Sacred Cow #7: All You Need Is An Afternoon

April 23, 2009
By Mike

“Get your presentation, complete with slides done this afternoon.  You need to present tomorrow morning.”

I’m sure we’ve all had this thrown on us.  Slap something together and deliver it.  PowerPoint’s easy to use, so why would you need more than an afternoon, right?  How about a whole day to make a slide deck “more attractive?”  It’s this perceived efficiency of PowerPoint as a tool that feeds this particular sacred cow.

As Miracle Max said in The Princess Bride, “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.”

Jan Schultink has a good post on quick slide make-over tricks.  There’s some very good ideas in there.  However, it’s one thing to make slides attractive and another thing all together to make them effective.  Deadlines be damned, I strive for effective slides first and foremost.  Pretty slides are of no use if they don’t help your presentation.

Take, for example, a deck full of bullet points, excessive text, and overly-complex, yet information-sparse (as opposed to dense) diagrams.  You can readily make those slides more attractive, but to make them effective, you need to understand the presentation.  You need to know which of the points and ideas in the slides are those that actually need to be driven home.  You need to know what the salient message in those diagrams are.  You need to know this information if you’re going to not only redesign the slides, but also architect the information in an effective way.

Doing it right requires more than just better scheduling of your own time.  It requires a change in the office culture.  Management needs to understand the difference between attractive, yet effective slides and attractive distractions.  Management needs to learn that slapping together some bullet points together is not enough.  They need to learn that old assumptions about PowerPoint slides have been discredited.  Management needs to learn that practices that they employ, such as last minute slide design assignments, simply because that’s just the way it’s “always” been done make it a sacred cow.  As we know, sacred cows are better off dead…and on my plate.

Image credit:  Aeioux, used under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Hi Mike,

    I agree with you there. If you look at only the slides of many great presentations (if they used slides at all), you might not understand the whole story. Many great presentations only use images and short video clips, how are you supposed to understand the story behind it? E.g. Lawrence Lessig's presentation at TED won't be helpful if he weren't talking while his slides are showing. It's the content that matters, not the slides.

    But this will be very hard to change. The office culture of "can you present some slides for tomorrow morning" will still be around for a while, so it's important to find a compromise.

    Though, I wonder, will there ever be a time when bosses say "Please make a presentation for tomorrow. Make a good storyline - use slides if you want." :-).

    Oliver
  • I agree this will be a tough nut to crack. It's going to take, at a
    minimum, patience and persistence.
  • The worst examples I have seen looked like they were slapped together by the presenter during a plane trip to a conference. At the last minute it is hard to resist cutting and pasting a huge table from Word or Excel into a PowerPoint slide. Big tables work for a written document like a handout. For an audience who can’t read them easily and quickly they can induce sleep.

    Financial types may begin by showing the annual statement for a corporation. Materials and processes engineers may begin with a table showing the detailed chemical composition of each material (perhaps 12 to 15 columns) as discussed in one of my very first blog posts: http://joyfulpublicspeaking.blogspot.com/2008/0...
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