52 weeks, 52 words: Week 8
WEEK 8: SACRIFICE
I have a bad habit…and in the spirit of Ash Wednesday and the start of the Catholic season of Lent, I suppose it’s a habit that I can be ever more intentional about and rigorous about trying to break. I certainly have a heightened sense of awareness to this nasty, insidious tendency toward over-indulgence, one that robs me of an ability to be persuasive and instead creates a crutch for wallowing in a combination of self-pity and self-aggrandizement. Sounds like tabloid material if I were a celebrity!
And, as the word of this week came to me, it was clear that I might also not be alone and suffer from a condition many others in the medical communications sphere might also be guilty of indulging: All too often, I have become chronically reliant on a surfeit of slides.
I have had success in recent memory by making hard choices in reducing the sheer tonnage of slides in a presentation by invoking a steadfast discipline and eliminating the bulk of slides that do nothing to enhance the storyline of my argument but weigh it down. With a critical eye and a willingness to sacrifice that which is not absolutely essential, I have discovered that the presentation does not lose any of its compelling features.
De-bulking also means being willing to trim down the words on the screen too, regardless of the total slide count. Sacrificing full sentences for key phrases or for interesting triggers brings a level of freshness to the aesthetic of the slides and pushes the presentation toward a much cleaner exchange of information.
In fact, it actually helps turn the audience’s attention back to me and helps ensure I don’t turn my back to the audience.
All too often, we start framing the presentation around an impulse to let the audience know how much we know rather than to tell a story centered around a main idea, namely solving their business challenge.
What starts as an earnest desire to inform the audience becomes a curious, fear-driven exercise to avoid not leaving anything out.
The inner voice that helps you to square these competing ideas engages you in a mental tug-of-war to add a new slide for every “what if” or “just in case” and you are left with a labyrinth of slides that takes you deeper into the unknown.
As that impulse grows, take a step back and force yourself to answer these questions deliberately about the presentation you are constructing:
- What can be accomplished in voiceover?
- What can be expressed visually instead of verbally?
- What idea(s) is stated more than once in your presentation that is more concisely stated or isn’t served by repetition?
- If you had to give the presentation in one-third of the time, what would you have to lose in the slide deck?
As I write this essay, I am on the train heading to a client meeting for a new opportunity in a disease space that I personally haven’t worked in but one in which I have a group of colleagues with extraordinary background experience. My own insecurity about this was a personal blind spot driving me toward a place where I wanted to dump in a bunch of slides to absolve my own weakness or to overcompensate and prove the worth of my team.
It became a blemish in its own right, however, as our first draft of the deck seemed to get lost in a cul-de-sac of content that either 1) the client themselves already knew or 2) choked our agenda of precious time for actual discussion of the client’s business objectives.
With fortitude, as the early draft of the deck for a one-hour meeting metastasized to 80+ slides, I found the courage to begin excising and aiming for clear margins. Soon the deck was a lean 38 slides and flowed much better.
Yet I had the nagging sense that it still wasn’t enough. I began thinking about the 4 questions above and pressed myself to consolidate some key ideas and to move several dense, busy, and complicated slides into a more infographic style with less total content on the slides. I also pushed hardest on the 4th idea from the list above about total time: While I knew we had an hour, my presentation had to allow time for client questions, not to mention discussion of key ideas and action items, as well as the invariable reality of the unexpected U-turns for ideas I anticipated being crystal clear that required a bit more detail.
Pacing aside, I had to ensure I accounted for the biggest X factor of all: my audience. Slide presentations are not one-person shows or performances; in our business, especially, they are conversations with an arc designed around undulations of tension and release between multiple parties that rise and fall with understanding and a transfer of information.
Both parties come to the presentation with objectives for the exchange and a sacrifice has to occur in terms of total slide count if you want to make sure everyone is fulfilled by the end.
This is perhaps the greatest sacrifice of all – a relinquishing of ego to support a mutual satisfaction.
I read recently an interesting theory about decisiveness from organizational psychologist, Adam Grant. When faced with a conflicting feeling about a decision to make, your true feelings about what to keep and what to discard can be ascertained with a dose of brutal truth serum.
He suggests flipping a coin – yes, flipping a coin – to decide what stays and what goes. If you flip the coin and call out heads and it lands on tails, indicating a counter-decision, you will either feel an indifference about the required action (meaning it would be okay to remove) or you will feel a great despair at the alternative reality and perhaps maybe that bit of content you were struggling with is more important than you let on. Either way, it forces you to discard the superfluous and choose more deliberately.
That choice isn’t always an easy one, but if we re-train our brains to push past the impulse, we can arrive at a more svelte presentation in the end. This year, Spring Break is right around the same time as Easter. So, while I am sacrificing my late-night snacking in pursuit of a better beach bod during Lent, I will also be attempting to purge my PowerPoint cravings and learning to live a bit more meagerly (and purposefully) in business conversations too.
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