The Science behind MPM – The Picture Superiority Effect

Visual communications are here to stay!  Don’t take my word for it, here is the scientific data.

• People will remember 10% of what you say to them three days later.
• If you communicate primarily with visuals (such as PowerPoint slides), your audience will remember 35% of what you show them.  That is three times as much.
• If you use both visuals and spoken, they will remember 65% of what you have said/shown them.  That is over six times as much as just spoken.

Or so asserts one of my favorite brain researchers, Dr. John Medina. 

The underlying reason behind this astounding set of statistics is that human being’s dominant sense is visual and it trumps all other senses. 

Our earliest recorded forms of communications were cave drawings. 

As children, vision is our primary sense and spoken language develops later.

All of this wraps up into a theory called the Picture Superiority Effect.

What is the Picture Superiority Effect and How Does MPM Use It?

Simply put, the Picture Superiority Effect is the scientific explanation for why a picture is worth ten thousand words. 

For a little over 40 years, scientists have acknowledged that we encode memory “verbally” AND  “visually”.  This dual-coding theory says that people, when they are processing information (such as your presentation) break that information up and encode it in the two different stores of Visual and Verbal. 

Recent cognitive neuroscience suggests that the visual memory storage is the dominant one.  (Note:  all of you cognitive neuroscientists out there please excuse this oversimplification).   This because it is easier for people to recall visual information.  Period

So what does this all have to do with the Modern Presentation Method?  Well, everything really.  One of the underlying principles of MPM is that visual communication is here to stay.  And that if a presenter wants to be truly effective they need to tap into visual communication.

We help you tap into it in a number of ways.

   

Removing the Visual Design Barrier

First, through the use of super templates, design guides, and slide starters MPM absolves the presenter of the need to have basic design skills.  Take this example, the Decision Briefing Infographic.  It’s designed to be printed out on 11×17 paper.

Now, people who natively speak and read Indo-European languages scan across any visual in a Z-pattern.  And so this particular Modern Presentation Method is designed to take advantage of this fact.

This notion of absolving the presenter from needing to understand basic design principles is sprinkled throughout the MPM templates.  Background colors and text are color coordinated to be visually appealing and also to contrast where important information needs to pop.  Slide layouts take advantage of any of a wide variety of design principles such as the Rule of Thirds.

Removing the Graphics Barrier

Next, MPM removes the graphics barrier.  By putting several thousand high-quality organizationally focused graphics at the presenter’s fingertips, we remove the need to search for and chose quality graphics.

Text First, Visuals Second

Last, MPM takes advantage of most people native communications strength, the ability to write.  By having presenters put their story together in textual format first, we use that native ability.  Then once the 80% textual story is in place, we use the templates and graphics library to quickly move the presenter through the visual stage of the build process.

Summary

So that’s it.  People’s dominant sense is vision and the Picture Superiority Effect proves this.  MPM helps the presenter take advantage of the Picture Superiority Effect by removing the Visual Design and Graphics barriers, and by focusing their story building skills in Text First.

That’s all, thanks for tuning in.

 DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

Introducing Your Organization to the Modern Presentation Method

Change is hard!  Especially within an organization.  People are afraid to move from what is familiar, even if it is sub-optimal, to something that is unfamiliar.  People have been emailing me lately asking how they should introduce the Modern Presentation Method into their organizations.  My answer is simple.  Do it very slowly.  Find the low hanging fruit.  And then fix it.

I recommend you find a presentation that is given regularly in your organization.  Something that is repeated frequently.  Here are some examples.

• Sellers and Marketers:  Your core “pitch deck”.  The one you use whenever you are presenting on screen to prospective customers.
• Teachers:  Any class you teach frequently.  Just pick one that looks bad or is too long.
• Managers and Organizers:  All-Hands meeting.  Team or Project Status meeting.

 

The next time you need to do that presentation, create a second version of it using the Modern Presentation Method.  Then, when you are reviewing it beforehand with the stakeholders, show them   the before and after versions.  If you did a good job, they will love the new version created with the Modern Presentation Method.

To put my money where my mouth is, I am going to do a before and after of an AAR deck for a training unit at one of the Joint Readiness Centers.  We’ll see if I can get permission to post it so I can show you what I did.

