slide:ology by Nancy Duarte

Among the largest and priciest books on the ‘Business Presentations’ bookshelf, and written by one of the USA’s leading authorities on presentations, slide:ology promises a great deal.  With its coffee-table-chic format, high-profile case studies and on-the-nose interjections from trendies like Garr Reynolds and Seth Godin, it cries out to presenters who are looking for something more aesthetically inspirational than the abundant boardroom manuals.

In this area slide:ology certainly does not disappoint. Complimenting Nancy’s earnest and passionate belief, the pages make pleasing use of imagery, typefacing, colour, imagery and all the other graphical niceties that the author knows and loves to teach. Unfortunately, the inviting use of white space and friendly ‘one idea per spread’ format that makes this book so accessible also makes it feel suspiciously lightweight. Insightful as most of the key ideas are, the breeziness with which they are dealt and the lack of scientific insight into why they work mean it is the graphic design sections of this book that have the most credibility.

Nancy’s Manifesto: The Five Theses of the Power of a Presentation is, puzzlingly, delivered right at the end of the book:

• Treat Your Audience as King
• Spread Ideas and Move People
• Help Them See What You’re Saying
• Practice Design, Not Decoration
• Cultivate Healthy Relationships

These principles are huge, and it is disappointing to find them right at the end of the book instead of seeing the content of slide:ology arranged around them. Readers will have to flip back through the book to look again for the ‘how?’ behind these ideas, while they might have had more impact by being introduced at the start, proven with hard evidence, and then demonstrated with the rest of the content.

The Art of Presenting, Without the Science

In her introduction Nancy says “This book covers how to create ideas, translate them into pictures, display them well, and then deliver them in your own natural way.” For the most part, this promise is admirably delivered upon. But in the same paragraph she then says “This book will teach you “why””, but it is this part of the picture that is sadly under-represented here.

Yes, pretty much anyone with exposure to presentations and an eye on the media knows that a global evolution from text-based to visual-based slides is gathering momentum. Nancy assumes her reader understands this, makes a strong case for presentations (and a decent case against ‘career suislide’ – the unhappy consequence of sticking with cue card-style presentations), and then launches into the creative starting-point; knowing who your audience is and figuring out what kind of engagement you need to have with them. This reader can’t help but feel that going into more depth about exactly why the tired old methods don’t work (and are actually counter-productive) would have provided enough intellectual ballast to keep everyone afloat all the way up until Chapter 11 – Interacting with Slides, when some of the cognitive rationale behind a visual approach actually starts to emerge.

The justification behind the central theses of the book comes too little and too late. Readers who are reluctant to start learning about design might need some clear facts about what makes bullet-points so harmful, and why audiences find it easier to assimilate visual information, to give them the motivation to keep reading through the dense central chapters on design. Alternatively, they may quite understandably be inspired to rethink their approach and subsequently convinced that Duarte can do it for them. As Nancy says after whetting our appetites for visual techniques in Chapter 2 – Creating Ideas, Not Slides: “Be prepared to enlist the help of a professional designer (you did plan far enough ahead to make sure you’ve got one available, right?)” Excellent advice, but it slightly undermines the tutorial styling of the design chapters to come.

That said, readers who already know that Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Keynote presentation is Duarte’s work will probably be quite happy to take Nancy’s word for all this, skip past the chapter on finding inspiration and sketching out our thoughts on Post-Its (because most of you already know our subject) and dive into chapters 3 and 4 on Creating diagrams and Presenting data. Gore did, after all, win hearts and minds all over the world by clearly and dramatically presenting the right data in the right way.  And in this area, slide:ology is a resounding success.

Killer Visualisation

All too often, presentation gurus claiming ambassadorship of the visual slide paradigm fail to address the critical skill of transforming a complex idea into a simple visual, instead falling into the ‘zen’ paradigm of full-bleed, eye-candy photographs and two or three-word shock headings. By contrast, the insightful creative process Nancy sets out along with pages of example diagrams and schematics is a hugely valuable resource…all the more so given that PowerPoint 2007 already provides many of the example diagrams in its SmartArt feature ready for non-designers to start inserting. The only caveat to these chapters is that sometimes Nancy’s sketching gets a little too enthusiastic….there are diagrams of a complexity that can completely baffle audiences unless considerable thought and work is put into how they are animated and explained.

On that subject, we have to wait until much later in Chapter 9 – Creating movement for some guidance into how to use animation effectively. That’s rather late in the day to mention such an essential and underused component of presentation software. Nancy does provide some great high-level insight into how to use effects to support different types of message (motion paths to show connections, advanced emphasis effects to show takeover or surpassing etc), but she does ask quite a lot of the inexperienced user by looking at animation more from a movie-director’s point of view than a PowerPoint or Keynote designer’s. The most useful tips here are delivered across twoparticular idea-spreads, Designing Time-Based Scenes and Planning Animations, which could easily have been fleshed out into an entire chapter at the expense of the cinematography-inspired theory that follows.

Bringing it All Together

In addition, much of the valuable insight from the earlier chapters on diagrams and visual sequences could have been combined with the animation advice to really inspire a dynamic approach to building and animating visuals that keep audiences engaged, but sadly this never happens. We get a whole Chapter 6 – Arranging Elements demonstrating how to lay out visual elements in sympathy with the eye’s natural flow of direction (at least, the natural Western eye’s direction), and different types of layout that encourage audiences to easily perceive hierarchy, progression and relationships. I can’t help thinking that this would be so much simpler to achieve by building the elements of the slide in the right order with the right effects. There are several very perceptive ideas in all of these chapters, but frustratingly they never quite combine to show how some truly dynamic explanations could be achieved relatively easily.

Design for All?

As much as Nancy tries to make the design-based chapters - Thinking Like a Designer, Arranging Visual Elements and Using Visual Elements – accessible to everyone, readers without some background and/or a keen interest in graphic design will likely find them difficult to embrace and apply. The case studies are certainly demonstrative of the various elements of theory that are expounded, but the slides shown are so disparate that it is difficult to see the principles being consistently applied. In addition, one of the most startling things about the selected slide examples is that they do not fully represent the depth of Nancy’s visual thinking. Too many of the slides still show text of a very small size and in full sentences, which is disqualified by some of the guidelines she sets out in Chapter 11 – Interacting with Slides.

Although there is strong encouragement for presenters to move away from basing slides on text, this appears as more of an afterthought in the final chapters. It might have made more sense first to set up arguments why this is a bad idea and then to build the alternative techniques around them. By presenting ideas about ‘Constraining the Text’, ‘Constraining the Length’ and ‘How Many Slides?’ at the end of the book, one feels Nancy has foregone an opportunity to make a strong case for a dynamic visual style in favour of her passionate expertise for creating attractive graphics. In addition, many of the examples jar with current psycho-perceptual theory with application to presentations; there is an abundance of large, full-face human photographs, which are shown to consume excessive cognitive load in audiences and make it difficult for them to concentrate on anything else. While this would not be an issue in traditional graphic design, there are different rules for presentations when cognitive processing is at a premium.

slide:ology could easily have been two books: one very capable and detailed guide to producing graphics that work well in presentations, and one explaining why bullet-points fail and visuals work. The latter thesis however, would need significant fleshing out to make a convincing case. Conspicuously absent from slide:ology is any attempt to delve deep into cognitive aspects of presenting and how to structure information to make long-term influences on audiences.  There are several brainstorming workshops offered in the book, from psychoanalytic ‘know thyself’ wordgames to exercises for generating and structuring ideas, and while the therapy-style presentation of these may not be to everyone’s taste, they are useful. This book is not focused on business or sales presentations, and readers seeking guidance on creating competitive value propositions and sales messaging will find these exercises lacking in substance.

Conclusion

With all that in mind, slide:ology is one of the best books available on creating visual presentations, even if its reach outweighs its grasp. A lack of psychological insight and a breezy style, that does not do justice to the many profound ideas littered throughout, may leave serious readers unsatisfied. Yet the chapters on presenting data and visualising information are almost worth the price alone, as long as readers have already bought into the approach before picking up the book. Highly recommended, but not quite the bible of effective presenting that it could have been.

Brilliant Presentation is published by Pearson (who also own the Financial Times), and prominently displayed at airport and railway bookshops across the UK. It has sold well, and no doubt been read by many an executive. Yet, while full of attractive prose and colourful anecdotes, the book is poorly structured, repetitive, shallow, and contains little that is new or insightful. This is precisely the sort of book on presentations that is widely read, and perhaps this explains why so many people deliver not brilliant, but tedious, presentations.

