Life After PowerPoint!

One of the most common mistakes technical people or smart people in general make when they plan a presentation is to assume that their goal is to teach people something — to change or to add to what their audiences know.

Ask these presenters, as I do, what they want their audiences to do as a result of listening to their presentations, and they’ll most frequently say, “I want them to know…”

But knowledge isn’t — or shouldn’t be — the goal of a presentation. Action is. That’s why I love what Chris Brogan recently wrote:

I came across a great quote by Thomas Kempis: The object of education isn’t knowledge; it’s action. How powerful is that? In thinking about communication, even if our efforts are intended to inform, what we really seek is to encourage action. Inside this statement come some new lights on old truths: education isn’t objective, ever. When one educates us, they indoctrinate us, and their goal?

That’s right. Action.

The Quest to Inspire Action | chrisbrogan.com.

Thomas a Kempis was a medieval monk and devotional writer. Whether he was aware of it or not, he was paraphrasing Demosthenes, the 5th century BCE father of Greek oratory. When asked what the three tests of a great speech are, Demosthenes answered, “Action. Action. Action.”

Even it you want or need to educate or inform people — to give a project update, say, or to conduct a training session — make it your goal to give people information they can use. Ask yourself, what do you want people to do with the information you’re giving them?

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Beard at Flickr.

In an earlier posting I wrote about the erroneous assumption that “the facts speak for themselves.” Many people — especially technical experts — operate out of a somewhat related erroneous assumption: “Knowledge is power.”

Knowledge is certainly superior to the alternatives — ignorance, prejudice, and error. But in and by itself, knowledge isn’t power, because power is all about action and the ability to accomplish something. (The New American Heritage Dictionary defines power as the “ability or capacity to perform or act effectively.”)

If you don’t do anything with what you know, what good is it?

Knowledge isn’t power. Using knowledge to do something worthwhile is.

And there’s even something more powerful than using knowledge: it’s communicating knowledge so that others can use it.

Here’s my hierarchy of the power of knowledge:

1. Knowing something without acting on it is like having a candle without lighting it.
2. Acting on what you know is like lighting the candle.
3. Communicating what you know so others can use it is like using your lit candle to light other people’s candles.

That’s why “presentation and communication” skills are so highly rated, even for technical experts. The better able you are to share what you know so that other people can understand and use it, the more valuable you are.

Photo courtesy of PeWu at Flickr.

Last week Andrew responded to an earlier post about the erroneous assumption I’ve been exploring lately — that the facts speak for themselves. He articulated what I consider to be yet another erroneous assumption: People make decisions on the facts.

We don’t make decisions and, furthermore, we don’t act based solely on the facts for one simple reason. In everything we do, we use both logic (reasoning, calculation, careful analysis) and emotions (feelings, intuitions, gut instincts). Depending on our temperament and on a host of other issues, we may use more of one than of the other. But we always use both.

We may think we’re being eminently logical, basing our decisions on the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts so help us God, but we’re also being influenced by other factors. We’re just not aware of what they are.

You might want to check out two books that explore the role emotions and intuitions play in how we think and act.

The first has been around for almost fifteen years. It’s Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. Check out this synopsis.

The second is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. As its dustcover says, “Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant – in the blink of an eye – that actually aren’t as simple as they seem.”

If you labor under the illusion – the erroneous assumption – that people base their decisions (solely or even mostly) on the facts, you’ll create the type of PowerPoint presentations that people hate. You’ll produce more slides than you can possibly cover in the time available. You’ll pack each slide with so many details that no one can possibly read them or want to. (I offer the slide on the left as an example.) You’ll stand off to the side of the stage in semi-darkness reading what’s on the slides, as if people are too dumb to read them for themselves. And you’ll wonder why they don’t buy into what you’re proposing.

Don’t ignore the facts. Just don’t assume that presenting as many facts as possible is the way to gain people’s understanding, agreement, or cooperation.

If you want to win people to your way of thinking and move them to action, you have to appeal both to their intellect and to their emotions.

I’m mostly against leaders using PowerPoint, because I think they should speak more to influence and inspire audiences than to give them information

But I work with a lot of high-tech experts who, by the nature of their presentations, want to present a lot of information. They almost always use PowerPoint. And I keep having to remind them that PowerPoint is only an aid. It is not their presentation. It is not their script.

That’s why I absolutely agree with Dave Paradi:

No matter how flashy your slides are, the audience won’t leave excited if your message lacks substance. But I am not sure it works the other way around.

If your content is great but presented with lacklustre visuals, the audience will still leave enlightened. They just may not be as informed or inspired as if you had also used great visuals to drive home your points.

That’s why I start almost every presentation by talking about the importance of properly structuring your message before you even consider your slides. Without a good structure, making sure that you have points that move your audience from where they are now to where you want them to be, the rest doesn’t matter.

Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog: Does great content trump poor visuals?.

Start with your strategy, determining what you want the audience to do as a result of listening to you. Decide what they need to know and feel in order to do that. Figure out why they would want to do what you want them to do. Then create a structure, an outline that organizes your content as clearly, cohesively, and simply as possible. Then, and only then, start creating your slides.

Agree or disagree?