How to Visualize a Great Presentation – Part Two: The Presentation Spectrum

Today, we’ll cover the second part of Visualization which is how the presenter decides what type of presentation they are giving. 

Have you ever sat through a presentation and wondered, what’s the point?  Felt as though the basic premise of the presentation is flawed and poorly thought out?  One of the chief reasons this happens is that the presenter did not decide what action they are trying to drive with the audience.  And so the presentation is not put together in a cogent way that that engages the audience. 

 

 

Three Types Of Presentations

I’m going to take a bunch of heat for this next statement but it is a critical underpinning of the Modern Presentation Method.  There are only three types of presentations that are ever given.  They are Pitching, Organizing, and Teaching presentations.  And each is very different.  Here they are:

    

Pitching

These are the traditional presentations that so many people think of.  A single presenter stands before an audience of hundreds, thousands, or perhaps just one and pitches his or her product or message.  The goal of the presentation is to activate the audience so they perform some action.  Most of the time that action is either to buy a product or to buy into a certain message. 

This presentation type is very well understood today and some of the giants among presentation experts such as Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds have really moved the state of the art forward with their theories.

Examples:  Advertising, sales presentations, marketing presentations, political speeches.

 

Organizing

The least understood type of presenting is Organizing.  There is not much in the way of literature on this and this will be a big focus of MPM.

Here, the presenter tries to create unified collective action from a team or organization.  If you look back at the Part One post from yesterday, I asked you to define your needs/wants for a presentation and gave you four ways to do that:  Observe/Inform/Status, Orient, Act/Mission, and Decision.

These four action sets map very neatly into what happens in an organizing presentation.

1. Observe / Inform / Status – The goal is to inform a group about what is happening in a particular situation.  “Right now our situation is X”.
   Example:  Status or Staff Meeting
2. Orient – The goal is drive consensus on what the “truth” of a situation is.  “We all agree that X is caused by Y”.
   Example:  Staff Meeting Issue Follow Up
3. Decision – The goal is to drive a decision.  Sometimes this decision is the right of a leadership team or individual and sometimes the decision is a group decision.  That is more about how the organization vests decisions making authority than it is about the presentation type.  “Here is how we are going to solve Y and we need to choose from Courses of Action 1, 2, or 3”.
   Example:  Meeting on solving a specific problem.
4. Act / Mission – The goal is to coordinate action.  Here, the presenter wants to get the team on board and coordinated as they prepare to go execute on some project or plan.  “Now that we have chosen Course of Action 3, here is what each team needs to go do”.
   Example:  All Hands Team Meeting

 Note:  For the management junkies out there, this is an OODA loop, which is a competitive decision making process pioneered by John Boyd back in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  More on this in later posts.

 

 

 Briefing versus Meeting

Before we leave organizing I wanted to make a special distinction between conducting an organizing presentation as part of a briefing or as part of a meeting.

Many organizations are consensus based in today’s world and as such when teams get together they meet and collectively reach a decision.  Ultimate decision making power may rest with one individual but generally everyone in the room is involved in the discussion.  Therefore the presentation must encourage and enhance this discussion.

There are also many other types of organizations that use a briefing culture.  This is where a team or a staff meet and come up with the content and then one person or persons brief a more senior person who then either makes the decision or drives the discussion.  Two notable examples would be the US Army and also the Senior Management and/or Board of Directors of most major corporations.

In the Army case, a staff or subordinate officers will be tasked with driving a particular briefing (Observe / Inform / Status, Orient, Decision, Act / Mission) and they will then come in and deliver that presentation to the commanding officer of the unit who will then presumably make a decision based on the content of the briefing. 

In the Board of Directors case, the same thing happens.  A senior executive will be tasked with appearing before the board and presenting a particular briefing generally on a hot topic of major importance (Observe / Inform / Status, Orient, Decision, Act / Mission) and then the Board will take the information and meet to make whatever decision they are trying to drive.

Regardless, a briefing is a one:few presentation that is often not accompanied with a robust back and forth.  Oftentimes the briefer will be allowed to go through the content very quickly and will simply be asked some pointed questions about the content. 

Best Practice:  Really good presenters almost always send a pre-brief in Word or PowerPoint format for the senior leaders to read in detail beforehand.  They then come in and give a short and tight presentation followed by a rich Q&A as the senior leadership has had some time to ruminate on the presentation beforehand and they generally prepare questions accordingly.

