Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The surest way to stifle an idea is to write a long-winded presentation deck about it.  PowerPoint, Keynote, and Prezi are powerful tools, but the power comes in how they’re used.  A weighty presentation deck can get in the way of the idea itself.

The classic Mark Twain quote applies equally when writing a presentation — “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Born out venture capital work as a recipient of many of PowerPoint deck, Guy Kawasaki has been advocating the 10/20/30 Rule for a decade. 

Someone once told me that most PowerPoint presentations have neither power nor a point. I cannot recollect, in 30 years of work, a single PowerPoint presentation I saw or gave that altered the course of anything. Yet in meeting after meeting around the world, PowerPoint is the medium of choice. In fact, according to Microsoft, there are over 30 million PowerPoint  presentations given every day.

When someone chooses to use PowerPoint or any other slide deck program, the choice has consequences. It establishes a power structure that is less relevant in today’s networked world, with the subject matter expert speaking at the front of the room and the audience passively receiving information. It keeps teams indoors, in closed rooms, in a seated position for prolonged periods which, as Mayo Clinic reports, increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and shortens life expectancy. And, most unfortunate, PowerPoint places technology at the center of the room with a heavy weight toward text, charts, sound bites, and bullet points.

When I helped start a social innovation organization called Civilla, in partnership with Adam and Lena Selzer, we gave ourselves an operating constraint: There would be no PowerPoint. None.

But saying no to something is easy. Figuring out what takes its place is harder....

Beware if you are still creating slides full of bullet points!

Very soon, you will find audiences leave the hall in disgust or hold a placard in protest “No Bullet Points, Please.” Already you will find them moan in pain as soon as they see a bullet-ridden slide. That’s not surprising. The audiences are intelligent enough to know what will follow that boring slide on screen: a far boring talk with presenter reading the slides and audience figuring out whether to listen to the presenter or read the slides.

Such is the bullet-point terror in the presentation world that cognitive psychologist Chris Atherton writes, “Bullets don't kill, bullet points do.”

What are you supposed to do as a presenter then? All presentation experts will advise you to keep 1 message per slide. So if you have 6 bullet points on a slide, you can simply make 6 slides and save the audience a headache. But what if you do not want to follow this advice. What if you wish to keep those 6 bullet points on your slide.

Perhaps you are not presenting your slides on a stage. You want to send the presentation as an attachment to one of your prospective clients. You would therefore need descriptive slides in such instances. Or maybe you have a slide full of steps and you do not wish the break the process into multiple slides that’ll make it complicated for you as well as the reader. What to do then?...