Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [55]
I asked, “How do you know about glottal stops?”
Matt replied, “I took a linguistics course in college.”
While Matt was using the term analogously to make a point about design (bullet lines should be spaced evenly), he was also inadvertently making another point about the relationship between graphics design and narration.
Unfortunately, in common presentation practice, these elements are often treated as two distinct entities. This separation results in dissociation between what the presenter shows and what the presenter says. The split forces the audience to stop listening while they try to understand the graphic. As a result, the disruption to the presentation is even greater than irregular spacing on a slide or the sound of a glottal stop.
You can bring your design and your words together in a very simple way. Whenever you display a slide, use your narration to help your audience understand what they are seeing. Use a Title Plus to describe your slide. A Title Plus is a succinct statement that captures the entire content of the slide.
Design each slide with a single-line title that conveys the main point. Each slide also has additional material below the title—bullets, graphs, icons, pictures, tables; that is the plus. Every time you click to a new slide, tell your audience what you’ve shown them using the Title Plus:
• “Here you see five years of annual revenues.”
• “This table compares our product to all others.”
• “These are the many benefits of our product.”
State the Title Plus the instant the new slide appears, or your audience will stop listening and try to understand what they are seeing. After the Title Plus, you can go on to discuss your slide in greater detail and add value.
Synchronize your graphics with your linguistics and you with your audience.
76. One Presentation, Multiple Audiences: 12 Presenters, 12 Stories, 1 Set of Slides
The foundation of the Power Presentations methodology is that the presenter is the focus of the presentation, not the slides. But this concept often runs into objections that usually begin with, “But you just don’t understand,” and then continue on with, “We need to have the slides to send ahead!” Or “We need to provide leave-behinds!” Or “My audience wants the details!” Or “The slides help me remember what to say!” Or “My board member made me do it!” Or, the most common, “The slides have to stand alone!”
As a coach, I have tried to counter these objections by driving a wedge between the display functions (during the presentation) of slides and their document functions (before and after the presentation), to no avail. Despite all my efforts—and those of countless other fellow coaches, critics, and authors—presenters continue to treat presentations as documents.
So let’s try one other argument. To set the stage, let me begin by describing the span of my services. For more than two decades, I have coached:
• Individual presenters to deliver one presentation to one audience, as in a keynote speech
• Individual presenters to deliver one presentation to multiple audiences, as in an IPO road show
• Individual presenters to deliver multiple presentations to multiple audiences, as in a tour to launch of a family of products
• Multiple presenters to deliver one presentation to one audience, as in presenting different levels of expertise at a conference or convention
• Multiple presenters to deliver multiple presentations to different audiences, as in offering a variety of schedule options at a conference or convention
But I had never coached multiple presenters to deliver one presentation to multiple audiences, until I worked with a unique group of executives at Cisco Systems.
Cisco has been my client ever since I coached its IPO road show in 1990, and they have given me the opportunity to work with many different business units. One of them, the Eastern Europe region, is run by Kaan Terzioglu, a Cisco vice president. Kaan invited me to Cisco’s London facility to coach a dozen of his managers from several countries, including