Thanks for tuning in.

 DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

Charts and Graphs

Today’s post will be a quick one.  These are for all of those people who are creating Pitch or Teaching presentations for onscreen or want a sharp on paper Organizing presentation.  Many times when you want to include a chart of a graph you can’t find one that looks clean enough in the standard chart templates.  Good charts and graphs are instantly understandable so they should be simple, with appropriate colors highlighting the important data, and with a minimum of text.

Well here are two in slide starters.  Blogs_and_Charts_v1

Doughnut Chart

The first is called a Doughnut Chart and it’s pretty self-explanatory.  I have made this one in grey scales so it will work with a large variety of backgrounds.  Multiple successive Doughnut Charts are great if you have one variable that are you are comparing over successive time periods such as year-to-year or quarter to quarter.

 

Pictorial Graphs

Pictorial Graphs are an even better method for single variable, successive time period comparisons.  The real advantage over Doughnut Charts is you use an icon or picture to represent the variable.  In this case, we could be talking about housing occupancy rates.  Again, simple, colors have meaning, and text is minimized.

 

Just a little taste, more to come in later posts.  Thanks for tuning in.

 DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

BAM! Your Modern Presentation Method Cubicle Poster Has Arrived!

All right, people have been asking me all week, do you have a single slide that shows what the Modern Presentation Method is?  So here it.  The five steps are outlined (Visualize, Storyboard, Build, Rehearse, and Execute), if the method varies by presenter experience level (101, 201, 301) I call out how it is different, and best of all I show which problems each step fixes.

 

So quick, download it, print it out, and proudly display in your cubicle.  Take a pic of it with your smartphone and email it to me! 

Thanks for tuning in.

 DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

Lies, Damn Lies, and Data – When and How to Use Data in Your Presentation

Data is great when you need to show your audience the effect of a particular situation.  “The reason we are up X% in sales can be directly attributed to an increased investment of Y in training the sales force.”  Any time you use an example in your presentation, it is a good idea to make sure you have concrete data points to support your position.  However, there are some pitfalls that must be overcome when using data.

 

Is It Accurate

Only The Facts – Data purports to tell the truth, right?  Anytime you put data in a presentation, you need to make sure the data is factual.  If it is not factual or it is unverified, make sure you notate that below the data.

Benchmarking – Let’s say you are presenting a set of sales data in a staff meeting.  It is a monthly staff meeting and you have done it already six times previously.  Before you present your data, it is often a good idea to remind the audience of the data you presented last time.  Especially if you made projections.  This gives your audience continuity.

Agreeing On The Truth – Make sure everyone agrees that they believe the data.  This is simply the most common misalignment in an organizational meeting.  I present a set of facts backed by what I think is solid data and someone does not agree with me.  Alternatively, maybe I am presenting a scorecard and someone does not agree with my data criteria for red-yellow-green.  The best way to solve this problem is to get agreement on the data before the meeting by shopping the data around to key stakeholders for their comments. 

Is It Understandable

Being Able To See It – This is the #1 sin I have seen.  The presenter loads the slide up with data and the slide becomes unreadable.  There are two solutions for this problem.  The first, if you are presenting on the screen, is to put summary data on the slide in a font large enough for the audience to read.  Then hand out a data pack built in Excel that gives the audience the rest of the data.  This will often suffice.  However, in a world in which you are working with a very complicated data set and by that I mean I mean hundreds or thousands of data points; I will usually create a single comprehensive slide on tabloid-sized paper (11×17) with all of the key data on it and hand out the printed out slide.  I might still include a data pack, but the key of the large slide is that you can put the complicated picture in front of your audience on a single piece of paper. 

Levers, Levers, Levers – This brings us to the notion of levers.  Levers are the specific actions that a leader or manager can execute in order to bring about change in their organization.  The notion of levers are critical when working with data as often times when you create that 11×17 with all the data, it is the interplay between disparate data sets that creates a lever that can be pulled.  More on this later, but for executives especially this is a critical concept.

Backing Up Your Main Data With Supporting Data – I love data packs.  Most of the time you have either a drought of data or a flood of data.  In the case of a flood, you need to move all supporting data off the slide into an excel spreadsheet[s] so you can focus the audience on the key point.  They way to do this is data points.