  

Teaching

The last presentation type is teaching.  The goal here is transfer knowledge to the students in the audience, spur their creative thinking, and give them the skills to help expand the body of knowledge through their future work. 

 

Don’t Mix Them Up

Now that we have defined the types I’m going to give the single most important piece of advice about them which is DON’T MIX THEM UP.  A single presentation should only be one type.  Period!

Why?  Because you will fail to drive the type of action you want if you do this.  Here are some examples:

• Pitching To An Organization In A Decision Presentation – This is simply the most common mistake I see.  The presenter’s job is to come back to a group and do a decision presentation.  Whether it’s a briefing or a meeting does not matter.  What does matter is that the presenter chooses to pitch rather than actually delve into all of the potential courses of action. 
  So the presenter comes in, already has his or her favorite course of action, and simply presents to that conclusion rather than laying out all available courses of action for a cogent decision by the stakeholders.  Eduard Tufte, one of our fiercest critics, makes this one of his cornerstone pillars when he talks about PowerPoint but I fear the good professor misses the point.  It is not the tool causing the problem, but rather the intention of the presenter.  I have a strong feeling that this particular problem is one of the root causes for the problems that the US Army has been having with PowerPoint as of late.
  
• Pitching Instead Of Teaching – Here is another common error.  In the course of teaching students, a professor or instructor fails to convey all of the facts.  Again, another point that Tufte extols and he calls it “cherry picking”.  In this case the good professor is right on.  A good instructor never cherry picks and doesn’t present a skewed set of facts.  This is purely intellectual laziness at its best and outright fraud at its worst.
  
• Mixing Observe and Orient in an Organizing Presentation– This is a subtle problem but one that has huge consequences.  In an Observation presentation the goal is to bring to light the status of a particular situation.  “Our sales for Q1 are this in categories 1 through 30”.  This is very different from understanding and Orienting on what is causing sales to be up or down in categories 1 through 30.
  Many teams will try to get together and do both actions in a single briefing and they often fail.  This is because it is often easy to get the status data but it is hard to find the underlying causes of what caused a particular situation to arise.  So the team spends most of its time talking about the status and makes half-baked decisions about the underlying causes.  Once the logic of a situation is corrupted oftentimes Groupthink creeps in and the poorly thought out assumptions become organizationally recognized “facts” that later decisions are based on.  This is bad, bad stuff as it leads to bad follow on decisions.

Best Practice:  When I run a major project, I almost always separate these into two separate meetings.  In the first, we look at our status and decide what we need more info on.  In the second, we come together and talk through what our fact finding has uncovered about what caused each particular issue.  This simple process is one of the best ways to avoid Groupthink because it imposes a rigorous review process on what the particular “truth” is of a single situation.

 

Which Type Is Most Common?

One of the reasons I’m spending so much time on the Presentations Spectrum and the three types of presentations is because I believe one of the core problems in the current state of the art on presenting is that it is skewed so heavily to Pitching and away from the other two types.  I believe there are far more Organizing and Teaching presentations every day than there are Pitching Presentations which means we really need to move the dial to help those presenters for whom there isn’t a great deal of material to learn from.

If you don’t believe me, go look at your work calendar and see how many of each type of presentation you have had over the last two weeks.  I looked at mine and it was about 8:1:1 for Organizing:Pitching:Teaching.  And about fifty percent of my job is Pitching! 

On its face it wouldn’t surprise me if sixty plus percent of all presentations that happen each day are Organizing, and the remainder split between Pitching and Teaching.  More on this later in the posts on how to Build and Refine.

 Here’s a quick summary of each presentation type along with their various stengths and weaknesses.

 

 

Summary

Later on in the Build and Refine process I will talk about how to build specifically to each of the three types.  The purpose of today’s post is to introduce the Presentation Spectrum so that during the Visualization Process you can pick which particular presentation type you plan to give based on what actions you want the audience to take and what your goal is.

1. Decide your goal first.
2. Determine what you want the audience to do.
3. Pick your presentation type.

Tomorrow I will introduce the remaining steps of Visualization.  Thanks for tuning in.

Have a good day. 

DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

How to Visualize a Great Presentation – Part One

Let’s dive into the Modern Presentation Method (MPM) and cover how to Visualize a great presentation.  I’m going to do it in three posts.  This one, the first, introduces Visualization and covers the first three steps.  The second post will be about something I like to call the Presentation Spectrum, which are all of the core types of presentations that a person might have to give and what makes them different.  The third post wraps up our high level overview of Visualization.

