PowerPacking the PowerPoint Deck

Around two years back I had created a course material, per my HR’s request, for a ‘Deck Writing’ training program. This was to be rolled out to nominated candidates inside the organization. So, I gathered information from the internet and picked learnings form my own experiences, structured it out into five modules (punctuated with in-class exercises and home assignments) and delivered it over a course of 5 sessions.

In these 2 years I had a chance to train 50+ candidates and I have learnt immensely from my in-class experiences. The fact that instead of a ‘Presentation’ we pushed for a ‘Conversation’ format, allowed for a fluid exchange of dialog amongst us. In due course I realize that despite the technicality and structuring mechanism of preparing a deck, the philosophy at play is quite basic – Make it easy for human comprehension.

Now tackling this could entail diving into psychological and neurological oceans but I think it can be condensed into two overriding aspects: Narrative and Perception.

Narrative:

Everybody loves a good tale. I wish I had started this post with the good old “Once upon a time…” but then I realized it was just two year ago so I modified it to “Around two years back…”

Only humans of all life forms have the capability of constructing and dismantling the world in their imagination. It is a unique capability that is often taken for granted but is a powerful tool that keeps us engaged and invested in a story. An interesting story tickles an almond-shaped structure in the brain called amygdala (reptilian brain) which charges dopamine (pleasure hormone) in the blood stream. Also, when brain perceives a story its neurons fire in the same pattern as that of narrator. This is called neural coupling.

A story sticks longer in mind because the narrative is instantly translated to images and emotions. A study that showed people are 22 times more likely to remember a story over a fact – which is just huge!

The responsibility of setting the storyline rest largely with the presenter like opening with adequate background/introduction, laying out the agenda, transitioning smoothly across agenda items and finally rounding it up all together by concluding or establishing a future course. Our deck can work as a container through which the story flows. Yes, just the way a liquid flows. This should imply an effortless and smooth motion to various sections and sub-sections of the story. So, the shape and structure of this container would impact the delivery and the reception of our story. All should fare well if 3 major impediments to free flow of narrative are well dealt with:

(a) Disconnects: Each part of the deck should be logically connected to other without any gaps i.e. one should smoothly transition into and out of topics without abruptly hopping from one notion to the other. If such gaps are there, they will definitely disrupt the flow.

(b) Leaks: Every issue should be closed out before moving on to the next topic. This is analogous to unwarranted openings in our container and will allow the audience’s attention to leak out. People tend to be hooked to unanswered questions and subsequently tend to be less focused.

(c)Twisted pathway: When a liquid flows in long loops of pipework, the flow rate significantly slows down. This is due to viscosity. The same is valid for long-winded stories in a deck. Conciseness and straight forwardness have a special place in creating a deck. The listeners are already preoccupied with many other things. So, spare them the ordeal of taking a detour when we can directly arrive at the point. We may have spent weeks doing an analysis but reveal only what fits well. Unless we have some kind of malice against the audience, we should avoid causing their ‘death by PowerPoint’.

Perception:

We perceive the world through our senses and when it comes to a presentation, majorly hearing and seeing of the five senses are engaged. The hearing side of the equation is managed by the narrator while the seeing is left up to the deck. When I try to emphasis this in my sessions I tag along a quote from Confucius - I hear and I forget. I see and I remember.

In one of my batches after I had quoted the above, a guy raised up his hand and asked, “Why do we call this training ‘Deck writing’?” I stand by his question. We don’t just write in deck, we visualize as well. There should have been a generic name for this like ‘Deck creation training’.

Visualization help to depict the data as we see and perceive it in the real world. For example in real world we perceive one object as bigger than the other when its physical dimensions are actually larger. Consider three cylinders with a liquid filling them up to 25%, 50% and 75% of their capacity. We instinctively identify this by a mental comparison of the length of the liquid column. And that is what we try to invoke when we represent data using a column chart.

If instead of a chart illustration we had chosen to dump data into a table can one still decipher it by reading it, right? To this I would say ‘reading’ is not a sense, ‘seeing’ is. Reading words or sentences could still convey meaning but reading numbers and understanding them sure requires some deliberate effort. Some people even have a condition where they have a phobia surrounding numbers and maths. Psychologists commonly dub this as ‘Math Anxiety’.

Easily perceivable facts filled-in into a free flowing story form a convincing deck. This would have involved scrubbing off all the complexities that we used in the backend. No doubt, it would take much longer to create such a deck. It would naturally take time and effort to render machine generated outputs easy for human comprehension. And why not, it even took evolution hundreds of thousands of years to make the world we live in ‘human comprehensible’.