Macros – Last, do not forget to use Macros.  Most of the data that you will be getting in today’s organization comes from existing databases such as sales and personnel databases.  If you have any type of data that you have to repeatedly report on in any kind of rhythm, such as a monthly status meeting, I suggest you do the following.  First, figure out exactly what data you need, who owns the system that generates the data, how often you will need it, and in what format.  Second, arrange with the database owner a regular cycle where they generate the necessary reports into Excel.  Third, have someone from the IT staff build a Macro that exports the data from Excel into a PowerPoint file in the format you want it.  It’s a little more work for the first few times that you do it, but it saves significant time in the long run as what can take hours to do manually (moving data from Excel to PowerPoint) can be automated into a process that takes just a few minutes.  Real powerful stuff.

Thanks for tuning in.

 DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

Telling It Like It Is: Using Real World Stories in Your Presentation

There is an old saying I like that goes:

Nothing succeeds like success.

I love the notion that current success can help breed future success.  This idea is the underpinning of why a good presenter always uses real world examples in a presentation.  Good examples help convince people that you know what you are talking about and that what you are saying is relevant to the point at hand.   They are convincing and reassuring to the audience.

I use real world examples in all three presentation types:

1. Pitching:  “Don’t take my word for it, let me tell you the story about…”
2. Organizing:  “I know this doesn’t seem like a big problem now, but let me give you an example of how it affected Joe on the production line”
3. Teaching:  “Sic Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell….”

 

Good Case Study Characteristics

Whenever I start a presentation, I immediately begin looking for examples and case studies.  A good case study has the following characteristics.

1. It’s Relevant To The Point:  A good case study must illustrate the point you are getting after.  In a Pitch presentation, you might be trying to convince someone to buy your product and so you should include a real life example of how another customer found success using your product.  This is great.  If it’s not perfectly relevant, don’t use it as it will confuse your audience. 
2. It’s Believable:  Never use an example that is not true or is an outrageous example.  There are always outlier examples that are not believable. 
3. It’s Interesting:  No one wants to hear about some boring case study.  Make sure it’s an interesting story. 
4. It’s Available:  Get you case studies approved by legal before you use them in a presentation!

  

Sourcing Case Studies

Finding good case studies is time consuming, which is why you should be thinking about them right from the start.  So where can you get them from?

1. Marketing/PR/Public Affairs – Most marketing organizations maintain some system of case studies.  It’s usually the first place I start.  At Microsoft, we publish an external website of case studies highlighting solutions implemented using Microsoft products and technologies. 
2. “Voice Of …” Systems – Most companies today have some sort of Voice of the Customer feedback process or system.  I always hook into the department whose job is customer satisfaction and look at their reports on what customers are saying.  I often find a lead and when I follow up with the customer directly, I find some great stories just waiting to be told.
3. Reporting – A few years ago, when my National Guard unit was in Iraq, I found myself needing to understand and explain to my superiors why the local insurgents were acting a certain way.  I found that by reviewing after action reports from other units who were experiencing the same things I was able to source compelling examples that I could use to explain what we were seeing.  I could put a name, a face, and a story behind it using the examples that I found.
4. Head To The Shop Floor – All good managers know that if you want to know the truth, you go talk to the people doing the work.  Are you having production problems?  Go talk to the folks on the line and get concrete stories about what is going on.  Are your sales down?  Go talk to the sales people and get stories about why customers are not buying.  Take the stories and put them into your presentation.

 

Conclusion

Finding great real world examples is all about legwork.  From the very outset of every presentation I know generally what subject I will be talking about, so right from the get go I am out looking for those stories, validating whether they are relevant and I can legally use them, and writing them up in a compelling and interesting way.

Thanks for tuning in.  Tomorrow we are going to talk about how to do a great demonstration during a presentation.

 DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

MPM Step #3: Build & Refine Your Presentation, an Overview

Sorry about the break.  I got a nasty cold and had to take a couple of days off. 