Many people, as soon as they start on a presentation, sit down in front of a computer and start building PowerPoint slides or a Word document.  Don’t do this.  Take your time and follow the Visualization process.  It can be done in just a few minutes for a hasty version or you can do a much more detailed version. 

Why Does It Matter?

Visualization is the most important step in the Modern Presentation Method.  Done right, you will save time later in the process as you will reach that 80-90% complete draft much faster and will less effort.  You will also build a better story frame.

What is Visualization?

Visualization is the process where you, the presenter, craft an outline for your presentation that is well thought out and is relevant to your needs and the audience needs.

There are eight simple steps.

 

Let’s take a walk through the first three:

1 – Get the Background on the Presentation

  Right out of the gate, you need to get some background on the presentation. 

•  First, who is the meeting owner?  I am often asked by an intermediary to do a presentation.  So-and-So’s administrative assistant will come up and ask me to present to So-and-So’s team on some subject.  The administrative assistant isn’t the meeting owner, it is So-and-So.  Always find out who the real owner is.
• Next, how much time is allotted to your presentation?  This gates how much content you will need.  The average speaker talks at 2.5 – 3 words a second.  For example, for a 30 minute presentation you should not exceed 4,500 words if you are a slow speaker.  Time also gates how complicated your presentation structure is.  Are you going to do just PowerPoint slides?  Do you want to have Q&A or a dialogue session?  All of this takes time.
•  Next, who will be in the audience?  Get a list of all attendees.  It’s even better if the list details what their role is and which company/group they work for. 
•  Where will the presentation be held?  Get the actual room # & name.  How many people does it hold and how is it setup?
• What Audio Visual is available in the room?  Is there a projector and a presentation machine already in the room?  Can you hook up a laptop?  Is there a whiteboard?  What is the audio setup?
• What is the stated purpose of the presentation?  Get a precise purpose from whoever is asking you.  Oftentimes I find that I am asked to do a presentation that has a vague purpose.  Recently I was asked to put together a class on how to build great slides.  It turns out after I talked to the person who wanted me to put this together that they really wanted a class on how to present to executives effectively.  Again, get the precise purpose defined.
• What is the sequence of events?  Many times you will be able to skip this step because it really only applies to presentations that are part of a larger event.  In the case where your presentation is part of such an event, like a conference, it is always a good idea to see where your presentation is in the batting order.  Who comes before you and what will they cover?  Who comes after you and what will they cover?  Often times I will build on themes of previous speakers.  “You heard Jon talking earlier about Widget X, and I wanted to follow that up with some more detail…”.  Even better, when I speak after a competitor I might take the opportunity to good naturedly point out where their “pitch” wasn’t entirely truthful.  One good point is to never repeat content and audience has already heard.  Audiences quite rightly dislike hearing the same content over and over.  It’s ok to reuse some content to frame your discussion, but do it quickly and get to the new content. 
• When do they need the presentation complete?  What is the work back schedule with key dates that the meeting owner wants?  When do they want to see drafts and do reviews of those drafts?  Is there a rehearsal?  Getting the details now will save you from big miscommunications later. 
• Where should I upload the presentation?  Is there a file share or a SharePoint site that you need to upload to?  If not, create one and store your drafts there and send that information to all stakeholders.
• Who will be introducing you?  Someone should always introduce you.  Take a few minutes and write them a 5 sentence blurb that they can use.  You’d be surprised how important it is to establish your credibility to the audience with a solid introduction.  It should be a fresh and interesting statement about who you are.  Done right, you have immediate credibility.  Done wrong….you will not connect with the audience.
• Last, will there be press?  Most of the time you won’t have to worry about this, but it is a big deal so never lose track of whether this is true or false.  This is important for two reasons.  First, you need to carefully vet everything you say in front of the press, lest a misstep end up on the front page of a news website.  Second, I will often go up and talk with the reporters about the pieces they are writing and determine what content they would like to hear.  You’ll be surprised how much they appreciate a speaker who takes the time to cover content they are interested in and a good story can often be the result.

A little background research goes a long way in this very critical step.  Use your time wisely, get the details up front, and a better presentation will be the result.

2 – Define the Audience Needs/Wants

Your goal in this step is to figure out what the audience wants.  A good presenter knows what the audience needs and feeds that need during the presentation. 

 So how do you do that?  In the previous step I asked you to get a list of all attendees.  That list should be as detailed as possible. 

At the very least I like to know:

1. What their full name is.
2. What company they are from.
3. What team or division do they represent?
4. What their title is. 
5. Their contact information.
6. Why are they coming to the presentation?

