One Minute Pause No 34

Gripes with PowerPoint are well documented. You probably know them all, so no point going over old ground. But I have one fresh, big gripe: PowerPoint destroys your natural style of presenting.

As you stand up and read off the slides, it zombifies you and stifles your mental agility. Your ability to think on the spot diminishes. You become a slave to the slide. You concentrate on reading out each word, rather than discussing your argument, ideas or findings. You turn your shoulders, and sometimes whole body, to pray at the PowerPoint altar.

When doing so you forget about the audience, their nuances, their reactions, and their attention span. You don’t seem to care that the audience probably can’t read and listen at the same time. You read your bullet points faster than people are absorbing them, and slower than others. All of this type of behaviour is far removed from the natural ‘you’ – which means the audience remains far from convinced.

Take the Anti PowerPoint Challenge
This should apply to everyone - not just PowerPoint junkies. Try conducting your next 3 presentations without PowerPoint. “Preposterous!” I hear you say. “Everyone in my industry presents on PowerPoint. I would look poverty stricken if I didn’t have some hi-tech kit. Also how would I show numbers and graphs?”

Those claims are easily countered. For starters, it’s a great point of difference to do what everyone else ISN’T doing. The variation will be a breath of presentation oxygen. As a result audiences will start to buy into you more readily.

Reducing your PowerPoint addiction may also force you to think of new ways of explaining things. It will increase your mental agility when under the pressure of presenting. You’re more likely to treat it as a two-way conversation than a formal presentation. If there is some supporting visual evidence, put it in a handout for afterwards, or a well presented board. I guarantee you that your audience will appreciate the variation.

So is there a role for PowerPoint at all?
Yes, but only if you avoid using it as a “crutch”, or a script on the wall. It should be used selectively to add power to your message, when the spoken word alone isn’t enough.

Recently a media researcher from Brilliant Advertising in Leeds presented a graphic that showed the geographic concentration of visitors with less than two hours drive-time. This was something very hard to explain in words, and the picture painted at least a thousand of them. It was a very striking graphic that in an instant proved a very relevant statistic. Similarly you can use PowerPoint to show video footage – say an endorsement from a customer, or to build or layer some data to show growth. Great ways to enhance a message.

Remember that people are there to listen to you. They want to hear your ideas, and see you bring the message to life with your own natural style - whatever that is. If you suspect that PowerPoint is limiting your abilities to do this, please take the challenge for your next few presentations.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 9:50 am and is filed under One Minute Pause. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.