Today I will give an overview of Step 3 of the Modern Presentation Method:  Build & Refine.  In this step, we will take a slide drawn up on your storyboard, refine it and add content, and bring it to life.  Here’s quick look at a before and after:

    

    

Summary

Build & Refine can be broken into five steps.  They are:

1. Initial Build Out:  This is where we take our storyboard that is on our whiteboard and we convert it into a digital outline in whichever medium (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) we are using.
2. Put In Real Content:  At this point, we focus on each individual section and build out great content.
3. Get To 80% On First Draft:  This is really a milestone, as the goal of the first draft of Build & Refine is to get to an 80% solution as quickly as possible.
4. Printout & Review:  In our draft review, we use a printed PowerPoint storyboard and then a printout of the presentation itself to drive a productive review. 
5. Repeat:  In a hasty presentation, you might well be done right now and you will go ahead and present an 80% draft and be done with it.  However, if you have worked efficiently to get to 80% or are working on a presentation where you have time to do multiple drafts you go back and repeat steps 1 – 5 until you get to your 99% draft. 

Done right, the Build & Refine step of the Modern Presentation Method can be done in as little at an hour or two for a hasty presentation, or it can be done over several weeks for a deliberate presentation.  Here we go.

Initial Build Out – 15 minutes from start to finish.

Remember our storyboard from Step 2 of MPN: Storyboarding example:

 

In Initial Build Out, we will take our storyboard and bring it to the digital world with one of our mediums.  In this case, it will be Word and PowerPoint.  That is right; it is time to use SOFTWARE!  Yeah, I can hear clapping through the halls of Microsoft! 

The purpose of the Initial Build Out is to bring your story frame over.

Now if you remember from the Step 2 post, for this staff meeting presentation I wanted to create a short 4-page Word doc handout that summarizes the overall status of the team.  I also wanted to create PowerPoint slides to keep the meeting on track.

So very first thing, I will open a new file each in Word and PowerPoint.  Now I am going to tell you a little secret right now.  I use templates of my own design for just about everything. 

In the case of Word, I generally start with this one.  It has an easy to fill out header section that includes my name and the document title and then a prefilled out footer with some legalese and a page numbers.  It is simple and easy to work with and is called Dave_Standard.

 

In addition, with PowerPoint, I generally start with this one.  In this case, I use a very simple template and because I know the room will be mostly dark I use a version with a dark background.  This template is called Dave_Dark_Simple.  You will notice that there are only three slide layouts in this design.  They are below and I only use the first two:

       

The first slide is simply a blank slide with nothing on it.  It is simple and allows me to do anything I want with the slide.  The second slide is a notes slide, where I will put my supporting notes for each content slide.

I use templates because they make starting a project simple.  They save me time.  Over the course of the year, if I do seventy-five presentations (a low # for many people) and I use simple, smart, and standardized template I save about 10 minutes for each presentation.  This timesaving is because I don’t have to look through dozens and dozens of templates searching for that oh-so right one and I also don’t have to build a template from scratch.  That savings is equal to Seven Hundred and Fifty Minutes a Year (12.5 hours) of my time saved.  I’ll have a lot more to say on templates in a later post.

Now I take my whiteboard content over and fill out my Word document first.  Always pick one document in a presentation as a primary document and this is where the majority of the content resides.  In this case, it’s the Word doc.

This is what the word doc looks like after I do the Initial Build Out.  All I’ve done is transferred my story frame and supporting points to the document.

 

The PowerPoint slide deck looks like this.  You will notice I have created a single slide note for each content slide and I have only filled out the headers for the notes.  There is a method to this madness and it is because I want to build out the Word doc content first.  Once my story starts coming together in the Word Doc, I will work on the PowerPoint deck. 

 

Put In Real Content

Now it is time to add content.  I start with the Word document.  One of my sections for this staff meeting was going to be about how we would pick the Team Member of the Quarter.  This is what the Recognition section of the Word document looks like after build out but before I add content.

 

After build out, I go to each section and put in all of the supporting content I have gathered up until this point along with any salient points I might have.  Here is what the Recognition section looks like after I do that.

 

Wow, it is two pages long now!  The beauty of including everything you know at this point is you will not forget anything important.  However, this is excessively long and it needs to be edited down and refined.  That is what I do.  All good communication contains only the minimum amount of detail necessary. 