Brilliant Presentation attempts to move presenters on the journey towards brilliance. Brilliant presenters are viewed as those with a ‘deep transcendental knowledge’; an all consuming passion for their subjects, the ability to tell stories in simple language, while making these stories seem fresh, and a sense of pace and control in delivery. Presentations are mostly seen as acts of theatre – and Hall has in mind the ‘ballroom’ or ‘keynote’ presentation in most of what he writes. Speakers on the after-dinner circuit are cited as examples.

This book is targeted more at the want-to-be business guru than the improving sales presenter. For Hall, presenters have control of their own material – that is, they decide what they want to say. Corporate objectives should be considered (‘judge a presentation not by the applause but by the reviews… win the business’), but no thought is given to the fact that many, many, presenters use material they have been given by others (e.g. the Global Marketing Department).

Approach

Hall proposes that presentations should:

1. Be in context – crafted for each audience and each occasion
2. Tell a story
3. Use facts to provide ‘colour’
4. Use high-quality visuals or none at all, and
5. Be performed with pace and power.

Context

‘If you don’t know why you are doing a presentation, where you are doing it, when you are doing it, to whom you are doing it, what the state of the political or commercial climate is, what the audience knows already and what they expect then expect to fail’. A presenter should do research into the event they are speaking at, the schedule for the day, the mood, the audience, and so on. Hall also suggests that part of understanding the context of a presentation is being aware of the day’s news, and even being aware of one’s own mood. Hall is suggesting that a presentation might need to be adapted right up until the moment it is delivered.

Story and Colour

Of Hall’s five parts of a brilliant presentation, two overlap – the need to use stories and the need for those stories to use ‘colour’ to bring them to life. Indeed, when explaining what kind of stories to tell, Hall makes the point that stories should ‘fire the imagination’, and use first person anecdotes. These two are what adding colour to stories is – as Hall later explains. Hall’s five parts of a brilliant presentation can usefully be reduced to four.
Stories should be written with a clear end in mind, and be summarised at the start. Structure should be simple – perhaps in three parts. To make stories interesting, they should be fresh and creative, and Hall suggests things like reading widely and working at breakfast time to get creativity flowing, in order to find material to add colour.

Visuals

Hall makes the important point that ‘if you have no visual aids you have made the decision to make you yourself the illustration’. While poor visuals ‘slow everything down’, the brilliant presenter should ‘get trained and experienced people to finish off [their] visuals’ for greater impact.

For Hall, visual aids should have fewer words, fewer slides, and sometimes impactful ‘single word slides’. Pictures can be ‘useful, as a picture is worth 10,000 words. But it has to be the right picture’.

Hall gives an example of what he considers best practice in slide design in chapter 10 of Brilliant Presentations. The problem? The slides he shows aren’t effective. They are professionally designed, but the meaning is all still conveyed by text. The slides are still self-explanatory. Images, far from conveying real meaning, are gratuitous and distracting. (Hall’s slides contain images of lemons – ‘to give it vitamin C, where ‘C’ stands for communication’.) All the meaning is in the text, and the text is still, essentially, a collection of bullet points. Pretty bullet points, but none-the-less, easily readable and understandable by any audience member, without the presenter. So why listen to the presenter?

In his chapter on PowerPoint, Hall gives the awfully outdated advice to ‘not use more than five bullet points or thirty words a slide except for handouts’. Fonts should be selected with care – ‘Ariel [sic] and Times Roman are pretty well foolproof’. In the context of the sentence, the spelling mistake is amusing, and ought to have been picked up by a publisher with Pearson’s resources. This book feels very much like it was written to cash in on a hungry market, rather than being any sort of labour-of-love. It’s on the shelves, and people buy it. But better books are available.

Performance

Presenters should be themselves, work on their voice, develop stage presence, look right, be dramatic, be dynamic – the advice comes thick-and-fast. The problem is that most presenters know these things to be important, but scatter-gun advice can end up being unhelpful. Probably the single most memorable bit of advice is to get a voice coach. By saying too much, this book ends up saying little.

Should You Read It?

Brilliant Presentations is poorly structured – both within and between chapters, making it hard to follow. For example, Chapter 4 – on context – talks extensively about the need to understand the audience. But then Chapter 11 ‘Really Understanding Your Audience’ is, of course, on a similar topic. The same material is handled in two places, in different ways. This doesn’t make the book easy to follow.

Individual chapters in the book are also poorly constructed. A large part of the material in the book is presented outside the main narrative – as lists of do’s and don’ts. In some chapters, there are more pages of do’s and don’ts than of the main body of text. Summaries at the end of each chapter sometimes relate to the main body, sometimes to the do’s and don’ts, and sometimes to neither. The book gives the impression of having been written as 1000s of small parts, with no successful organising principle. Hall does suggest a five-stage approach to brilliant presentations, but then chapters 9-16 seem to sit entirely outside this framework, and the five stages are really four in any case.

This book contains some great material, and some wonderfully pithy writing in places – but one comes away with a feeling of having read much and gained little. There is good advice, but, ironically, the structure is off, there’s no clear story, too much extraneous material, and the only examples of visual aids are distinctly unimpressive.

Viewed from above, Hall’s message comes down to this – A brilliant presentation must start with an understanding of setting, have an effective message (based on colourful yet simple stories), should be accompanied by impressive visuals (or no visuals), and must be delivered well. True. But perhaps somewhat obvious? Once context is understood, the message, visuals, and delivery of a presentation are all that is left. With little clear overarching narrative, putting Hall’s advice into practice is challenging. Large lists aren’t easy to remember – which is exactly why books like this, and many presentations, aren’t as successful as they could be.

‘If you keep on doing your pitches in the same old way, getting the same dire results, how hard and debilitating is that? How much simpler to copy the proven techniques that deliver victory’.

David Kean’s short guide to winning new business pitches is written primarily for those in advertising and marketing, but is relevant to all. Kean sets out a clear and straightforward step-by-step approach designed to deliver results.

As Kean points out – coming second in a pitch ought not be be any consolation. Yet for many, ‘we agree who is going to say what, and make last-minute amendments to the presentation on our journey to the client’s offices … Doing everything at the last minute is our disease. It is the work of the amateur’.  Indeed, ‘pitching for business is the last bastion of amateurism in an otherwise wholly professionalised business economy’. Yet new business is what keeps most businesses going.

m62 offer an extremely popular and demonstrably effective STAT service to help companies win with a great pitch presentation. The service works – with client win rates at 85%+ in 2008. The service covers value proposition workshop, through presentation design, coaching of presenters, Q&A workshops, all the way through detailed exercises that most pitch teams wouldn’t even dream of doing for themselves. For those who can’t afford m62 STAT and the services of a presentation agency – David Kean’s book is a good place to start with DIY efforts.

Because it is the most interesting and stimulating part of a pitch, Kean argues that many businesses focus on coming up with the creative solution to a prospect’s brief. In advertising, that might mean desiging a campaign to run; in construction, it might mean designing a building. Yet, as important as this part of the pitch is, this is only one component of what prospects are looking for. Kean turns the question around – ‘If you are looking for a business partner, what do you want?’ Strong creative solutions are one part of the answer, but Kean suggests that we are also looking for:

• A strong team of people,
• Who will be interesting and stimulating to work with,
• Who share one’s own goals and ambition,
• Who have understood one’s business,
• And who can deliver value for money.

‘Solving the problem doesn’t win pitches’ – instead, we need to offer prospects all of what they are looking for – much of which is about how we come across, not just what we present. Companies that are technically excellent in their own field can lose pitches, Kean argues, ‘because … competitors compensate for their skill gap with stunningly good pitch craft’. Clearly, pitching well is important for those who want to win new business.

Pitching to Win is divided into eight main sections, corresponding to the ‘ingredients of a successful pitch’, which Kean suggests are:

1. Being organised
2. Knowing your audience
3. Solving the problem
4. Pricing properly
5. Practice
6. Delivering great presentations (and who are we to argue)
7. Unstoppable momentum (i.e. follow-up)
8. Feedback

Being organised doesn’t sound like particularly insightful advice – but we’ve all seen pitches suffer for a simple lack of preparation. Pitch teams should be put together early, time to meet set aside, team members briefed, top talent input sought, and senior management buy-in confirmed. As much as possible should be found out about the prospect at this stage – via networks and supporters.

Understanding the audience means being absolutely clear about who is being pitched to. Many make the mistake of thinking that the audience for a pitch is the end-user – ‘the housewife, the shareholder, the investor’ or whatever. Of course, a strong solution to the prospect’s problem will necessarily ‘work’ for the end-user (e.g. a well designed hospital will ‘work’ for doctors and patients), but the end user doesn’t award the contract – the prospect does.

