PowerPoint without Bullet Points!

I did a 2-day presentation to a group in Virginia Beach last week. The topic is a rather dry one - how to stay in compliance with environmental laws andregulations. Instead of giving the audience a copy of the presentation material at the beginning, I gave each attendee a 4-page summary containing 3 key points to remember for each of the 11 sessions. There is room on the handout for them to take their own notes and to add more points to remember. At the end of the 2-day conference, I gave each participant a copy of a CD that contains a 400-page PDF document that is both searchable and printable. This document has all the topics that I covered in technical detail.

The arrangement worked out remarkably well. The attendees were able to take notes AND pay attention to the presentation. There was nothing for them to read ahead of my presentation so they focused on the presentation.

By the way - no one fell asleep. Many just noticed the presentation was “more refreshing” than the usual presentations they had been exposed to. They just enjoyed it. They didn’t even noticed there were no bullet points until I pointed that out to them.

In my last posting, I mentioned that I would scan a diagram from Dan’s book to illustrate how cluttered his virtual thinking sketches can become. Here is one. Tell me what you think.

Dan Roam has written an interesting book on visual thinking. I had posted a video on some of his thinking on this blog. I read Dan’s book on the plane as I flew from Seattle to Virginia Beach. This is an initial impression of his book. There will be more postings to come.

The book starts off by showing how to draw simple diagrams to illustrate ideas and points. The concept is very elegant and SIMPLE. Remember: simplicity = beauty. Half way into the book, Dan presents an MBA-like case study by applying his virutal thinking concepts to “real life” situation. This is where things start to go awry. His simple (and beautiful) diagrams in the case study evolve into some hand sketched diagrams that look like some organization charts from the federal government. And we all know how bad that can look. His diagrams are worse than those awful PowerPoint slides we see in Coca Cola’s presentation.

So instead of a bunch of PowerPoint bullet points, he ends up with a bunch of diagrams. When I get back to my office, I will scan a few examples of his virtual thinking diagrams and post them here.

One of my readers complained that I mixed typed text with hand sketches in my virtual thinking sldies. To go along this line of thinking, Dan should have written his entire book by hand. By the way, some of his sketches are so small that you almost have to have a magnifying glass to read. This is due to the fact that the fonts are small and the book measures about 4 by 4 inches instead of the usual size.

My take of this book? It is a mixture of simple elegance and awful clusters of almost unreadable diagrams. More later. Any comments from anyone? 

If people are turned off by clusters of bullet points (and they are), why would it be different with clusters of diagrams?

Look at some of Garr’s slides and you will see the beauty of simplicity. For an excellent example of simplicity, all you need to do is look at at Google’s search page.

Company executives started replacing reports with PowerPoint presentations (loaded with bullet points) over 15 years ago. The executives would speak at length on each bullet points. That was fine albeit half the audience would be in a coma.

The REAL problem came when the PowerPoint slides were passed on down to the lower level staff for implementation. There were no backup documentations. No detailed analysis. Nada. These lower level people never attended the executive meeting and never heard the presentation. All they had was a bunch of bullet points and that’s where everything started to go wrong: misunderstanding, misinterpretation, miscommunication, hallucination….etc.

Millions of dollars of mistakes have been made because of this problem.

One of our visitors alerted me to this gem of a presentation by Coca Cola. It is not clear what the presenter was trying to convey in this slide. Did he expect the audience to read and understand the chart? Did he actually think that the audience could read the fine prints on the chart? If he didn’t, why did he bother putting it up there on the screen in the first place?

It is unfortunate that many corporate presentations are like that. Instead of writing out a paper report, they just toss everything into a bunch of slides and read off them. Simply awfull.

I hope the presenter just flashed this slide on the screen for a second or two while saying: “We have a complicated structure.” and moved on. That’s about all you can do with a slide like that.

Here is a wonderful slide presentation made by Garr Reynolds - of the Presentationzen fame - on a book he had read. Garr used as many slides as he needed to make his points - 184 slides to be exact. This is what I was talking about in my earlier post.

My thanks to James for sending me the link.

The whole idea of NOT having bullet points in your presentation is to tell your story as if you are showing a movie. Your story has a setting, cast of characters, starting point, end point and how to get from starting point to the end point. These make up your first FIVE slides. (see below for a short video of the concept). Once you have defined the theme of your story, you are FREE to tell your story the way YOU want to.

You should not be bound by some artificial rules that say you must have three acts with each act containing three scenes. In other words, the rule says that you are supposed to tell your story by focusing on only three main ideas and if you must explain each idea, you should not use more than three points to explain it.

I say BREAK that rule!

Why? What if you have to tell a story about the Ten Commandments? Which three commandments do you focus on? which seven do you discard? Will you be stricken by lightning?

You should use as many slides as you need to present your ideas. If you had 100 points you wanted to make and you had jammed them into 10 slides with 10 bullet points each, now is the time to break these out into 100 slides. Each slide will represent each one of your ideas. I promise you - the PowerPoint police will not come and arrest you for having 100 slides or 1000 slides.

Your content is the same as before except now you are presenting the same 100 ideas with 100 slides and this time around you audience is no longer in a coma.  

 Here is a slide show about the first five slides:

I came across this little gem on YouTube by Richard St. John. He answered the age-old question: “What leads to success?” with a presentation that is simple, clear, funny and short. It also embodies the concept of visual thinking. I hope you enjoy it.

Here is a short video on how to make it big in the A/E/C (Architecture/Engineering/Construction) world as a marketer.