Best Practice:  Set hard limits on the amount of content to include in each section of a presentation.  As you remove content from the main presentation itself, move it into an appendix so that if you need to refer to it during the presentation you can.  Too much information in the main body of a presentation is one of the worst problems that exist today in presenting.  Get the flab out of the presentation and put it into the appendix.

When I am done, the Recognition section is only a little more than 1/2 of a page in length.

 

Once I am done with a section in Word, I can build the accompanying section in my PowerPoint slide deck.  In the case of the recognition section, my storyboard graphic looked like this:

 

 I go to my slide deck and build out a reasonable facsimile of what I want for the slide using the above as a visual inspiration and using the Word document as my source for detailed information.  Here is what I came up with:

 

Now, this is just an example involving one section of a Word document and one PowerPoint slide.  I repeat this for every section of the Word document and then do each slide until I have an 80% first draft.

You can do a thousand little things when you build content.  I will be covering a selection of examples in upcoming posts on how to build great content so stay tuned for that. 

The key to getting to 80% content is to follow the very simple process I just laid out. 

1. Bring your storyboard and story framework over to your medium unchanged.
2. Gather all of the relevant content and put it into your first draft.
3. Review and refine the content until it fits within the story you are trying to tell.

 

Get To 80% on First Drafts

What is 80% then?  80% is the minimum quality necessary, in your mind, to actually conduct the presentation.  I have done presentations for internal meetings where 80% quality meant because I only had a few hours to get a presentation ready my visual quality bar was low.  Regardless, because I did such a thorough job during Visualization and Storyboarding I knew I had a cogent and well thought out story and the lack of world-class graphics did not hinder me delivering a great presentation.

On the other hand, for a major presentation in front of 15, 000 people it has taken me four or five hard days of work to get to 80%.    Nevertheless, I know what 80% looks like in my mind and I don’t stop until I get there in the first draft.

Printout & Review

I always review my first draft!  Most of the time, I conduct a quick informal review with stakeholders, where I’ll pop into their office for 15 minutes and walk them through the presentation.  In later posts, I’ll go over this in more detail but I always (a) build a storyboard in PowerPoint so they can see the entire presentation represented on one piece of paper, and (b) I always make sure to highlight anything controversial to get their take on it.  In every presentation there is going to be a data point, a particular line of thought, or an assumption that people will disagree with.  Talking this out during the draft process is critical as it prepares you for all sides of an issue.

For a more important presentation, I will schedule a full review of the first draft to make sure I’m on the right track.

 

Repeat

The last part of Step 3:  Build & Refine is to go back and repeat the steps all over again as long as time permits.  This is because your end state should be a presentation that is 99% complete.  I say 99% because there is no perfect presentation.  With each revolution of the Build & Refine process, your presentation will become more refined, cogent, and impactful.  You will continue to change and tweak your story framework, your visuals, and the supporting documentation. 

Conclusion and What’s Next

That’s an overview of Step 3 of the Modern Presentation Method, Build & Refine.  Over the next week, I will cover a number of topics that have to do with Build & Refine such as how to build great content, how to do the PowerPoint storyboard, how to build out slide notes, and many more so stay tuned!

Ping me back on email and let me know how well it works for you.

DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

Dave_Standard – Word Document

Dave_Dark_Simple – PowerPoint Slide Starters

Length Matters – Really!

It is time to fight Blab Flab!  Before we actually start Step 3 of the Modern Presentation Method (Build & Refine), I wanted to bring to light a question that I know lies in the back of the mind of every audience.  It is “please do not make me sit through this presentation for even one second longer than I must”.  

 One of the unfortunate side effects of modern presentations is the penchant of presenters to use all of the time available to them AND to fill up every second of that allotted time with content.  The resulting Blab Flab is an audience killer.  Here is your goal for any presentation:

How long should your presentation be – Let’s Use Television as a Guide

 Edward Tufte has a phrase that I love to copy and that is “use what works in the wild”.  In order to use your allotted time wisely I suggest taking his advice to heart.  Let me give you an example of how content is bucketed into time allotments in the real world.  The example is television.