Because the prospect decides who wins, Kean points out that getting to know them is essential. Really understanding what the decision maker is looking for, their style, their way of thinking, is the key to winning a pitch. Tailoring a pitch to the decision maker’s needs and wants makes a lot of sense. Finding reasons to meet them makes even more. Making sure that other influencers – for example in procurement – are also convinced means providing additional materials, in a style and form that suits their particular needs.

The main content of the pitch – solving the prospect’s problem – needs to be done well, but not perfectly. If the pitch team try to come up with the perfect advertisement, design, or architecture, too much time will be spent on trying to come up with the solution – and not enough on the other important elements of the pitch. Planning backwards to find out how much thinking time is available, involving the real experts in this thinking time, and using creative-thinking techniques should create a strong solution within the right time-frame. Kean argues that this solution should then be tested as a hypothesis with the prospect. m62 does something similar after running a value proposition workshop as part of pitch projects – as after all, success is not about being right, but about the prospect thinking you are right. It pays to check.

A pitch presentation should be practiced three times, Kean proposes. Although many pitch teams see themselves as ‘too busy to rehearse once, let alone three times’, these teams are ‘busy fools’.
Rehearsal one is used to ensure the team is happy with the presentation – in terms of content and structure. Presentation two is a proper rehearsal – used to get presenters reasonably comfortable with their own parts. The third rehearsal is used to perfect transitions and exchanges between presenters – to ensure the presentation ‘comes together as one seamless flow of brilliance’.

After the third rehearsal, Kean recommends listing ‘the worst question the client could ask you’, then ‘the second nastiest question clients could ask’, and so on. The group should ‘work out what the answer is and who should answer’. m62 tend to decide who should answer and then let them get on with crafting the answer – if only to save time given the sheer number of questions that need to be prepared for, and to keep a group focused and positive before they pitch. Also, and here Kean is somewhat silent, it is important that giving answers to tough questions is seen as an opportunity to sell. Kean is somewhat silent on the advantages of crafting an overall value proposition – or sales message – and tying answers back to that. m62 believes this is one of the critical elements of successful pitching. Answers to difficult questions should support the main sales messages of a pitch.
Kean points out that although some teams rehearse their presentations, few rehearse their fee discussions, although ‘this is where the real money will be made’. All price discussions should be practiced, with particular care taken to appreciate the difference between value and cost. Where value has been demonstrated, then it makes sense to ‘price with pride’.

Kean also says relatively little about the actual presentation. Like that other pitch expert from the agency world – Jon Steel – Kean talks about the need to control the environment, which if presenting in one’s own offices can even mean having staff stride around purposefully simply to look busy. The comfort and comprehension of the audience should be thought of – with a ‘chief listener’ appointed to ‘watch and listen in order to ensure the clients are understanding everything you are saying and to feel the effect the presentation is creating’. Breaks can then be called for as needed – but in any case at least every hour.

The actual presentation ought to have just a few key points, and a few (no more than five) presenters. This allows the audience to take in and understand what is being said.

Kean is not altogether helpful on presentation structure. Presentations should have a beginning, middle, and an end, he states. The beginning should be ‘exciting’. The middle should contain ‘something dramatic’ that ‘reawakens the audience’. The end should be a ‘climax’ rather than a ‘whimper’. Which is all very well and good – but after being told to make all of a presentation exciting, one doesn’t really know, practically, what to do or what structure to use. m62, for example, has a clear position on how a sales presentation should be structured. Practical advice can help when faced with a high-pressure pitch situation.
Pitching to Win suggests asking the prospect for the last pitch ‘slot’ – so that others can waste time on ‘laborious market analysis and other non-value added guff’ – so that you don’t have to. Kean also feels that going last means ‘their memory of you will be fresher’. While those arguments make some sense, an effective presentation will often re-frame the way a prospect thinks about their own problem. Doing this before others pitch can work powerfully. Mnemonic techniques should allow a strong presentation to stay in the memory.
After the pitch has been delivered, Kean sees two more phases of work. Follow-up involves answering questions in more detail, getting feedback from supporters and acting on it, generating and sharing additional ideas, and generally just not giving up. Feedback should be sought whether one wins or loses – but after a loss, he recommends waiting four weeks. At this stage, the feedback the prospect gives will be more open, and ‘the first cracks in their new relationship may have begun to show’.

Pitching to Win ends with two useful tables, one a sort of nine column summary of parts of the book (and also some material that, oddly, doesn’t feature in the book), and the second a standard timetable for running a successful pitch.

Where Pitching for Win is at its strongest is precisely in offering this sort of practical advice. It points out how essential it is to take pitches seriously, to manage them professionally, and to spend time demonstrating one meets all the prospect’s needs. For this alone, and particularly given – at 136 pages – how short the book is, it is well worth the read. Pitching to Win won’t really tell you what your pitch presentation should look like – or even how to present – but it does provide a clear guide for managing the pitch process. For those who want a great process and a great presentation, there is always m62 STAT.

Most people who have had significant dealings with management consultants might be surprised to learn that McKinsey & Company even has a Director of Visual Communications. But they do – Gene Zelazny – and this is the book he’s written on presentations, perhaps to encourage McKinsey’s army of consultants to present effectively.

Many books about presentations can be assessed on four measures:

• How clearly and insightfully do they critique the standard approach of reading out slides?
• How effective a process do they describe for developing a presentation?
• Does the way the author recommends using visual aids make sense?
• Is there anything new or insightful in the work?

Zelazny’s book – Say it with Presentations is excellent in describing a process for presenters to follow. In places the process is obscured (for example, by a long aside about developing imagination), but in general, following Zelazny’s approach from start to finish will work well. This is a book I can recommend.

Define the Situation

Most good books about presentation will make the point that the place to start in designing a presentation is well away from PowerPoint. Zelazny recommends starting by asking four basic questions – Why present? What are the key audience members like? How much time do I have? What medium should I use?

Asking why one is presenting encourages clear, realistic, objectives to be set. Thinking about the key audience members makes sure that the presentation is tailored to the way key individuals like to receive and process information. Zelazny also reminds us that sometimes the audience might accept our rational arguments, but be resistant to the change these arguments bring. Being convincing, rationally, isn’t always enough.

Zelazny makes the point – ignored by many other authors – that there are a number of types of presentation. Presenters may stand up and use slides, transparencies, or whiteboards; deliver a videoconference, or use a web presentation service. Nowadays, some presentations are recorded and served on demand. Technology has enabled new types of presentation. It doesn’t make sense to automatically turn to PowerPoint where pen and paper might be more suitable.

Design the Presentation – Message

Say it with Presentations sets out four stages for shaping the messages of a presentation.

First, presenters should determine their overarching message. This message serves as both summary and introduction. (e.g. ‘To counter the limited potential for growth at home, J.J. Ltd. should proceed with its efforts to tap the significant growth opportunities of the United States’.) The overarching message is a thirty second summary of the rest of the presentation, and for Zelazny it should be presented right up-top.

Second, presenters should craft a clear storyline. Here, Zelazny follows the approach of his McKinsey colleague Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle. A presentation (or document) should start with the recommendation, then giving an overview of the conclusions supporting that recommendation, and then, in turn, look at each conclusion and the evidence that leads to it.

This is the approach advocated by m62 for sales presentations. The recommendation is, of course, to buy. The conclusions supporting this recommendation are value proposition statements (e.g. ‘single supplier’, ‘proven track record’). Then, once we have presented each value proposition statement in turn, we revisit each one and look at the evidence that supports the claim. Instead of a meandering linear structure, we end up with a clear and effective presentation structure.

Third, once a storyline has been crafted, Zelazny recommends writing both an introduction and an ending. Presentation introductions are compared to airline pre-flight safety announcements. Routine and boring, we tend to ignore them. Instead, by talking about the purpose of a presentation, arguing for its importance, and previewing content upfront, dullness can be avoided.

Fourth, endings should summarise the presentation; make clear recommendations; set out, and ask for commitment to actions; and list next steps.

Zelazny recommends scripting both introduction and conclusion. We tend to be opposed to scripts at m62 – not least because in delivery they can end up stale and stilted – but if limited to a few lines at either end of a presentation, these negative effects ought to be minor.

Design the Presentation – Visuals

Say it with Presentations, as one might expect from an author responsible for visual communications in a large company, does not advocate the extensive use of bullet points.

