When information bloat meets shrinking attention spans, those who know how to communicate lean by adding maximum value with minimum waste, will stand out. To be lean, you must carefully guard against the “fat” of irrelevant material.
How much irrelevant material is in your presentation? Probably far more than you think. Despite your best efforts to clarify your main point and carefully select just the data you need to support your arguments, there are still many insidious ways that information can creep into your presentation.
Irrelevant information is like unwanted empty calories that somehow latch on to fat cells in your content and bloat your presentation beyond recognition.
If it does not add value to the listener or does not support your main point, it does not belong. While no one sets out to purposely include irrelevant material, it forces its way in for several reasons:
- Information compulsion. This phenomenon was described by journalist Tom Wolfe, who said, “people have an overwhelming need to tell you something that you don’t know, even when it’s not in their best interest.”[i]
- Self-serving excuses or boasting. When you want to make yourself look good, you might talk about how hard you’ve been working or the difficulties you’ve overcome to get the information.
- Excessive context. Decisions are about the future, but too many people spend far too much time talking about how we got to this point rather than where we need to go next.
- Editorial commentary. It’s tempting to tell people how they should react to a situation, but sometimes the facts best speak for themselves.
- Neat stuff. Have you ever come across a visual or a chart that is just so cool that you have to include it in your presentation? Before you do, ask yourself what point it serves or how it advances your argument.
- You see a lot of this in presentations; it includes such things as opening amenities, your “corporate story”, and all the stuff your legal and marketing departments force you to put on your slides.
[i] Cited in Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, p. 107.
You may hate the idea of speaking in front of groups, and there’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of people feel the same way. I used to feel the same way early in my career. But I’m going to explain why you should develop at least some reasonable proficiency in public speaking, even if your work does not require it.
The ability to speak in front of large groups of people is one of the most important skills you can develop to propel your career, even if you don’t do it regularly as part of your job description. That’s because it increases your influence, makes you a better thinker, boosts personal confidence, and makes you a better communicator in other modes as well.
Influence
Public speaking has immediate practical benefits. It gives you more exposure both inside and outside your organization, and you’ll be seen as more of a leader by those who count.
As a knowledge worker, your value is directly dependent on your ability to effectively transfer that knowledge effectively to the relevant stakeholders. Public speaking allows you to transfer that knowledge wholesale to a much wider audience. If you think of yourself and your personal brand as a startup, public speaking is the best way to make your personal influence scalable.
Maybe you’re not that interested in increasing your personal influence for selfish reasons, and that’s very noble of you. But having greater influence helps to advance causes or ideas that you care about. And if you learn the art of communicating your ideas in a way that aligns with the way others think and what they need, others will care about them as well.
Thinking
Beyond practical reasons, public speaking has intrinsic benefits that carry over to other aspects of your work and life. It’s no accident that rhetoric was at the center of education for so many centuries. Very smart people for over two thousand years have known that it is the incubator of leadership skills, because it teaches one to think and to communicate ideas.
When you craft and deliver a speech, you get two valuable forms of feedback that improve your thinking. The first is self-generated, which comes when you prepare. Frequently, we don’t really know if we understand an idea until we try to put it into words that others will understand. It’s called the illusion of understanding; I frequently suffer from it myself. I might read an article that makes perfect sense in my head, but when I try to articulate it out loud or on paper, I realize how shallow and patchy my understanding truly is.
And, knowing others are going to listen critically forces you to find objective support for your ideas, which strengthens your grasp of topics even if you already know them fairly well. Every single time I prepare a presentation, I learn more about the topic than I knew going in.
Second, if your topic is engaging enough to spark questions and discussion, it’s the purest way to evolve and improve your thinking through competition with other sharp minds. In fact, public speaking is a form of deliberate practice, in which you push your communication to the limits of your abilities and then get immediate feedback on your performance.
Confidence
Public speaking is like New York: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. When you learn that you can enter a room full of complete and potentially hostile strangers, and win them over to your way of thinking, no job interview or one on one meeting need ever intimidate you again. And, because public speaking is one of—if not the greatest—fears that people have, simply overcoming your pre-speech jitters is great training for so many other challenges in life.
Communicating and Connecting
Finally, public speaking makes you a better and more influential speaker in one on one communication, because you learn to express your thoughts in a listener-friendly fashion that captures their interest and addresses their interests. It makes you a better writer, for the same reason.