• Is TV Successful At Getting Our Attention:  Americans spend 3.1 hours each day in the United States watching television.  The only activities we spend more time doing each day are working (just barely at 3.2) and sleeping (8.7).   Clearly, television holds our attention well, right?  So what can we learn about programming to help us with time planning for our presentation?  A lot.
• What is The Average Length Of A Show:  Prime-Time television comes in two formats mainly, 30 minute and 60 minute segments.  Therefore, 30 minute and 60 minute segment lengths are good starting points for presentation length.  Even more important, we are conditioned to receive content in chunks of 30 and 60 minutes, which are regularly interrupted by small breaks.  
• How Often Does The Audience Get Breaks:  You see, for every hour of prime time television, almost 14 minutes are taken up by commercials.   The result is that for a 30 minutes show, you can expect to see commercials about every 10 minutes and the total amount of content you see in those 30 minutes is actually just 23 minutes.  Double it for a 60-minute presentation.   

 I have found that the conditioning that audience members undergo at home affects how an audience behaves during a presentation.  Namely, they like it short, certainly less than an hour, with regular breaks and changes of pace.

What are the Guidelines About Length?

So here are my subsequent rules about how to allot time based on this example:

1. Limit your total length of content in any hour to 45 minutes or less.  Even better, let’s round it down and use 40.  This works for all three-presentation types (Pitching, Organizing, and Teaching).  There are some great presenters out there that can thrall and sway audience for much longer periods, but for the average presenter this is what you should aspire to. 
2. How can you keep reengaging the audience as you go through your allotted 40 minutes?  The constant distraction of the PC on the table, or the smartphone in their lap threatens to tear the audience’s attention away at any moment.  Address this by putting a major Change of Pace every 10 minutes.  Think of the Change of Pace as little commercials that help actively engage the audience’s attention.  Examples of a Change of Pace are demonstrations, videos, a live dialogue or Q&A session, handouts or props, in fact virtually anything that is (a) exciting and (b) different from presenting from slides.  I might have a 20-minute discussion or Q&A at the end.  I might just end early and let the audience have a 20-minute break.  Alternatively, my Change of Pace every 10 minutes or so might be so interactive that we can use up the extra time in that manner.  Regardless, build the changes of pace in.

 If you follow these two simple rules, you will start with a target time that is reasonable for the audience, yet long enough for you to deliver a great presentation.  Now let us move on to how to control the amount of content in your presentation.

Don’t Throw Everything And The Kitchen Sink Into Your Presentation

In today’s overly bureaucratic world, there is often a desire to put as much content as possible into a presentation.  There are a bunch of reasons for this, few of them valid, and it is a terrible idea.  First, when you put every conceivable detail into a presentation you will lose control of the length of the presentation.  It will get longer and longer and that is a recipe for a 100+ slide mega disaster.  The second reason is that in any good communication you seek to clarify and bring out the salient points, not bury them in a mound of data.  Here is how to fight these two problems.

1. Set a word count or slide count right from the get go.  If I have 40 minutes of content, I know that I speak at 2.5 words a second, which is 150 words a minute.  Therefore, my presentation should not exceed 6000 words.  Alternatively, I can assign a target # of slides.  I usually use about 3 minutes a slide as a starting point.  So about 13 slides in this example.  This is simply a starting point but it helps you plan how much content to include.
2. Build content with brevity in mind.  As I build out content and write my slide deck or Word document, I will focus on moving as much un-needed content as possible to an appendix.  I do not just delete it, but rather put it in the appendix so I can use it if I need to dig deeper into the issue during the presentation.  .  To quote from true experts, William Strunk and E.B. White who wrote classic book on English usage, The Elements of Style, over 90 years ago, “Vigorous writing is concise”.  This is also true for presenting.  Good presentations are precise, without an ounce of extraneous fat either visual or text.  Remember, your goal is to achieve maximum productivity in minimum time.  Actively push the flab into the appendix!
3. Focus on whether or not the audience will understand your content.  When I talk about maximum productivity in minimum time, I am really trying to drive home the notion that once the audience understands your content you have achieved your primary goal.   An individual person’s cognitive load or ability to understand a set of content is directly proportional to how much time you take in your presentation and how much content you push at them.  If you make the presentation too long, you will lose their attention and you will fail to get your content across.  Conversely, if you push too much content at them in too short a period you will overwhelm them with information which is an all too often occurrence today.  This is where the 3 – 8 Door Points we talked about in Visualization become your guide.

