Winning with Logic, not Bullets

Boy howdy, do I ever love the header on this post!

What I'm actually thinking of is an approach I use to prepare presentations, which I learned from the best presenter I've ever worked with. He said something to me along the lines of, "Don't present the work, present the rationale for the work." And from, I think, that moment on, I broke free of the much-critiqued built-in rhetoric of popular presentation tools, which fragments when it should elaborate, reducing arguments to discrete, disconnected points, fragments the points into sub-points, and so on. The typical presentation relies on overviews and summaries to hold its rhetoric together, when it should be building and refining a cohesive point of view you can read, start to finish, and feel like it makes sense.

The fact that Tufte's classic lambasting of PowerPoint has become a cliche makes perfectly clear how much pain and suffering presentations cause. And the proliferation of books on the topic also makes clear how difficult it is to actually make good presentations. But I don't think it should actually be that tough.

In the consulting world, you have to go fast, and you have to collaborate. What ends up happening a lot of the time is that you divide up the work, and everyone goes off and makes some slides, then the account director puts them all into a "deck." (And the very word "deck" hints at exactly what's wrong with this approach.) When you present, the meeting is full of uncomfortable moments where someone says, "Justin, I think this is yours. Did you want to talk this slide?" But the problem with the deck concept isn't that labor can't be divided, it's that decks can be shuffled, and logical arguments can't.

So, If your slides make just as much sense almost no matter how you order them, go back to the drawing board. Simply put, if you can easily reorder your slides, their rational threads have frayed.

So here's my presentation tip: Approach the outline for the presentation as you would a persuasive essay. I think of it as outlining the presentation's rhetoric, as opposed to outlining the presentation's slides. Like so:

1. Your brand sits at the convergence of high trust and personal passion. Your customers are most likely to participate online in venues they trust around topics of great personal interest. Your products serve your customers passions, and your brand is highly regarded.

2. So the opportunity to build a customer community is there. This isn't true of every brand. Your great relationships with your customers are hard-earned, and the next logical step is to extend them online.

3. But it's not enough to build it and hope they will come. The Internet is full of empty, static communities that make perfect sense on paper. In truth, the social web is a highly competitive arena, and just showing up won't be enough for to realize the full opportunity.

4. You therefore need to think beyond innovation and create uniquely relevant customer value. Innovation is important, but it's not enough. You need to create value not realized elsewhere on the web or off--value your customers will wonder how they ever did without.

5. We have the chops (and the rigorous methodological foundation) to help you create a community where your customers will rush to engage, then discover on arrival that they already feel at home.

Not bad for completely generic copy! Reading back through that outline it almost feels like it... uh, makes sense, even though it's not about anything. The reason for that is the rhetorical connections across the paragraphs. Words like "so," "but," and "therefore" are like signposts, guiding the audience through the logic of the argument and connecting each point to the previous.

Now, this only works when you can torpedo the presentation-by-committee approach and put one person in charge of the outline. In my experience, everyone appreciates the person who will step up and figure out how to tell the story. Done right, with input from everybody, this approach ends up making everyone look better.

It's important, once you've created the outline, to stick with it. The random informational slide someone wants to drop in at the last minute has to inform the presentation's rhetoric or go into an appendix.

In practice, I usually end up putting the bold text on slides and using the rest as talking points. The last thing you want to do is read your slides. I'm lucky to work with top-shelf designers who contribute layers of visual meaning to the text, and frequently the text ends up getting replaced with something visual. That's fine, because the outline ensures that the final presentation holds together.

So there's Ryan's Ten-Cent Presentation Tip. Try it out!

Comments

[Vijay Venkatraman]

hey ryan! vijay here! :) you know, it's an interesting point you make - outline the presentation as a persuasive essay. you know, we all forget that the presentation is a tool for persuading people as opposed to presenting content. you know, i think that just renaming the tool to "MS Persuasion" will make a world of difference to presentations. i think it'll reinforce the idea and remind us that the true goal of the presentation is to persuade people, not present content. wow! you know, that's kind of changed my mental framework for how i look at presentations. now i am going design presentations that are directed towards persuading my audience. thank you!