“If you read the words exactly as they appear on the visual, it doesn’t take long before the members of the audience feel their intelligence is being insulted because you’re reading to them what they can obviously read for themselves … Another option is to paraphrase. The problem with paraphrasing is that few people can read one set of words while listening to another.”

Text can be used to ‘help the audience see the structure of a complex presentation’ or to ‘reinforce important sets of ideas such as three conclusions, four recommendations, five issues, or six next steps’. But even then, the presenter should ‘translate the text visual into … a structure visual’.

Perhaps because there are an infinite number of possible messages, and an infinite number of visual representations of those messages, creating a framework for visualisation (or ‘visual translation’) is impossible. (Notwithstanding the efforts of Dan Roam.) If Say it with Presentations has one major failing, it is that it doesn’t really give the reader much sense of what types of visuals work well. There are ideas for what visuals can be used, and a section aimed at encouraging imagination, but having an idea and having a good idea are not the same. Even some of Zelazny’s own examples look fairly ineffective, and some go against his comments on the use of text, quoted above.

Zelazny’s experience of which visuals to use in which situations to use in which situations is not distilled for others to use. Presenters should use visual slides, but this book is of only limited help in explaining what these slides should look like.

Deliver the Presentation

Successful presenters, Zelazny notes, have confidence, conviction, and enthusiasm. Confidence comes from self-knowledge, mastery of one’s material, and understanding of the audience.

Conviction is necessary. For Zelazny, a sales person who does not believe in the company presentation she has been asked to deliver should try to change the presentation, change the company, or change jobs.

Presentations should be rehearsed, more than once. The first time alone, but delivered aloud. The second time with colleagues each feeding back on a different aspect of the presentation (as m62 do as part of the m62 STAT service). Questions should be anticipated and prepared for. Video recording as part of the rehearsal can be hugely useful.

Facilities and equipment can go wrong. Zelazny’s approach borders on the paranoid – but one knows full well that this careful approach makes sense. Get to the venue early. Check everything, twice. Carry spares. Expect the worst.

When presenting, Zelazny recommends introducing the next slide before showing it, so that the audience is not overwhelmed with two sources of information at once. Yet, m62 would recommend instead the use of slide builds – so that the framework of a slide can be shown as it appears on screen, helping the audience understand what the presenter says as they introduce the slide. As an example, rather than explaining that the next slide is going to be a graph, and what it will show, m62 would suggest showing the slide title, and then animating in the axes of the graph. This approach avoids information overload, yet makes information easier to assimilate.

Presenters, Zelazny argues, should be prepared to listen, and to allow silence. Questions should be accepted patiently. Where presenters don’t know, they should admit it. And presenters should have the ‘courage to be quiet’ – giving the audience time to reflect.

Should You Buy It?

Say it with Presentations is a worthwhile read. It isn’t groundbreaking, or even innovative. It doesn’t really give answers as to which visuals work well on slides. It focuses more on selling ideas and arguments than on selling products and services. It has little to say about presentations for education or training.

What Say it with Presentations does do is set out a sensible process for those wanting to write, design, and deliver presentations. For that alone, this book will be useful to many.

For a book so full of footnotes and references, it is surprising that this book rests so fundamentally on a confusion between what is and what ought to be. Abela argues that there are two types of presentation – Ballroom style and Conference Room style. ‘Ballroom style presentations are… colourful, vibrant, attention-grabbing and noisy’… and ‘Conference Room style presentations are more understated: they have less colour, with more details on each page; they are more likely to be on printed handouts than projected slides’. From this he leaps to the conclusion that ‘Conference room style presentations are more suited to meetings for which the objective is to engage, persuade, come to some conclusion, and drive action’ [emphasis added], for example sales presentations.

Looking for justification for Abela’s assertion, one finds only an argument put forward by Tufte: ‘PowerPoint… reduces the analytical quality of serious presentation of evidence’. Abela then, argues that sales presentations should be given using only densely-typed printed sheets because this style allows better presentation of complex evidence. One wonders whether either Tufte or Abela has ever (a) sold anything (b) seen PowerPoint used to its full potential.

Advanced Presentations by Design is full of useful material; one just hopes that readers only actually follow its recommendations in limited ways and for limited purposes. Abela sets out a ten stage process for readers to follow when constructing their own presentations:

1. Identify the communication preferences of the most important audience members
2. Set clear objectives in terms of audience belief and audience action
3. Identify a problem the audience have to which this presentation will offer a solution
4. Collect evidence that will back up the arguments presented
5. Use stories to present some of this evidence
6. Order material by presenting a problem, a solution to that problem, an illustration of what the solution might mean, and then repeat with problems that are raised by the previous solution
7. Present evidence using charts
8. Lay out charts in fine detail on as few pages as is possible; layout the page in a way that conveys an overarching message
9. Identify stakeholders, including those who may not attend the presentation, and develop a plan for dealing with them
10. Identify metrics with which to measure the success of the presentation

Some of Abela’s advice is useful. It would be useful to know what the communication preferences of audience members are – and so, for example, whether it might make sense to leave extra time for Q&A, provide an overview up-front, or even to list all relevant facts and details in an appendix. Advancing this argument so strongly as to suggest finding out the Myers-Briggs type of audience members seems to be absurd though – particularly when in mixed groups (i.e. most audiences) one has to cater to everyone anyway.

The suggestion that material be gathered and messages crafted before opening design software is good, and advice shared by nearly all books on effective presentations. Setting objectives, and measuring success are two bits of uncontroversial advice, that many would benefit from. In particular, contextualising objectives in terms of both what we want the audience to think and what we want the audience to do as a result of our presentation makes a lot of sense – and is a useful distinction to keep in mind.

But all these recommendations, and the extensive review of relevant research, are very much secondary to the two most significant parts of Advanced Presentations by Design – how to structure a presentation, and how to use visual aids effectively.

Presentation Structure

Abela recommends a linear presentation structure – where, once the broad situation is set, the material should be set-out in the pattern:

Complication » Resolution » Example » Complication » Resolution » Example

Here, a complication is essentially the most significant problem that arises in the mind of the audience, the resolution is the recommended solution to that problem, and the example brings to life the proposed resolution. Then, the next complication is the problem that is posed by the audience in response to the previously advanced resolution, and so on.

The result of this linear approach is that the audience is directed down a very clear path, and their concerns as they proceed down this path are addressed. All of this is fine, unless an audience start off with two major concerns. Abela’s structure will address one of these initial major audience concerns in detail. But, what about the other concern? What about situations where half the audience are bothered by complication A, and the other by complication B? Abela recommends addressing one complication in depth – but ignoring the other complication entirely. Does this make sense? Arguably not – it will often make more sense to address complication A, then complication B, and only then to follow these lines of response in further detail.

Following Abela’s method works well where the audience all share a single major concern, and this can be identified and addressed. In other circumstances, pursuing a single line of enquiry can leave important audience concerns left unaddressed.

Visual Aids

For all but a few presentations that aim solely to entertain, Advanced Presentations by Design recommends using the printed page as visual aid. Material should be represented by one of a large number of graphs, and these graphs arranged together onto pages to illustrate the relationship between them. Printed handouts should communicate concisely – Conference Room style presentations ‘should look more like an architectural drawing than something you’d see on television. Good conference room style presentations should have lots of relevant detail and text, and should be handed out on paper, never projected… On paper, you can use font sizes as small as 9 point without difficulty.’

For internal meetings, with engaged audiences, and to facilitate detailed discussion, this approach has its place. But, in a sales setting, is this what the audience want? Do audiences want to read 9 point fonts because they agreed to meet a sales rep? Do presenters want to give away their arguments in advance on paper before they start presenting? Is the reason you failed to close your last appointment because you didn’t give the audience enough detail?

The printed page cannot utilise animation, or get a point across. Messages often involve change over time, or complex processes. Animating these changes on screen aids understanding. If a picture paints 1000 words, and an animated picture can paint 10,000 words, Abela would recommend the words instead – in a 9-point font.

Architectural drawings may be appropriate as leave-behinds, or to use to facilitate Q&A. As a visual aid to help a salesperson present a clear and persuasive message, the approach will be unsuitable more-often-than-not. No salesperson will want to hand out densely packed black-and-white pages, only to find the faces of the audience drop before they even begin to speak.

Conclusion

Advanced Presentations by Design is a useful reference, and contains a thorough and detailed review of the presentation literature. For certain types of presentation (e.g. internal discussions, classroom education) the approach Abela recommends may be appropriate. But, at heart, this is a book built upon the naturalistic fallacy – confusing what is (presentations can use projection or printed handouts) with what ought to be (using printed handouts is a good idea).