 

So that’s it.  Length matters!  Ping me back on email and let me know how well this works for you.

 DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

 

Length Matters Infographic In Its Entirety

Get Your Picture ON! – Finding and Using Great Pics and Graphics

I wanted to cover a couple of best practices we will be using extensively BEFORE we go through the next step of the Modern Presentation Method, Step 3: Build & Refine.  The first of these best practices is how to use Pictures in all types of presentations and even more importantly, how to find great ones at little or no cost.

Using Pictures

Vision is our dominant sense.  Not hearing, touch, taste, or smell.  In fact, we are far better at remembering visual information than we are at remembering what we hear.  This is important for a host of reasons, but the simple thing to remember here is that if you want your audience to remember key points of your presentation you should present it in a visual way. 

This is why I almost always put a graphic or picture on every slide.  Sometimes it is the single dominant feature, sometimes it’s a small graphic next to a single sub point, sometimes it’s the background.  But it’s there and it contextually supports whatever point I’m trying to drive home.

Now, I’m going to stand on the shoulder of a giant in communications, Garr Reynolds.  Garr is in my opinion the best single authority on how to use pictures in a presentation and I encourage you to pick up Presentation Zen and also his latest book, The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides.  Garr will do a much better job of giving you a detailed account of how to user pictures than I can.  I do however have three key points that I think all presenters should keep in mind when using pictures or graphics. 

1.  Match the picture to the subject:  Each picture must correspond precisely with the exact point you are trying to make.  One of the most renowned authorities on how a brain works is Dr. John Medina from the University of Washington.  He teamed with Garr a while back and came up with this short presentation on how to do this.  Check it out here:  Brain Rules For PowerPoint Presenters.  Slides 8, 9, and 10 are brilliant!

2.  Remove the Background:  Most of the pictures you will find will have a background.  You will often find that the background doesn’t match the color of your deck.  Here is a picture I downloaded from Microsoft Clip Art. 

It has a white background which clashes with my black background.  And it quite frankly looks pretty poor as a result. 

If I remove the background, the picture now POPS out at us and looks really good.  Plus, now I can put text into the space formerly used by the white background. 

I use the Background Removal tool in PowerPoint to remove the background.  Here is how I do this:

1.  Select the picture in the slide.

2.  Go   to Picture Tools on the Ribbon Bar and select Format

   

3.  Select the Remove Background option (all the way to the left) and remove the background.

4.  The end result looks like this.

3.  Rule of Thirds:  An almost universal rule used by photographers and cinematographers is the Rule of Thirds.  In any graphic they divide what is seen by two horizontal and two vertical lines equally spaced.  The four points where these lines intersect (shown with the red dots) are where the focus of the eye will go and are where you should put the most important information on your slide.  Here is my slide before I apply the rule of thirds.

You can see that it doesn’t quite conform.  Now, let’s take a look at it when I apply the rule of thirds.  In this case, the upper left hand point frames the picture and the lower right hand point frames the title.  And it looks much better!

Finding Pictures

The #1 question that I get is where a presenter can go to get great graphics or pictures cheaply.  There are four places I recommend for 100 and 200 level presenters.

1. Clip art – thousands of free pictures – http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/
   Microsoft has recently purchased thousands of stock photographs for free use by Office 2007 and 2010 owners.  Here are 5 pictures I downloaded when I searched for the keyword people.
              
2. Does your organization have some kind of media bank?  Usually PR, Public Affairs, or somewhere in the Marketing org of your company you will find logos and stock photography that have been licensed.  In many cases, you can use those images and graphics free of charge. 
3. Source from your company or organization’s web site.  Take the US Army for example.    You can get most of the logo graphics you would need (unit logos, rank logos, etc…) at the Army’s Heraldry site here:  http://www.tioh.hqda.pentagon.mil/
   Also, if I wanted to get great pictures of soldiers in action, I would just go to the Army Public Affairs website and guess what, it has thousands of great photos that I could use.  http://www.army.mil/media/
   Best Practice:  An institutional (company, organization, etc…) best practice in today’s world is to have a single repository of all copyrighted images, logos, graphics, and videos company-wide.  Creating a one-stop SharePoint site with thousands of these images will save cross-company perhaps hundreds, even thousands of hours of time that presenters are wasting today in searches for graphics they can legally use in their presentations.
4. Last, there are some fantastic stock photo sites out there where you can get pics and graphic for a low cost.  Even better, there are Microsoft Office plugins that you can use to download and manage what you buy from these sites.  Examples of stock photo sites includes iStockPhoto, iClipArt, and Veer).  Find out more here:  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