It teaches you to think and adapt on your feet, which can make you a better interviewee, a more effective salesperson, and a more persuasive contributor to meetings.
In my own career, I was lucky enough to learn how incredibly useful public speaking can be while I was still in my early 20s, thanks to a friend who shamed me into attending my first Toastmasters meeting. I went with great trepidation, but I found the environment to be so relaxed and supportive that within two or three meetings I had totally changed my attitude and gotten over my fear. Within a few months, the bank where I worked took notice of my abilities, and increasingly had me speak at various functions. In a way, it’s no exaggeration to say that learning to speak in public changed my life.
So, if you have been holding back, I urge you to take that first step. Take a class, hire a coach, join Toastmasters, commit to speak somewhere, so that you don’t have a choice, and just do it. You will be glad you did.
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Imagine this scene: Dr. King sets up on the National Mall—and delivers a PowerPoint presentation! Would we remember his words today?
MLK’s Dream speech worked so well for many reasons, but one of the most important was his ability to seize the audience’s imagination through mental imagery. He didn’t need a big screen set up on the white marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial to get us to picture scenes of black and white children playing together “on the red hills of Georgia”, or to imagine freedom ringing from “every hill and molehill of Mississippi”.
All he had was words, and words were more than enough.
Technology adds so much to our capabilities that we sometimes forget what we give up in return. I wonder if PowerPoint has sapped our power to evoke mental images through words, and if so, does it matter?
I do believe it matters, because mental images can be more persuasive than actual visuals. Actual visuals are good because they are processed instantaneously, and because everyone sees the same image, but these advantages may actually be disadvantages in terms of the persuasiveness of the image. Mental images can be more persuasive because they make people care, they make them remember, and most important of all, they can make them act.
Mind pictures make your listeners care
The right word can be like a light switch in the listener’s mind that lets them see their own personal version of the image you want them to see. Because it’s theirs, it can be more real and more meaningful—hence more persuasive. Political strategist Frank Luntz says, “…the word imagine is perhaps the single most powerful communication tool because it allows individuals to picture whatever personal vision is in their hearts and minds.”[1]
Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, compares the effect of two statements: “a vaccine that protects children from a fatal disease carries a 0.001% risk of permanent disability.” Vs. “One out of 100,000 vaccinated children will be permanently disabled.” The second statement is more moving because all we see is that one child, not the 99,999 that are happy and healthy.
Mind pictures make your message unforgettable
When someone is getting ready to decide or to act on your presentation, you want them to remember how they felt when the heard the presentation and the arguments for taking the recommended course of action. Because creating the image actually takes work, the effort of creating the image will get the listener more involved and engaged, and they are more likely to remember the image or have it pop up in their minds when they are getting ready to act on the information. That’s why all memory systems are based on mental images.
Bob Woodward’s book, Bush at War contains this statement uttered by CIA agent Cofer Black in a Cabinet meeting after 9/11: “’When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,’ he said. It was an image of death that left a lasting impression on a number of war cabinet ministers. Black became known in Bush’s inner circle as the ‘flies on the eyeballs guy’“
Think about it: I read that book 17 years ago, and when I began writing this podcast, it popped into my memory immediately. Now, that’s powerful!
Mind pictures make your listeners act
People are more likely to perform the actual behavior if they envision themselves doing it. One study that tested actual consumers’ sign-up rates for cable service tested two descriptions of the benefits that cable would bring, such as not having to hassle with babysitters and gas to go out. One described the benefits, the second asked people to imagine themselves in that situation were more than twice as likely to sign up than those who just got a description of product features.[2]
It’s especially important for leaders who want to turn their vision into ground truth. One study conducted by Wharton professor Andrew Carton found that hospital leaders who “communicated visions with image-based words triggered better patient outcomes that leaders who communicated visions abstractly.” They also found similar results for teams who were tasked with designing new toys.
Even better, when you can get them to picture themselves in the image, it tends to increase the likelihood of the behavioral change.[3] Stories are powerful image creators, and they are even more powerful when you make the listener the hero.
By the way, it even works great when your audience is yourself. There’s an idea called implementation intentions, which is basically picturing in your mind actually performing the action that you intend. So, for example, instead of saying, “I’ll work out after work”. You say: After I grab my keys and get into my car, I will start thinking of my workout routine as I drive directly to the gym…” It makes it much more likely that you will remember it and actually do it.
