Merrie Spaeth is President of Spaeth Communications, Director, Media Relations, Reagan White House.
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Professor Edward Tufte is one of the world’s experts on envisioning information. He believes that how we visually display information, particularly data, has a huge impact on how we absorb or learn from it. He’s also the leader of the anti-PowerPoint movement, arguing that PPT is an overly simplified, lazy man’s way of displaying what looks like useful material but too frequently obscures the actual content.
I agree with Tufte, but I’m writing because of another observation he makes to explain why PPT is so frequently ineffective: “designer guidelines and bureaucratic norms that insist on PP for all presentations regardless of content.” And, since PPT is here to stay, let’s identify ways to make it more useful.
The Case Against PowerPoint
First, if you or your company use PPT, spend a few dollars to download the e-version of his seminal article, “The Cognitive Sytle of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.” Written in part to understand and critique how NASA and Boeing failed so catastrophically to correctly diagnose and address the danger to the Columbia space shuttle in 2003, one focus of his analysis concludes that PPT is a terrible format to convey serious technical topics. Its templates and formats cause critical information to be overlooked, to be “pitched out.”
It’s important that teams start here on their endeavor for better displaying information. Why? Because so much of his analysis and criticism are correct, starting with the observations that:
• PPT is for the presenter, not the audience.
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• PPT is “relentlessly sequential.”
• Today’s PPT is hostage to a 1956 paper by psychology expert George A. Miller, who argued that humans can remember approximately five to seven points, giving birth to the “six bullets on six slides” commandment.
One of his most astute observations is that art has gone through many styles, ranging from Egyptian flat descriptions to the Renaissance to Picasso, with a lot of others in between. The objects or people depicted didn’t change, but the style of depicting them did. His argument is that PPT is simply the current “style” of presentation, and farsighted companies will find new styles.
Although I have a hard time seeing our clients adopt his main recommendation—to ditch PPT, give people reports and expect them to read and discuss them—he is onto something important.
How We Can Make PPT More Effective
1. Interactivity shouldn’t be confined to post-presentation Q&A. It should be built into the presentation. Even with the constraints of Zoom participants, the speaker can query the audience. With larger groups, ask for raised hands or use the Chat function. (We like to have a partner presenter who handles the chat comments and polls.) We also use one or two short printout components that the speaker can refer to. This does break the eye contact with the listeners but does make up for it with a new element.
2. Focus on the audience. A Lean Six Sigma presentation to other black belts can be a lot different than a budget request to a board. Turn the obligatory agenda at the start into “guide posts,” a very short enumeration of what’s to be covered, why and what you want the listener to take away.
3. Don’t overlook setup. Setup is critical yet too often overlooked. Rather than just dumping data, tell a story. While Tufte hates “build” slides, I like using multiple, as this increases interaction with the listeners.
One of our clients in Europe was making an important presentation to his board asking for a significant amount of funds to erase technical debt. He began the presentation with three eye-catching pictures:
• A kitchen full of mold, insinuating that they had delayed maintenance beyond the point of cleanup.
• A multistory building illustrating that they had overbuilt the technical architecture and thus the entire structure was at risk.
• A box of tools covered with rust to show they had also failed to invest in equipment to fix the problems.
With these three images in mind, he then proceeded with a fairly straightforward and numbers-filled analysis of the proposed project and costs. (They got the funds.)
4. Give each slide a headline. Each slide should have what we call a “headline,” a single line with a point of view. A headline can be absorbed visually and repeated if the listener turns away. And yes, it can have a subhead. But try not to slop over multiple lines.
5. Include blank slides where the speaker continues to talk to, and with, the audience. Tufte is right about the death knell of relentless sequencing. If your design staff rebels against a blank slide, the fallback position is a simple picture or a simple quote. Instead, turn the attention from the slide to the speaker.
In conclusion, power on PPT! But let’s recognize its faults (defaults?) and improve on them.
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Author: Merrie Spaeth, Forbes Councils Member