 

So that’s pictures 101 for the 100 & 200 level presenters out there.  In a few weeks, I’ll fire up a post for the 300 & 500 level presenters.  Ping me back on email and let me know how well this works for you.

DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

Slide Re-Use is Audience Abuse!

Today’s subject is all about whether you should re-use other people slides in your PowerPoint deck.

This is a once good practice that has been terribly abused. It all starts innocently enough, say John gives a great presentation and then Fred finds out about it and then asks to borrow the deck so they can use it in their presentation. Then a couple of things generally happen.

1.Fred inserts John’s complete so slide deck into the middle of their own already 40 slide presentation and proceed to make some monster mega deck. The resulting bastardized deck no longer has a coherent story framework and is often just way too long.2.Fred has no idea how to present John’s slides because John did not do complete slide notes. John just handed over the slides to Fred with no supporting information. When Fred presents the slides he reads directly from every slide because that’s all the information he has to present with. And so the audience abuse continues.

So what can a presenter do?

First, don’t reuse someone else’s slides if you can avoid it. Period. But like every good rule there are always exceptions and here is how I like to think about each one.

• LIMIT THE TOTAL NUMBER OF REUSED SLIDES: Don’t copy someone else’s slide deck in its entirety and just re-use it. Usually I will select a few slides that I really need and use them. I never reuse a whole deck. There are two exceptions to this rule.
  1. Teaching – Is someone has constructed a great classroom presentation I will use it in its entirety as long as it comes with good slide notes so I’m not just reading from the screen. I will usually rework some of the examples and stories in the deck so they are personalized in my voice, using my stories and experience.
  2. Pitching – Same with a Pitch deck, especially sales decks. It is a good practice, but whenever I give someone a pitch deck I will spend an hour with them teaching them the story behind the deck and make sure they personalize it.
• THE SINGLE CANONICAL SLIDE: One other good practice when re-using slides is to simply pick that one canonical slide from the other person’s deck and use it in a framing slide. One of the most common scenarios that exist is that someone in your organization will have created a single great slide that somehow explains your organizations current strategy. These are great slides to reuse as when you are framing your own story, such as when you might need to do a nod to your company’s larger strategy. One note though, use it quickly and move on. Don’t dwell on it as it is simply a framing slide for your later argument.
• INCLUDE NOTES: I never give slides to another presenter without good notes and talking points. A well designed slide is often just the top level point you are trying to drive home and there is often significant text needed to properly frame and explain that top level point. Whenever I reuse myself or give someone a slide to reuse, it is a good idea to have these notes and talking points lest you become simply another poor presenter who can only read the text on the slide to your audience.
• IMPROVE THE SLIDE DON’T JUST REUSE IT: I almost always improve any slide that I’m given. One of the side benefits of this is that when I rework a slide, I become intimately familiar with the content and the context in which I are going to reuse it.

Best Practice: I never reuse a slide that doesn’t fit neatly within my story frame. Remember that you are trying to tell a cogent story and if you include a slide that detracts from your story you weaken your argument. This is the penultimate reason for including or not including a slide that you want to reuse.

One last thought. I like to think of presenters at the 100, 200, 300, and the 500 level.

• 100 level are those that are new to presenting and are new to their roles.
• 200 level are presenters who have done a fair amount of presenting and are comfortable, but not especially technically proficient at putting together a great visual presentation.
• 300 level are advanced presenters who can put together good story frames, good visuals, and deliver well.
• 500 level are the experts and generally work in senior communications roles doing very advanced presentations.

100 and 200 level presenters are the biggest abusers of slide reuse. If this is where you are at, please don’t just reuse. Take into account what I’ve laid out here today if you are going to reuse someone else’s slides.

Ping me back on email and let me know how well it works for you.

DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com