‘Stephen Kosslyn is Chair of the Department of Psychology, and John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. A leading authority on the nature of visual imagery and visual communication, he has received numerous honours for his work in this field’. What Stephen Kosslyn is not, however, is any sort of expert on how to push PowerPoint to get the best out of the software. Kosslyn’s book virtually ignores the ‘visual slide revolution’, and instead deals in great part in how to use bullet points while taking account of the insights of psychology.
Kosslyn leaves the biggest questions that that psychology might answer unaddressed – Can we listen to a presenter and read bullet points at the same time? If not, what visual support should a presenter use instead?

Kosslyn argues that ‘different parts of the brain deal with language and with vision, and we humans store the two sorts of memories separately’, and that for this reason we should use pictures and video as we talk. What he doesn’t address is whether visual aids in the form of written language can be processed alongside the spoken word. Many psychologists argue that they cannot. Reading and listening at the same time is just too hard.

Kosslyn claims that his book will ‘open your eyes to a whole new way of making and delivering PowerPoint presentations’. But Clear and to the Point is essentially a book about an old and tired way of making and delivering presentations. The wrong approach, done better. Shorter bullet points. Fewer bullet points. But still bullet points.

Clear and to the Point is a difficult book to read. It is full of interesting insight, but much of the valuable material is hidden alongside material that seems almost self-evident. Chapters essentially consist of lists of dozens of guidelines (e.g. ‘Don’t randomly use different transitions for different slides’), with short explanatory paragraphs under each point. The reader is left wondering if this book was first written as a PowerPoint presentation, and later expanded. With little overarching narrative beyond the first chapter, but rather 100s of “do’s” and “don’ts” presented in list form, this can be heavy going.

What conceptual framework Kosslyn does provide is coherent and insightful. It is a pity, therefore, that this framework is extended to the rest of the book simply by re-ordering the bullet-points of each chapter to show how they relate to Kosslyn’s 8 Psychological Principles (e.g. ‘don’t randomly use different transitions for different slides relates to the ‘Principle of Informative Changes’, which points out that people expect changes in properties to carry information). By structuring the book in this way, one is forced to read long lists not once, but twice. Many of the items on these lists are pretty obvious – even without psychological principles as guidance – and the overall effect is that this book is far from a “page-turner”.

Kosslyn claims that to deliver an effective presentation a presenter must achieve three goals:

• Goal 1 – Connect with the Audience
• Goal 2 – Direct and hold Attention
• Goal 3 – Promote Understanding and Memory

One can achieve each of these goals if one ‘respect[s] the eight psychological principles’ that Kosslyn sets out.

To connect with the audience, a presenter must follow the Principle of Relevance (that ‘communication is most effective when neither too much nor too little information is presented’) and the Principle of Appropriate Knowledge (that ‘communication requires prior knowledge of pertinent concepts, jargon, and symbols’).

To direct and hold attention, the presenter should obey the Principle of Salience (that ‘attention is drawn to large perceptible differences’); the Principle of Discriminability (that ‘two properties must differ by a large enough proportion or they will not be distinguished’) and the Principle of Perceptual Organisation (that ‘People automatically group elements into units, which they then attend to and remember’).

To promote understanding and memory, a presenter ought to follow the Principle of Compatibility (that a ‘message is easiest to understand if its form is compatible with its meaning’), the aforementioned Principle of Informative Changes (that ‘people expect changes in properties to carry information’) and the Principle of Capacity Limitations (that ‘people have a limited capacity to retain and to process information, and so will not understand a message if too much information must be retained or processed’).

The practical implications of these principles vary, from the insightful, through the obvious, to the irrelevant (because we shouldn’t be presenting in the way Kosslyn assumes is the only way of using PowerPoint), to the plain wrong. So, for the Principle of Relevance, Kosslyn suggests, for example, that one should ‘graph different types of data in a single display only if they are highly related and must be compared’ (good advice); that one should ‘present only the information needed to make your point’ (fairly obvious – if hard to put into practice) and that ‘the amount of text you present should just be enough to remind you to present the key points’ (bad advice – slides should be for the audience, and not serve as cue-cards for the presenter).

So, what are the bits of good advice that Kosslyn gives? Writing generally, Kosslyn suggests that presenters should always prepare a tailored presentation for each particular audience, that the presentation should be structured to allow for natural breaks, and that questions should be prepared for. He argues that the audience should be given an overview of the presentation structure during the introduction, and shown where they are within this structure as the presentation progresses; and that topics should be introduced in relation to the audience’s prior knowledge and concerns. Presentations should end with a clear visual summary. All good, sensible advice, but presented as a shopping list, with little narrative flow.

The chapter on text in Clear and to the Point is rendered slightly irrelevant because it assumes one should be using far more text than makes sense. The chapter on colour is informative, but provides a level of detail that seems out-of-keeping with the rest of the book. For example, in a graph containing a red line and blue line that intersect, the red line should be placed in the foreground. Good advice, but somewhat more detailed than that found elsewhere in the book, which can make the information in the book difficult to assimilate.

Kosslyn produces lists of “do’s” and “don’ts” for a number of types of graph. His overarching arguments are that (a) labels should be preferred to graphs (b) only relevant data should be presented (c) axes should be identifiable and labelled (d) an inner grid should be used when precise values are important on line graphs and bar graphs. Further guidelines are useful, but this entire section tends to ignore the use of animation with graphs. Without considering how PowerPoint allows complex graphs to be simplified by presenting first data A, then animating in data B for comparison, Kosslyn misses a trick. Psychological principles will only generate a limited amount of insight if the author is not expert in the software he is writing about.

When writing about charts, diagrams, photographs, and clip-art, Kosslyn’s advice feels dated. He recommends using photos and clip-art to introduce an abstract idea, and then suggests that Einstein’s ‘visage has become a symbol for “genius”’. But most presenters understand by now that inserting a clip-art image of Einstein to represent genius will seem tired and clchéd. So, while the advice that illustrations face the centre of the slide (as images direct attention) is useful, other points in the same section seem at best irrelevant. Insight in this book is mixed with poor advice.

This is a book with some valuable material. Kosslyn obviously has a tremendous knowledge of psychology and visual communication. Yet, this book is difficult to read, and feels as if it was drafted in PowerPoint. Kosslyn assumes that bullet points work, and then provides detail on how best to use them. For those who want to use visual slides, there are snippets of value here, but perhaps other books provide a better guide on how to use PowerPoint effectively. With luck, the authors of these works will have read and digested the psychological principles Kosslyn presents, allowing their readers to benefit from his insights without struggling through the less compelling parts of his work.

Dan Roam defines visual thinking as ‘solving problems’ (and selling ideas) with pictures.

‘Visual thinking means taking advantage of our innate ability to see – both with our eyes and with our mind’s eye – in order to discover ideas that are otherwise invisible, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and then share those ideas with other people in a way they simply get’.

Visual thinking is powerful because pictures can ‘represent complex concepts and summarise vast sets of information that are easy to see and understand’. For Roam, visual thinking is democratic and accessible – pictures can be sketched messily by hand, or drawn carefully by wonderful artists. Visual thinking is accessible not only to those who think of themselves as visual, and drawing pictures can be done by those who always thought they couldn’t draw. For Roam, we all (nearly all?) have the ability to ‘look, see, imagine, and show’ – and that is all we need. Abilities can be used and improved, but there is a ‘learnable, repeatable, and useful process to visual thinking’.

In his this ambitious work Roam sets out both a clear process, and a complete framework for visual thinking. This book is in-part how-to guide, and in-part taxonomy, and so in reviewing the work we will answer a few essential questions:

• Is Roam’s process easy to follow?
• Does following Roam’s process for visual thinking lead to better results than would be obtained through some other process?
• Does Roam’s typology for the kinds of thought that can be presented visually work?
• Does Roam’s framework of image types work well for his typology of information?

In answering these questions we are trying to work out whether The Back of a Napkin is a great book – take as read that it does a good job as introduction to visual thinking for anyone who wants a start on the subject. It is in attempting to set out a complete framework for visual thinking that this work attempts to add the most value.

A written review of The Back of the Napkin can’t really do the book justice. The book looks great, and is full of simply 100s of hand-drawn sketches. Production values are high. The book is very accessible, and ideas are illustrated well – visually, verbally, and through the long case-study that makes up much of the second half of the book.