Now, take that list, import it into an Excel spreadsheet, and let’s do some analytics on it.

Look for commonalities amongst the audience members.  One of the first things to do is determine which percentage of the audience is in which role.  So organize by title.  For example, at our yearly Worldwide Partner Conference, almost 70% of my audience is comprised of executives (CEO’s, C-Level, Presidents, VPs).  Figuring this out helps me determine the altitude of the content.  For executives I know I should be presenting strategic level content that helps them make good decisions about the direction of their organization.  If I’m talking to sales people I know they want to know how to get more sales, so my altitude will be much lower and my content will be more action based so they can have great takeaways that they can action to become better sales people.

Another cut is which companies are they from?  And what do those companies do?  If you are talking to a bunch of folks from consultancies, your message should feed what a consultant needs to do a better job.  You get the point.

Even more important than company is what they do for that company.  What their role is and which team or division do they work for. Are they in sales?  Do they actually produce their company’s product and are in R&D or engineering?  Are they an executive that runs the marketing organization?  Again, look for the commonality.  For example if seventy percent of the audience is in marketing, make sure your content speaks to marketers.

Next, how many people are in the audience?  Generally speaking, smaller audiences are easier to have “dialogue” with.  You can have robust Q&A for example.  I usually categorize with what I call 7-30-100.  Seven people is a great number to have a rich back and forth.  The number is small enough you don’t need a moderator and everyone can gather around a whiteboard and pass paper effectively.  Thirty is when I usually add a moderator to the mix.  Someone whose job it is to keep us on track and focused.  It is tough to have a really rich back and forth because just a few people can dominate the room if you let them.  This is still small enough that you can have a dialogue though.  And one hundred and above is when it gets real tricky to have good back and forth.  With crowds like this, you can use twitter and a host of other tools to get real-time feedback and you can also setup up microphones for Q&A but again it is really tough to get great back and forth.

Last, try to determine what topics are top of mind for the audience.  I always talk directly to a smattering of audience members beforehand.  If it’s an external audience, I’ll call them up introduce myself.  If it’s an internal presentation within my company, I’ll schedule a quick 15 minute face to face meeting.  I keep my initial question high level.  “What are you hoping to hear at this presentation?”  And then once I hear the three or four things that are top of mind I drill down deeper on each one and find out what their needs really are. 

I then take all of this information into account when I create the content.  Your audience is the primary reason you are there to give your presentation and they should feel like you have taken the time to understand what they want from the presentation.  I almost always point out that I have talked to audience members beforehand and then I include their questions into the actual presentation itself. 

3 – Define Your Needs/Wants

Your next step is to figure out what you want.  Generally you are trying to one or more of the following four things. 

1. Observe / Inform / Status – You are trying to present some information that you think the audience should know.  The most classic example is teaching.  You present the material with the intention that the students learn the knowledge.  Another example would be the ubiquitous staff meeting.  “Here is the status of our world”.
2. Orient – You are trying to gain consensus about what the “truth” of a situation is.  Often times an outcome of a status meeting is “we need more data” or “I don’t think this can be true”.  When you orient an audience you are most likely bringing the “truth” to light and looking for consensus.
3. Act / Mission – These are meetings in which you focus a team on a specific objective and send them off to work.  A project plan meeting is an example.
4. Decision – These are meetings in which you put one or more courses of action in front of an audience and ask them to make a decision.  An interesting special case here is a sales pitch which is just a Decision presentation with only one course of action, the one you are trying to sell.

 Many presentations do one or more of the above.  Here are some examples of meeting types in action:

• Sales Pitch – Let me tell you about what is happening in our marketplace (Observe / Inform / Status), here’s some facts that support what I just told you (Orient), I think you only have one course of action which is to buy my product (Decide), now here are your calls to action to do that (Act).
• Staff Meeting – Everyone gets together and goes over the latest quarters business results (Observe / Inform / Status).  This is usually followed up by:
• Project Meeting – Everyone gets together and shares what they learned about the problems (Orient) and then the group develops some courses of action and decides what to do (Act).
•  All Hands – Once a month we get the whole team together, share the state of the business (Observe / Inform / Status) and then tell the team what we are doing project wise over the next month (Mission / Act)

Take a few minutes and determine which of these tasks you are trying to accomplish with your presentation.  Be crisp and précises and write out the objective you are trying to drive with your presentation:

• Decision + Act:  I want the audience to go out and buy my product.
• Orient + Decision:  I need the team to be in agreement on what we are going to do about this problem.
• Act:  I need the team to do this task in a coordinated fashion.