Mind pictures make you look better
There’s also a more personally selfish way to look at what painting word pictures can do for you: it makes you seem more charismatic. There has been research done that correlates the imagery content of presidential speeches with perceived leadership charisma; and also studies that actually manipulate the variables experimentally which demonstrate the same thing.
How to create mental pictures
First, make it a priority. You’re already spending a lot of time trying to find the right visual for your slide presentation. Why not spend some of that time figuring out how to generate the virtual image in their minds? You don’t have to give up slides, but try a little harder to use them less. Give yourself a goal of adding one or two verbal paintings to your dry content.
A great way to do this is to picture the scene in your mind after you’ve written it. For example, I can take that last sentence I just wrote and re-write it this way: Look at the words on the page, sit back, close your eyes, and imagine what it would like for your listener to do it. Then draw that view for your listeners.
Sketch your points first in black and white to make sure you get the message down properly, but then go back and stir the pot of your vocabulary. I know I’ve said before that short plain words are the best, but the ones that come out in your first draft are the dull everyday words that have lost their fizz. Dig a little deeper where the colorful interesting words lurk just beneath the surface.
Some of the best words are adjectives that convey vivid details, names of concrete things that everyone can envision (think of Churchill’s “iron curtain” descending over Europe), and strong action verbs that can make those pictures in their minds move and act in ways that make them more memorable and vivid.
Analogies and metaphors are especially easy for listeners to picture in their minds. In 1940, Great Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany and desperately needed supplies and weapons that it could not afford. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to provide them, but the isolationist mood in the US made that very difficult. FDR came up with a plan called Lend-Lease, under which the US would “lend” materials to Britain in exchange for leasing some of its naval bases. It was legally dubious, but instead of quibbling with fine points of law, here’s how he sold it at a press conference: “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire…I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.”… I don’t want $15–I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. ” The average voter couldn’t be bothered with legal clauses, but could easily picture the idea of their neighbor’s house being on fire.
Notice how FDR said it. He didn’t just compare the situation to a house on fire, he made the listeners picture the scene, with the hose several hundred feet away, and the physical acts of fetching it and connecting it to the hydrant, and helping him put it out.
Build it into your presentation structure. Where are the best spots to add a dab of living color? The introduction is a great place to flip the visual switch in their minds. When you’re describing the problem and the pain it’s causing, is another great spot to put it in. But probably the best spot for visual imagery is the end of your presentation or speech, you give them a psychological power boost before you send them on their way.
Imagine
Imagine this scene: you’re in a boardroom about to make your presentation to a group of decision makers. As the previous speaker quietly fades from the premises and their memories, your listeners are chatting idly or fussing with their phones. You launch into your presentation and bodies lean forward, the room clicks into silence, and heads snap to lock eyes onto you.
Or you describe the problem and the risks they run in not solving it, and eyes widen, people almost visibly shudder, and heads shake. You can see that they are feeling the pain you’ve painted for them…
Finally, imagine your team after you’ve delivered your vision for the year, pouring out of the room charged up with palpable energy, eager to get started.
You can turn any one of these pictures into reality by
painting pictures with words.
[1] Frank Luntz, Words that Work, p. 21.
I’m often asked to recommend the best book on PowerPoint, and it’s hard to select just one, because it truly depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Here are four of my favorite, along with links to more in-depth posts I’ve written about three of them.
So much depends on the size of the audience, and related to that is the level of interactivity you expect.
If you’re delivering a “ballroom” type speech to hundreds of people, your slides are going to contain very few words, and comprise mostly visuals that add impact and memorability to what you say. Nancy Duarte’s Resonate is excellent for learning how to structure your story and present it visually. Garr Reynolds’ book Presentation Zen Design can help even the most aesthetically-challenged non-designer put together something that looks good.
For most business presentations, you will probably be in a much smaller room and there will be a lot of back and forth discussion, so you need a briefing or a discussion deck, and Bruce Gabrielle’s Speaking PowerPoint is in my estimation far and away the best book for this.
Finally, as a reminder, visuals do not have to be slides; you can get the audience involved in putting together your story with interactive visuals, and for this I recommend Whiteboard Selling by Sommers and Jenkins.
Never forget that slides are tools, and the best tool to use depends on the job you need it to do.