A Process for Visual Thinking

Roam’s process for visual thinking comprises four stages, roughly corresponding to a particular understanding of how human’s actually think. For Roam, the visual thinking process starts with Looking – ‘taking in the visual information around us’, then moves to Seeing – ‘selecting or clumping’ information, then involves Imagining – ‘seeing with our eyes closed, or the act of seeing something that isn’t there’, and then, as this book deals with sharing thoughts, comes Showing, where we must ‘summarise all that we’ve seen, find the best framework for visually representing our ideas, nail things down on paper, point out what we imagined, and then answer our audiences’ questions’. For Roam, this entire visual process is iterative, and thoughts are constantly re-evaluated and re-cast.

For Roam, this process involves the eyes, the mind’s eye, and then pen or paper (or some other visual tool). I would argue that not all visual thinking starts visually – I could see information to start the process off, but equally I could listen to information and then use my mind’s eye to sort and imagine this information. A small point – but relevant to what visual thinking is. Thought not be visual from beginning to end to be considered visual thinking.

Having described a process for visual thinking in outline, the rest of Roam’s book sets out (a) how to work through the process effectively and (b) how to apply visual thinking to a case study looking at a “typical” business situation.

Looking

For Roam, effective looking comes from (i) collecting as much relevant information as possible in one place (ii) defining a coordinate system to physically lay-out this information (using Post-Its, and measures such as time, price, location, or size), and (iii) discarding some information to leave the most relevant (‘visual triage’).

What’s interesting about this description of looking is how similar Roam’s process is to that recommended by other authors – Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, and even the team here at m62 often recommend a similar starting point for collecting and refining content for a presentation.

Seeing

‘While looking is about collecting the raw visual information that is in front of us, seeing is about selecting what’s important.’ For Roam, we see six types of information (which he rather too tidily abbreviates to the ‘6Ws’.

• Who or What
• How Much and How Many
• Where
• When
• How
• Why

As any journalist student will tell, these categories set out the essentials of any scene or story. Using the checklist ensures we describe a situation fully, and approaching a business situation with the 6Ws in mind will go much of the way to ensuring completeness. I’m not sure if this characterisation is insightful or obvious, but in any case it provides a good starting point for analysing information.

Imagining

Nothing if not a fan of rather forced mnemonics, Roam introduces five pairs of categories that allow us to decide ‘what’s most important to us and what’s most important to our audience’. Roams SQVID (or squid, with a Roman ‘U’ and a ‘D’ for the Greek “delta”) asks us to consider what view of our information to focus on.

• Simple vs. Elaborate
• Quality vs. Quantity
• Vision vs. Execution (or in other words, where we want to be vs. how we would get there)
• Individual Attributes vs. Comparison
• Delta vs. Status Quo (or in other words, how things might be if they change vs. how things are now)

Roam’s five pairs of categories are, of course, capable of characterising pretty much any information we might want to show. But are these characterisations particularly neat? Maybe not – from the start the possible overlap between categories such as ‘vision’ and ‘change’, or ‘individual attributes’ and ‘simple’ is apparent. This criticism is well founded, but not terribly important. What is useful here is what follows next – and how Roam combines these five pairs of categories with his ‘6Ws’ to provide what he describes as a ‘showing framework’.

Showing

The categories presented in the framework for showing presented in The Back of the Napkin must – if they are to be useful – ‘be comprehensive as a group and yet individually distinct enough so that we know when to call upon each’. To create his ‘Visual Thinking Codex’ Roam combines his 6Ws with his SQVID, to create a 6 by 5 matrix. Each entry (or cell) on the matrix corresponds to a type of visualisation. So, if we want to show a ‘when’ (from the 6Ws) in terms of Execution (from the V of SQVID) we look on Roam’s Codex to discover we ought to show a complex process chart. If we want to show a ‘who’ (from the 6Ws) in terms of comparison (from the I of SQVID) Roam’s Codex would recommend we show comparative portraits.

For Roam, once we know which ‘W’ we are answering, and what sort of focus we want (comparative, visionary or so on), the type of visual to use follows simply. All we have to do is use a simple table for guidance.

Roam’s Visual Thinking Codex is a great idea, but it is only partially successful on its own terms (of being comprehensive and having distinct categories). Categories in the Codex must be combined (for example, how much and when – two of the 6Ws are often required together), making use complex. Roam incorrectly characterises some pretty common visual information – so organisational charts and Venn diagrams for Roam are spatial – or about where. This is a linguistic trick, as these diagrams aren’t concerned with where things are in space – Roam’s third ‘W’.

These criticisms sound picky, and in a sense they are. For the casual reader, Roam’s work is a great starting point for generating visual ways of presenting information. As a full Visual Thinking Codex, it may not be completely successful. Most readers won’t care.

Presentations

Once we have visual ideas, we need to show them. For Roam, this might be done through pen and paper. But software is also mentioned, and Roam sees PowerPoint as a relatively simple way of presenting information visually. Roam doesn’t discuss animation – but does suggest sketching ‘live’ in front of an audience. Here, PowerPoint’s animations may make things easier for the presenter, who can focus on presenting information as it builds, rather than trying to ‘sketch’ while presenting. Roam’s encouragement for all those who believe they aren’t great at drawing to give it a go is welcome, but perhaps giving an important presentation while sketching would be a bit too much for some.

Conclusion

Anyone who understands presentations knows that PowerPoint should be used visually. Yet visualisation – presenting complex ideas visually – is hard. Back of the Napkin presents a framework for visual thinking – a way anyone might be able to approach the task. It’s not clear whether following this framework is easier than simple trial-and-error, or indeed easier than imitation of existing visual material. The framework is imperfect. But, as a simple introduction to a complex field, Roam’s book represents a useful popularisation.

“Got milk?”

Jon Steel is a hugely influential figure in advertising, and for our US readers at least, will be familiar through his work. This is a presentation website though, and it is for his work on winning new business pitches – Perfect Pitch – and not for his strategic planning expertise, that we take an interest in Steel’s work.

Books about winning new business often include impressive figures about win-rates and the amount of work won by the author – to establish credibility. Steel has won billions of dollars of client billings, at a 90% win-rate. But plenty of people have won vast amounts of business (for their companies or their clients – m62 certainly has) – yet without self-awareness and the ability to analyse how they come to succeed – these sales superstars have little they can teach us. Fortunately for us, Steel has a clear view of how pitches should be approached – in terms of broad aims, specific approach, and clear process.

Steel’s idealised presenter must (i) understand audience psychology (ii) take relevant and important material and distil it into a single motivating idea (iii) then write a presentation full of twists and turns with the right visuals to bring this idea to life, and (iv) perform when presenting, and present as a performer. Whether many individuals – Steel aside – possess all these attributes is a point for debate. Steel uses this ideal as organising idea and to map out the process to follow in writing a presentation.

Audience Psychology and the Purpose of a Pitch Presentation

For Steel ‘the purpose of any presentation is to take the key decision maker or makers from the place they currently occupy to the place where you want them to be… You can’t just tell them where to go; you have to guide them carefully, sensitively, logically. And it’s not enough to inform. The job of the person who wants to win is to persuade.’

To illustrate this distinction between the rational and the emotional, Steel discusses the OJ Simpson murder trial in some detail. The prosecution, Steel notes, used rational argument exhaustively and painstakingly… but the jury simply didn’t want to find the defendant guilty. In pitch situations, ‘the members of the audience have to feel what you are saying.’ Steel suggests using personal stories, and taking surprising approaches to familiar material, in order to engage the audience emotionally. Appearing likable, personable, and easy to work with also plays a part in those pitches where key decision makers will have to work with those pitching.

If the aim of a presentation is to move the audience from A to B, Steel argues that arrival at B should not signal ‘the end of a thought’ but ‘the start of a new thought: an invitation, a challenge to the audience to get involved.’ Presentations should persuade, and to do this most effectively they should invite the audience to dialogue.

Designing a presentation to engage the audience does not mean leaving gaping holes in the structure of a presentation. On the contrary, Steel is clear that questions should be anticipated, and where possible, answered before they arise. But, as an illustration of an approach that invites participation, Steel tells of a time when ‘a client was simply asked to pick which question he was most interested in hearing [Steel’s team] answer… The presentation became a conversation.’

Finding a Single Motivating Idea

Distilling material to produce a presentation – for Steel – is an intensive process. Certainly visuals follow the story – and never come first. Instead, presenters should first gather material, move this material around to tease out connections and meaning, then discard material. After all of this work with Post-Its and long walks and relaxed cogitation, a unified key idea should be found. For Steel focusing on a single idea is ‘the only way of building a strong body of work that has been really thought through … creating and keeping a linear, logical flow to a presentation.’ It’s likely that pitches for consumer advertising contracts take a different shape to those in other industries – and in some pitches, two or three strong ideas must be explored. But focus on a strong core message will of course strengthen a pitch, and make sure the audience can more easily assimilate information.

