Slides that Don’t Make Sense
Most presentations disengage the audience. Bullet points give away too much; the audience feel no need to stay engaged to find out what ‘happens next’. Visual cognitive dissonance is a technique m62 use to make the audience want to know what happens next. Dissonance is a mental state of conflict or incompleteness; visual cognitive dissonance presents something visually that doesn’t seem to make sense at first glance. The audience look again – they want to work out what they are being shown. Surrealist art, jigsaw puzzles, or m62 slides.
Visual Cognitive Dissonance is a technique m62 use to counter the effect of Death By PowerPoint.
When presented with visual information, the audience block out the presenter while they assimilate the information. There are four possible outcomes from this process:
- I don’t understand this
- I understand this and I strongly agree
- I understand this and I strongly disagree
- Yes. So what?
The first 3 outcomes are useful to the presenter and the last is a predictor of boredom. Finding content that polarises audience opinion (options 2 and 3) is difficult and dangerous. Which leaves us with the first one, “I don’t understand this”.
At m62 we have designed over 6500 presentations and in excess of 225,000 PowerPoint slides and the one thing they have in common is that they do not make complete sense until the presenter either builds or explains them. This is Visual Cognitive Dissonance in practice.
Visual Cognitive Dissonance is a way of arousing the Reticular Activating System (RAS) in the brain, it compels the audience to engage with the presenter, which lets face it is a good start for a presentation.
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Slides that Don’t Make Sense
Visual Cognitive Dissonance exists when slides don’t make sense on their own, and the audience need the presenter to explain the presentation.
4 Comments to Slides that Don’t Make Sense
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Nick Cvetkovic, Sales Director of Retail & Sports SystemsWe’re delighted with the finished presentation. It has been extremely well received by audiences. The use of graphics instead of text definitely increases retention rates and it always amazes me how many people remember certain slides.
#1
raj
2:52 pm, April 12th, 2010
i m fully impressed by this…
#2
Jessica Pyne
12:11 pm, April 13th, 2010
Thank you for the kind words, Raj. If you are interested in gaining a further understanding of presentations, check out more of the articles in our presentation theory section.
#3
Angelyn
11:31 am, August 11th, 2010
Will definitely try Visual Cognitive Dissonance! Thanks for sharing this.
#4
Jessica Pyne
2:05 pm, August 11th, 2010
You’re welcome, Angelyn – we’re glad you’ll be putting our information to good use! Hope it goes well, and please keep spreading the word that PowerPoint doesn’t have to be boring!