Creating Effective Presentations
We often struggle to present information to other people who don't have the same knowledge as we do or don't see the world as we do. Depending on whom you are talking to (sales, developers, prospects, your CEO…), you may even have to bring the same topic in a very different way. When we don't take that into account, we start from our perspective resulting in decks that are perceived as boring, too long, or are hardly understood.
This article is about a process I use to help me ensure that my presentations are tailored to my audience and have the right level of detail. It focuses purely on the process I use to build my content, not about the design or the presentation aspect.
Here's the process visualized:
Step 1: Find the intersection between your goal and your audience's goal
To prevent creating a presentation from your perspective,?ask yourself two questions:
Your presentation's goal can be found in the intersection of these questions because to get the effect you want, you HAVE to satisfy BOTH needs. Once you have established it, write it down; you will need it in later steps.
Step 2: Determine the foreknowledge your audience already has
It is important to consider what your audience already knows. For example, if this is about a new project, do they know what this project is about? Is it already clear to them what the plan is? Is it clear to them how it fits in the bigger picture? How tech-savvy are they? ...
Understanding that will help you determine in later steps:
No need to write anything here, but make sure you are aware of this.
Step 3: How much time do you have
Presentations often take longer than planned because most people start by building their content, and ascertain only when they are done how long it will take. To prevent that, define now how much time you have by taking the minimum of the answers to the two questions:
Write that number down. You'll need it in later steps.
Step 4: Determine how this deck will be used
If this is a presentation you will always present to people, then you should rely as much as possible on your voice-over. Don't use too much text in your slides; people can't listen and read at the same time anyway.
If you want people to use this deck afterward as a reference, then you may want to decide to use more text. Then people can easily read the text and have a better understanding next time they look at this slide.
Both are fine, just make sure it's a conscious decision.
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Step 5: Do a braindump of anything you may want to say or use
Here is where the work starts: write down in bullets everything you may want to use or say in the presentation (quotes, topics, sentences, full paragraphs, images…). Don't assess whether it's important enough. Don't evaluate whether you have the time. Don't try to think whether this topic is right for this audience. Don't think about the order in which you want to say things. Ignore all that and simply do a brain dump.
Don't consider things like timing, importance, order…. That complicates the challenge. Eliminating all these parameters at this stage enables you to focus on one thing and one thing only: dumping ideas.
For example, if I wanted to create a presentation of this article, here are some potential bullets from that braindump:
Step 6: Create your storyline in bullets
Once you have your braindump, start building your storyline. Don't start building the deck just yet, use bullets! Driven by what your audience already knows and driven by what they need to learn from your presentation, build your story from the bottom up. When reading a novel, you also don't get a dry overview of all the relevant characters and places in the story. The story is built up to get the reader interested and to ensure they get to know all characters, and all events in the right order. Do the same in your presentation.
Indicate in your bullets where you may want to use a new slide. And then, for each slide write down exactly how much time you want to spend/talk about this. Doing this now ensures that you can quickly see whether you are still within your timebox. This makes it easy later to determine how much detail you can add.
E.g. for this article, we could have created the following storyline:
Step 7: Move your braindump bullets into your storyline-bullets
Go over your storyline from top to bottom and start moving bullets from your brain dump into your story. Each time you include an item into your storyline, ask yourself these questions:
It's a lot to consider, but at least you only have to consider it only for one slide at a time!
Here's what our storyline for this article could look like:
Step 8: Create your actual presentation
Only at this point, create your deck. At this point, you know EXACTLY what message you want to bring with every slide. The only thing you still need to decide per slide is HOW you will visualize or present it so that it is clear and visually appealing. You no longer have to consider the story, the order, the detail…. That has already been taken care of which makes creating your deck a lot simpler.
Conclusion
It may look like a lot more work to apply all those steps, but without it, you may find yourself struggling to consider everything at the same time (e.g. am I getting to my goal, am I in time, is it visually appealing, is it understandable...). That makes this problem too big, too complicated. This process splits all this complexity into bite-size pieces.