Sacred Cow #7: All You Need Is An Afternoon
"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.
A Tale Of Two Brown Bags
At the place where I earn my living, we'll sometimes have someone in the office give a "brown bag" presentation during the lunch hour. The idea is that any meetings during this hour are completely optional for all of those who are invited, which is everyone in the division. They're informational or educational in nature, where someone in the office is choosing to share what they know, what they've learned, or the product of their R&D project.
Last week, a friend & co-worker of mine and I both held our own brown bags. He presented on pivot tables in Excel and I gave a high-level presentation on basic steps one can take to make more effective use of PowerPoints. Both were lessons in the often overlooked preparation step: the dry run.
"Joe"
I'll just call him Joe for the purpose of this post in order to protect the innocent . Joe gave a good presentation on what pivot tables are and how to use them. I walked out of there with a good understanding of what they are, how they can be used, and how to use them. Not only did I comprehend his message, but I also retained it. Score one for Joe! His presentation didn't use even one PowerPoint slide at all. He didn't need them. In fact, slides would have done more harm than good. It was a great example of when not to use them.
One slip-up that left him confused at times during the presentation was when faced with giving his presentation on a different operating system. When starting his demo, he asked aloud, "now where is it on the Mac?" Right there, that told us he wasn't in control of his demo. When he did find what he was looking for, exactly where it would be found on Windows, he did find the dialogs a little different. That's to be expected, since the user interface conventions are different. However, when using this unfamiliar dialog, he often had people offering suggestions on where to click rather than him showing us.
One thing we can't count on when giving a presentation, especially nowadays, is that the host computer is using the same operating system as what we're used to. Mac users need to accept that they may find themselves stuck with a Windows machine and Windows users need to accept that they may find themselves on a Mac. What this requires, then, is a little planning and preparation. Get to the site of your presentation even earlier than you would if you knew for certain that you would be using your own laptop. If the environment is different than what you expect, do a dry run. If things are different, note the differences so that when you do give your demo, you can do it so smoothly and your audience will think you're a natural...a real pro. If you have access to a computer using the other software before you even arrive on site, do your dry run then so that you're even more prepared even sooner. I do this with all of my slides that are in PowerPoint format. If they're developed on a Mac, any slides I present at work are also run through on a Windows machine. Any anomalies are caught early and adjustments are made.
Me
My presentation, including all of the questions and comments during the talk too exactly as long as I thought it would. Practicing it about 10 times made that part pretty predictable. Of course, there could always be something to throw it off, but I planned well, at least in that regard. One thing I didn't do that hit me out of nowhere was consider the less than optimal quality of the projector. When I got to my example of a good corporate template, the template's and the projector's shortcomings became quite clear. The light gray background image was washed-out to the point where you couldn't see it. If I was using a big plasma or LCD screen, it would have been fine. However, this projector has been notoriously difficult to calibrate and I should have remembered that.
Testing the slides on this projector is something I should have considered and planned for. Instead of a situation where I said, "what you should have been able to see is...," I would rather have been able to say, "what you see here is..."
The lesson in both of these presentations: when presenting, if you're using any sort of technology whatsoever, do not take anything for granted. Murphy's Law is not an exception. Plan for it and take a little extra time ahead of your presentation to do a dry run. This will hopefully allow you to make any adjustments you need to before it's show time.