Finding the Right Visuals

Once a presentation has a core message and accompanying story (and, for Steel, a script written out word-by-word), visuals should be found. Steel suggests designing research with visuals in mind – asking research participants to draw pictures, write short responses, take photos, and so on. Again, this may be more relevant for direct-to-consumer work, but may be an idea others can adapt. Then, using this and other material, the presenter should ‘add the illustrations that help bring [the story] to life’. For Steel, these illustrations will most likely be printed on boards, tacked to walls, or produced in-house on video. For the rest of us, PowerPoint might be the best tool.

Jon Steel thinks that he dislikes PowerPoint, although we would venture that he simply hasn’t seen the tool used well. For Steel ‘visuals should be created that will assist in delivering the message’. Steel believes that ‘PowerPoint is not designed for the benefit of the message a presentation is meant to convey, or even for the audience, but rather for the sole benefit of the presenter.’ Continuing this analysis of the rather all-too-common use of slide software for bullet points, Steel argues that ‘in the form often used for presentations, PowerPoint represents intellectual lethargy on the part of the presenter, and generally induces something similar in its audience’.

This critique of PowerPoint as it is commonly used is spot on. Bullet points are used as cue-cards for presenters, demonstrate laziness, and bore the audience. What Steel hasn’t seen, and what those without the full creative resources of a major advertising agency might benefit from, is PowerPoint used well. The tool can make presentations come-to-life, and help tell stories visually. Steel transforms rooms with stadia seating, produces TV spots, and has an entire company playing video games as part of a pitch. PowerPoint, used visually, can provide an accessible way of providing similar impact.

For Steel, the visual goes beyond a simple focus on slides or print-outs or video, to encompass the entire presentation experience. Steel pays attention – more attention than many pitch teams – to room layout and appearance. ‘The room in which a pitch is delivered should be a physical manifestation of both the agency and its idea’, and the room ‘has to feel different’. This might mean dressing a room with examples of work, images produced in the research process, or even visual aides to make up the presentation. Dressing a room to relate to the core message of a presentation helps bring the message to life – helping to persuade and not just inform.

Elevating the audience experience should also apply to what happens after the pitch. Leave-behinds should not simply consist of slide print-outs. They shouldn’t simply repeat the material of the presentation, but summarise this idea in a way that helps to ‘demonstrate the relationship between the people who work in the agency and that idea’. For Steel’s agencies, this means asking staff to bring in photos, write personal stories, and then binding these collections in glossy print. Leave-behinds become coffee-table books, about the key idea of a sales presentation. The approach may not work in other contexts, but it certainly beats print-outs of six-slides to a page.

Managing the Pitch Process

Perfect Pitch mostly examines the pitch process from the perspective of the individual presenter (who writes his or her own material), but also provides guidance for the pitching organisation. If presenters must understand audience psychology, messaging, how to use visuals, and how to present, organisations must understand what to pitch for, who should pitch, and how to prepare as a team.

Organisations must be strict about what work they pitch for. Firstly, because pitching takes time and resources. Secondly, because some business relationships are a bad match, and staff will become unhappy as a result of them. Thirdly, because existing clients may be neglected if resources are too often diverted to pitching new business. Steel warns of the need to be wary of prospects who ‘have asked for a meeting because someone has told them they should’, and of those times a company is merely included to make up the numbers.

For Steel, the pitch team should be made up of those who will actually be working on an account. Clients ‘want the people they will actually be working with’. This team should ‘like and respect each other’ – as this will of course lead to better ideas and better work.

Conclusion

Perfect Pitch is a great book. Its shortcomings are easily ignored. The book won’t all be relevant to those outside of an advertising agency environment, but differences are easy to identify and consider. The critique of the common use of PowerPoint is spot-on, but there is a lack of awareness of what can be done with this and other presentation software. The structure is not always crystal-clear, but the stories, anecdotes, and well-argued points make up for this.

What Perfect Pitch does well is set out a clear and insightful guide to pitching, both for individuals tasked with writing and presenting a section of a pitch presentation, and for those running a pitch process. Steel gives both a clear sense of what presentations should do, and of how to write them. From clear messaging to appropriate visuals, the guidance is clear. Some readers will struggle to put Steel’s insights into practice, which is presumably why WPP had no qualms about letting the book be published. Most readers would be satisfied even with some improvement with their pitches. Whether those following Steel’s advice will see 90% win rates remains to be seen, but we know from m62 client experience that these rates are achievable.

Made to Stick is not a book about presentations, but it is a book for presenters. Looking at what m62 would call the “messaging” stage of presentation design, the book looks at what makes some ideas easy to understand and remember.

In communication, and this will be familiar to all who write presentations, often knowing too much can be a disadvantage. Try – the authors suggest – tapping out a popular tune to a nearby listener. The person tapping expects the listener to know what they are tapping, and yet most of the time they will not. We assume, as presenters, that our audience understand us, but without our background knowledge and overview of our material, often they do not.

So, what to do?

Brothers Heath suggest that, if our messages are to stick, our ideas should be:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

These categories can be massaged to spell SUCCESS, but whether this helps or not is anybody’s guess.

Simple

Simple messages clearly convey a single core idea, and have this core idea communicated in a way that taps into the audiences’ existing ideas and knowledge. Election campaigns can be focused on ‘the economy (stupid!)’; airlines can be all about ‘low fares’.

Core ideas must be meaningful, and easy to understand – so the film Speed can be seen as “Die Hard on a bus” – explaining one idea by easy reference to existing ideas that are already understood. Jargon should be avoided.
Simple ideas, when grasped, should explain a lot, with few words. Disney theme park employees are “cast members” – an idea that can guide behaviour and decision making. For example, cast members wouldn’t take a break on stage, so Disney theme park employees shouldn’t take breaks in uniform in public.

Unexpected

Many corporate presentations are boring – in part because the audience know what they are going to hear before they hear it. Not only because presenters use bullet points and hand outs to give the game away, but also because messages are fairly predictable. People pay more attention to things that don’t seem to fit, that aren’t expected. One reason why “We’re Number Two, We Try Harder” was such a successful slogan for Avis was because people expect companies to claim the number one spot, not second place. An unexpected approach gets the attention.

Presenters can get attention by surprising the audience with surprising facts, and can sustain attention by creating a mystery of teaser. Presentations can be made more engaging when the audience are actively involved in confronting something genuinely surprising. Involving the audience in dispelling myths, right at the start of a presentation, can go a long way to putting the audience into a receptive frame of mind.

Concrete

Messages stick when they are made concrete, or real. The Heaths illustrate this in an interesting way. Try now to think of as many white (coloured) things as you can. Then, try to think of as many white things in your refrigerator as you can. For many, the second task yields as many objects on the list as the first task.

Concrete ideas are fairly exact – saying that a computer is “the size of a magazine”; showing what your product did for Acme Corp can be concrete; describing a target consumer in great detail – down to pictures of her kitchen and her car is concrete.

Credibility

m62 often recommend building credibility in the first few minutes of a sales presentation. Why? Because if a message doesn’t seem credible it will be discounted, even if it is perfectly true. Credibility can be achieved through status, through prior performance, through the use of convincing detail, or through the appropriate use of statistics.

Status – “Nobel Prize winner”, “biggest widget maker in the USA”, or so on – makes an audience lend credence to a message. In a related way, credibility can be built by demonstrating that a company have performed for others who have very exacting standards. In this way, a courier firm can claim to have transported the latest Harry Potter book securely, or a security firm could claim to have guarded top VIPs.

Extraneous details can make an idea easier to remember, and a tale seem more believable. So, an organisation that claims to value diversity may not be believed, a dance group who talk about a 73 year-old member might be.

Statistics, when brought to life, bring tremendous credibility. So, instead of $200 million turnover, think along the lines of “sold enough shampoo to wash all the hair in New York for an entire year”, for example. Extremely large, or extremely small, numbers should be converted into a frame of reference that the audience can readily make sense of.

Finally, credibility can be built by asking the audience to test something for themselves – “our burgers have more beef than the competitions’ – see for yourself”, would be an example from advertising (or, more exactly, “Where’s the Beef?”). Truth helps here, but the very act of inviting direct comparison itself builds credibility.

Emotions

Understanding how people make decisions is crucial to presenters, particularly those selling. Yet Dan and Heath Chip argue that we tend to assume that others make decisions differently to how we make them ourselves. More exactly, we tend to assume for others more base instincts than we ourselves have.