 

Summary for Part One

So that’s the first three steps of Visualization. 

1. Get the Background on the Presentation – Get the who, what, where, when, why, and how and set the expectation with the meeting or presentation owner on when and how you will deliver the content.
2. Define Your Needs/Wants – The audience is king.  If you do a good job defining what they need/want and this is reflected in your presentation you will have them on the edge of their seats.
3. Define the Audience Needs/Wants – Know what you want to accomplish with this presentation.  Write out those objectives and use them to guide you as you build content.

 Tomorrow I will introduce step four of Visualization which is determining what type of presentation you are trying to give.  And Thursday, we’ll cover the remaining steps.

Have a good day. 

DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

Time Management and MPM

If you are like me, one of the top things you worry about whenever you start a project, is how much time should I spend on each item in my work back schedule?

This is a difficult question when it comes to presentations, but here are some basic Modern Presentation Method (MPM) rules to follow in order to maximize your time

1/3: 2/3 Breakdown

From an overall time perspective you should spend 1/3 of your time in the first step of the MPM process – Visualization.  The remaining 2/3’s of your time is in the remaining steps.

 

The reason you should spend such a big chunk of time in visualization is that it is simply the most critical part of the presentation.  If you do a good job focusing on what the audience wants/needs, what you want/need, how you will present (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc…), and your story framework, you will minimize the number of revisions that you will do later in the process.

Why is this important?  Time.  Changes later in the process take 10X as much time as they would have taken if the change occurred early in visualization. 

 Create the Work back Schedule

The next step in time management is setting your work back schedule.  Backward planning is critical in presenting because oftentimes the date of the presentation can’t move.  In order to avoid the relentless pressure of such a deadline, it is helpful to put together a work back schedule immediately.

At a minimum, I will set completion milestones as follows:

1. Visualization Complete – 1/3 of the way through my allotted time
2. Storyboard Complete – Within 2 days of completing Visualization
3. Draft 1 of Build and Refine Complete – No later than 1/3 further of the allotted time.
4. All Subsequent drafts Complete – All the way up till 4 hours out.
5. Do Rehearsals – Last 24 hours.

  

Calendar Management

Many great plans fail because the project owners fail to book time.  Before you go any further, I recommend that you schedule meetings for each of the milestones.  I would get 1-2 hours on your calendar on each milestone day to give yourself appropriate time to complete each step in the process.

Hasty versus Deliberate

Oftentimes, you will have less than a day to put together a presentation.  One of the best things about MPM is that this is taken into account.  If you find yourself in this situation, I would recommend that you stick with the 1/3 : 2/3 rule as a basic guide.  If you are working as part of a team, it helps to pull everyone into a room, do the visualization together and then assign work items.  Don’t ever skip Visualization!  You’ll pay later if you do.

Summary

So there’s Time Management in a nutshell.  Use your time wisely and no matter how short your deadline is, you will never feel rushed and out of control.

As always, ping me with your ideas and comments.

DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com

Dark Room = Dark Slide Background

Saturday afternoon and I’m going to take a few minutes away from the first bowl games of the year.  As a result, this post will be pretty quick.

Today I want to riff on slide backgrounds.  People ask me all the time, should I use a light one or a dark one?

Well, the answer is really simple.  Dark room; use a dark background with light or white text.  Light room; use a very light background with black or very dark text. 

Attached is a 2 slide PowerPoint presentation you can use to check this out for yourself.  Here are what the two slides look like:

       

Go into a conference room and fire up PowerPoint in SlideShow mode and pull up the first slide with the Black background.  If you have the lights on it will look washed out.  But if you turn the lights way down or off the text just POPS OUT at you.  Go to the back of the room and see which line is the smallest line you can read.  In many 30 x 40 foot conference rooms, people can read the size 20 font. 

Now bring up the slide with the Light background while the room is still dark.  You can probably still read the size 20 font, but the slide seems to bloom a little before your eyes due to the while background.  Now turn the lights back on.  I’ll bet the slide looks great.  As a result of this little test here are a few observations.

1. Dark Room – Use a Dark Background (Blue, Black, Green, and Grey are best)
2. Light Room – Use a Light Background (White and Grey are best)
3. Almost all rooms greater than 50 people should be a dark room.  The light text contrasts better for readability in large spaces.

 

So that’s it…now it’s back to football for me.

DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com