s what I think technical people mean by a presentation’s story. Or, at least, here’s what I hope they mean. The presentation’s story is the thread that ties everything together into a unified, meaningful, and desirable whole. It is a one-sentence summary of how you — your team, resources, knowledge, approach, tools, products, technology, etc. — can help your audience get from where they are to where they want to be.

Before I elaborate on this idea, let me ask for your input. Have you heard people use the term story in this way? Do you use the term yourself? What do you mean by it? Is it something like what I’ve described?

Every successful speech and presentation drives home one — and only one — big idea.

A big idea organizes, ties together, and makes sense of many smaller ideas.

Great speeches advance one big idea. At Gettysburg Lincoln spoke of the birth, death, and rebirth of liberty. At the outbreak of WWII in his first address as Prime Minister to the House of Commons, Churchill answered the question “What is our aim?” with one word: Victory. On the steps of the Lincoln Monument, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of his dream – and America’s dream — of freedom and equality.

Lincoln’s speech, which was by far the shortest (under two minutes), was also the most tightly focused. But even it addressed — and tied together — several smaller ideas (dedicating a graveyard, honoring the dead, committing ourselves to their struggle).

The problem with most speeches is their lack of a big idea. If they present any overarching idea at all, it’s usually a small idea that leaves audiences asking, “Is that all there is?” or “Who cares?”

By their very nature, presentations tend to communicate more information and, often times, more ideas than speeches. (Here is how I differentiate a speech from a presentation.) But effective presentations still expound one big idea.

Watch Hans Rosling’s presentation at TED. (It’s a masterful presentation.) In 15 minutes he presents an amazing amount of information — especially statistics — and he develops several ideas. (Many of his ideas deserve their own speech.) But all of the information and all of his ideas develop a single message, Rosling’s big idea: The economies of Asia are catching up to the economies of the West.

The greatest curse of most presentations — audience’s most common complaint — is too much information. But the real culprit is not too much information but the lack of a big idea that ties all the information together and makes sense of it.

Do you have any examples of presentations that develop a single, clear big idea that you’d like to share?

Photo courtesy of Guido van Nispen at Flickr.

There’s an article worth reading on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s web site. It’s titled “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom.”

It isn’t a rant against the use of PowerPoint in teaching, but it does try to get teachers away from an over-reliance on it. The article extensively cites the thoughts of José A. Bowen, a dean at Southern Methodist University.  Here’s a brief summary of his approach:

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

Later in the article there are examples of how to use PowerPoint not at a “crutch” but as a “creative tool.”

You can watch an interview of Bowen here.

Bowen makes an implicit distinction between learning information (through lectures aided by PowerPoint and other means) and learning how to think (through discussions, interaction, and active participation). It’s a distinction that every presenter should keep in mind.

Sometimes a presentation is all about presenting information. You just want your audience to know something — a new procedure or policy, the latest test results, the status of a project. And sometimes you want them to learn how to think — how to conduct an experiment, how to analyze data, how to select the best option.

You have to determine your goal — do you want to communicate information or help people think – before selecting the tools and methodology you use.

I’ve just returned from working with over 80 sales reps of a high-tech firm. They sell contracts (consulting, installation, products, and maintenance) that are worth many, many millions of dollars. Their sales process, which is remarkably well thought out, requires them to give several presentations. Their final presentation is often a formal oral proposal made by a team.

I was impressed with how professional and well-trained they were. During our discussions, I asked how long they typically spend rehearsing their formal oral proposals. One person said, “We talk it through in the parking lot outside the customer’s headquarters.” Others said they might spend a half a day or a day. They all admitted that they’d like to spend more time, but that doing so wasn’t always feasible.

I’m a pragmatic sort of person. If you’re getting the results you want from your presentations, I think there’s little reason to change what you’re doing. So that’s what I told them: “If you’re happy with how many contracts you’re winning, keep it up. But if you’d like to improve your win ratio, I suggest you put more time into rehearsing your presentations.”

In future posts I’ll address how much time I think teams should put into rehearsing their presentations. And I’ll make some suggestions about how to make the best use of that time.

In the meantime, I’d like to ask for your input. How much time do you recommend devoting to rehearsals for a high-stakes team presentation?

You can’t motivate other people.

People can only motivate themselves. You can’t make other people feel anything. They and they alone are responsible for their own feelings. So you can’t make people love their jobs or want to do what you want them to. You can only give them incentives — reasons why they might love their jobs or want to do what you want them to — and let them decide for themselves.

You can, however, de-motivate people.

You can give people reasons for hating their jobs or for not wanting to do what you want them to. You can make their jobs tedious and meaningless. You can make them attend endless meetings that accomplish squat. You can make them work with bullies and idle gossips. You can reward incompetence and overlook people’s meaningful contributions. You can enforce rules and policies that make no sense. You can overwork and underpay them.

The job of a leader or of anyone who wants to motivate others is first to un-de-motivate people. To un-de-motivate them, remove as many irksome, useless, and onerous impediments as possible. (In the real world, an impediment-free workplace is an impossibility.)

Create the right environment — not a perfect workplace, but a good-enough one. Give people the guidance, support, and tools they need to succeed. Then it’s up to them. If they become engaged — if they motivate themselves — great. If they remain detached or bored or passive — if they choose not to be motivated — it may be your responsibility to help them find someplace else to work.

Do you agree? Disagree? What would you add?