People make decisions based on their own self-image and group identity – that is, they decide “as fire-fighters”, or advertising creatives, or left-wing process engineers, or whatever. People often aren’t as moved by appeals to their base instincts as we might think, but instead make decisions based upon their sense of how people “like them” would act. Emotions are important – and are often more sophisticated that we realise. People care about individuals, their own self-interest as autonomous beings, rather grandiose and important concepts they see as relevant to their own identity (“sportsmanship”), and about their own group identity.

Business decision makers often exhibit a strong sense of corporate belonging – which could and should be utilised when appealing to their sense of the company “Way” of doing things.

Stories

Stories provide a memorable way to structure information. Although the “essential” moral of a story may be far shorter than a story itself, if a story is well chosen it becomes memorable, whereas a moral with no story will simply be forgotten. Stories should be inspiring – about overcoming obstacles, or doing things in new and creative ways. Stories should not be invented – but spotted. Individuals in companies often encounter situations that would make great stories, but very few of these stories are recorded.

Stories often work best when left slightly open – messages and morals should be left for the audience to discover and expand upon – rather than spelt out in 28 point font.

Should You Buy It?

Brothers Chip and Dan Heath bring complimentary perspectives to this work. Chip Heath, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Stanford University, draws on his research into urban legends and conspiracy theories – such as that of “kidney theft” or “razors in candy on Halloween”. Dan Heath founded an educational publishing company, and so grapples with the challenge of helping to explain complex material on an everyday basis. These perspectives shine through, and the numerous stories told make the material covered easy to grasp.

Made to Stick is a great book – a real must for anyone grappling with how to get ideas heard and noticed in a crowded marketplace. The material is clearly presented, and Brothers Heath thankfully had the awareness to bring their own teachings to bear on their material. The book is easy to read, and easy to remember. A clever summary helps the reader commit material to memory. Academic detail is relegated to a references section. Arguments are well-made, and schemas are well-constructed.

Other authors may have issue with some of the material presented. Better stories and illustrations are out there. Other approaches may be easier to put into practice, may help ignite greater creative spark, or may just work to make stickier ideas. This book won’t be the last word on what makes some messages stick – no book will – but it is certainly an indispensible popular addition to the field.

“Millions of presentations are now given every day with the aid of PowerPoint or other software. Yet, most presentations remain mind-numbingly dull, something to be endured by both presenter and audience alike.”

Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen opens with an elegant and convincing critique of typical PowerPoint presentations. These presentations are ineffective because “putting the same information on a slide in text form that is coming out of our mouths usually does not help – in fact it hurts our message”, because the audience find it hard to process spoken and written information at the same time. Yet although most presenters have themselves endured poor presentations as audience members, business and conference norms encourage presenters to continue to present in the same ineffective ways as their peers.

Reynolds notes that traditional thinking about PowerPoint has been to treat it as “a kind of document-creation tool”. Instead, presenters should look to documentary films and comic books for a wider perspective on how to create effective presentations. Reynolds recasts the presentation as visual storytelling, and much of Presentation Zen sets out how to tell an effective visual story.

Presentation Zen looks, in turn, at the process of writing a presentation, how to craft messages and decide structure, presentation design, and presentation delivery. Although many business presentations are not delivered by those who wrote them, Presentation Zen is primarily aimed at those writing their own presentations. Less consideration is given to those compiling material to be delivered by an entire sales team, for example. For those delivering pre-written corporate material Presentation Zen will likely frustrate by merely illuminating corporate folly; this, of course, shows how effectively the book makes the case for visual presentations. For those in marketing or sales with responsibility for building slides to be delivered by entire teams and departments, the challenge with the Presentation Zen approach lies in creating visuals that guide and support a range of presenters to deliver core corporate messaging – where some of these presenters will need more ‘hand holding’ and visual support than others.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when preparing presentations is in “going digital” too early. In other words, many people simply type slide headings and bullet points directly into PowerPoint without ever stepping back to ask important questions about the audience or about their own objectives. Reynolds recommends “going analogue” – using paper and pen, whiteboards, or Post-Its to “brainstorm, explore ideas, make lists, and generally sketch out… ideas”. In this analogue stage, two of the most important questions to have in mind are “What is your core message?” and “Why does this matter?” As is all too obvious, many presentations are given without explicitly asking these questions. Following Reynold’s recommended approach encourages presenters to spend enough time preparing their presentations, and stops presenters getting ahead of themselves with slides before they even know what to say. Following this process will assist the vast majority of presenters.

The Presentation Zen approach is – as much as anything – about using visuals to support speakers, and about presenting these visuals in a simple and elegant manner. A typical Presentation Zen slide (if there is such a thing – hundreds are available to view at www.presentationzen.com) would be a stock photo image that ‘bleeds’ off the edge of the slide, together with a few words containing the essential message of the slide. Graphs are used – and presented in easy-to-read 2D formats. Quotes are presented attractively over full-slide images. Corporate templates are conspicuous by their absence – branding on each slide is considered unnecessary. For the most part, Presentation Zen slides appear to be static – with little use of animation. (Clearly, in a book, this will necessarily be the case – but there is limited talk in either the book or on the website about animations and builds.) The static nature of Presentation Zen slides, coupled with the use of explanatory text, means that – to an extent – these slides are self-explanatory.

Traditional slideware fails because too much is given away by the slide – making the presenter redundant. Yet some of the examples in Presentation Zen give the speaker too little support. If traditional slideware gives away too much (making the presenter redundant), Presentation Zen may go too far the other way – with very little core content supported visually. Further, some of the visuals that are produced suffer from being self-explanatory. The advantage of slides that don’t make sense on their own is that the audience find they want the presenter to make sense of the visual; self-explanatory slides disengage the audience.
To understand how the Presentation Zen approach works in practice, consider an example from page 133 of the book, where Reynolds shows a before-and-after treatment of a traditional slide. This slide is about blogging, and draws an analogy between blogs and sharks, arguing that just as sharks must keep moving to stay alive, blogs must be regularly updated with a predictable frequency if they are to be successful. The treatment of this material in the Presentation Zen style shows a full-slide image of a shark, with the tag-line “Blogs are like sharks”. The rest of the content is left for the speaker to convey. Yet while the visual may help the audience grasp the metaphor, the actual core material is not given any visual support. The audience may well remember that blogs are like sharks, but this will mean nothing if they do not understand or retain the core message – that blogs should be regularly and predictably updated. This is of course just a single example, but the point applies more generally. Where the Presentation Zen approach removes content into speaker notes and only provides visual support for the title of the old material, speakers can be left with a lot to do.

For exceptional speakers, a single large image on screen may be enough support. For the average sales person, delivering a corporate presentation day-in and day-out, it may be that a richer visual support is needed. Reynolds recognises that “if you need to explain something quite complex, then build (animate) the parts of your chart or diagram in steps in a way that is logical and clear”. But little detail on how to do this is given, even though in the corporate world an awful lot is indeed quite complex.

Perhaps this ‘static’ approach to visual support is indicative of a graphic design bias in the Presentation Zen approach? PowerPoint is capable of extensive animation; and subtle use of movement and builds can help convey meaning. Reynolds gives examples of documentary films and comics as great examples of visual communication. But films, of course, use animation. Another example Reynolds could have given was TV weather forecasts – where on-screen graphics and presenter synchronise elegantly to convey complex information.

Where Presentation Zen truly excels is in talking about design. This is not a PowerPoint (or Keynote) ‘How To’ book. What Presentation Zen does do is to make the case for effective design – by advocating the removal of the non-essential. By utilising strong visuals (such as stock photos), and with elegant layout that makes full use of white space, grouping, and alignment, Presentation Zen advocates an aesthetic that is attractive and effective. The temptation with PowerPoint is to add more, to each slide, and to each presentation. What Presentation Zen teaches perhaps most effectively is that simplicity is something to aspire to. Through use of photographs and plain text, this approach is also relatively accessible – meaning that individuals may be able to produce acceptable slides without professional support.

Presentation Zen is one of the most popular books about presentations on the market today, and it deserves that position as it is well written and informative. It presents an approach that will work for some material, and for some settings. A Presentation Zen approach will be immeasurably better than one written as a document within PowerPoint. But, the Presentation Zen approach still uses slides that are self-explanatory, and still fails to truly utilise the full capabilities of the medium – with animations and builds relatively absent.

Presentation Zen is an excellent approach for the individual, confident in his or her ability to talk around the subject with perhaps limited visual support. Where subject matter is more complex, or where speakers are more varied in their grasp of the material, visuals need to support the core material in a presentation, and not just help the audience remember the major content headings.