It took a tour of colleges for a light bulb to go off in my head. That’s when I realized that PowerPoint dread begins at an early age. But there are valuable lessons to be learned about how your average, everyday business presentation can benefit from some “big room” thinking from the presenters who do it right.

In this episode we learn to approach presentations–every presentation–like a big lecture, or a TED Talk, and how that translates into huge time saving and a more focused message and audience.

Welcome to P3, the perfect presentations podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, your host, and co-owner of Perfect PlanIt. Since 2005 our company has created more than 7,000 presentations for conferences, trade shows, road shows, sales meetings, board of director meetings, pretty much any presentation you can imagine, for use anywhere around the world.

Today, I want to talk about how college better prepared me to give good PowerPoint presentations. Not going to college, just visiting colleges.

My 17 year old son is about to be a senior. That’s sort of a staggering thing for me to imagine. I just watched a video of him narrating to himself while playing a video game. He was probably about 6 years old. Little voice, little laugh. Now I’ve got this near-adult with a deep voice who’s researching colleges and writing thank you emails to enrollment officers, and it’s all just a lot to take in.

But the fun part has been these road trips to visit schools. We recently did a road trip where we visited five colleges in four days. When you visit a college, the first thing they do is huddle you all together into a room while an enrollment person tells you all about the school, the academics, sports, life on campus, financing and on and on. It takes between a ½ hour to an hour.

If you ever want to see how quickly an audience gets bored on PowerPoint, watch your kid, who’s never really sat through a PowerPoint of any length, come to realize that almost all of these presentations are the same, and quickly start to tune out. By day three, he was making jokes about it. “Here comes the student activities section, where they tell us about their dance marathon and their crazy squirrel watching club.” That’s a thing, by the way. Every school has student organizations, and the three biggest schools we visited had identical talks about how cool their clubs were, and one of them was squirrel watching. I’m fascinated to learn how that went viral and everyone decided to start it.

The point is, here’s a captive audience who’s traveled some distance just to visit your school and is excited to learn about it, and you are showing bullet points and reading what’s on the screen. And here’s the part that really frustrates me. This admissions counselor does this every day. They’ve got a room full of kids who want to be excited, even entertained. And there they are reading bullet points off a PowerPoint.

But there was one school that got it right. The admissions counselor was about 25 years old, and had graduated from the same school. He was talking in front of about 100 people, which is a lot for a Monday morning at 9am. He never once looked at his presentation. He looked at the audience. He cracked some jokes and loosened people up. He walked around as he clicked through his presentation and riffed on the content that was there, and it was nicely designed by the way. His presentation was essentially the college version of a TED talk. And I thought, this is wonderful! People are nodding, not nodding off. And when he was done we were all very excited to see the campus, because his enthusiasm was infectious.

This got me thinking about how we all give presentations. About how we discuss giving presentations. They typically assume that the presenter is standing on a stage like this young man, presenting to a large group of people. They treat every presentation like it’s a TED Talk, or a main stage discussion. But for you, when was the last time you gave that kind of presentation, if at all? And if you did, how many of your presentations are that kind?

My college tour experience was the opposite of what your daily life probably looks like. Chances are you spend most of your time in meetings, using presentations as a way to share information with your team. And we don’t talk about that enough. Don’t worry, we’re coming back to our hero admissions counselor. But I want to start with your presentation, the one that gets created on the fly, often with one version and no revisions, as you fly out the door to your next meeting. If you have a strong corporate template, maybe it even looks ok, even as you know your ideas are only vaguely organized.

It would be easy to give everyone a pass here and say hey, it’s ok, we get that you’re just sharing information and you had to do it quickly and as long as your ideas are all there, it’s all good.

In truth, there is a kernel of the right idea in teaching presentation training as though you’re on a big stage, whether that’s a TED talk, or a 25-year-old admissions counselor at a university.  So today I want to talk about how you change your presentation culture, and get your teams to share their information in new ways that feel much more like they’ve got a spotlight on them. Because information sharing is critical. There shouldn’t be a free pass just because you’re busy. It’s because you’re busy that it’s more critical than ever to do it right and do it well. And guess what? In the end it doesn’t take any longer than doing it wrong!

Let’s back up for a moment and start with a simple premise. No one claims to like PowerPoint. Right? Those kids at the college tour got their first, sad exposure to PowerPoint dread, and all they wanted was to see a dorm room and a cafeteria and maybe an academic building.

We know the reasons we hate PowerPoint. Endless bullet points. Bad clip art. Boring presenters reading off the slides while you read along. And boom, you’re done and forget all of it and wonder where your half hour went.

Let’s go deeper. Why do we have meetings to start with? We do it to share information, tasks, updates on progress and projects. Which is to say, we do it to move forward and achieve goals. Now, there’s an entire industry around more productive meetings, but we’re here to talk about presentations. When it comes to meetings, PowerPoint is foundational in many companies. It gets used because people see it as a way to share information, and to do it in a way that they can manage. That’s an important point, so let’s focus on it for a moment. Most of us are not natural presenters. And we’re definitely not information design experts. At Perfect PlanIt, we create gorgeous presentations, but if you as me to design one, I’m going to struggle, even though I know all the right ways to do it. That’s because I’m a natural writer, not a designer. In a perfect world, you’d have a team like I have, where you could meet and share all of your ideas for what you want to convey in a meeting and magically they’d come back with gorgeous infographics, data brought to life, and a story to tie it all together.

But we don’t have that. We have only ourselves, and this pretty simple tool that lets us put our ideas down, and organize them in a way that we can share with others.

But we’re missing a few key components, and this is where things start to break down.

First, we’re missing the expectation of what the audience will do with the information we share. Most presentations I see are simply information gathered and shared, but with no outcomes associated with it. OK, you shared this with me, but what do I do with it? Step back for a minute and ask yourself why you’re there. There should never be a meeting where you simply give a status update. I mean, someone has to do something next, right? Even if you’re presenting the results of something, let’s say a big research project. You’re sharing what you’ve learned. From your company’s perspective, they’re not anxious to simply have you share that learning. They want to know what to do with it. And that’s all outcome based. You’re sharing what either you, your team, or both should do with the information. Yet so many presentations are simply regurgitating facts and figures, and everyone asks a few questions and goes on their merry way. That’s a terrible outcome for a meeting.

Second, ideas are not organized. This is really common, and is a function of the world we live in. So many things to do, no time to do them well. Your presentation was an afterthought. “I need to give an update, so let me throw everything into PowerPoint in a stream of consciousness flow, where maybe I reorganize a couple slides to make more sense, but not really. Success in business isn’t random. The people who rise are able to build compelling arguments, for themselves, the products they manage, the initiatives they challenge. And building a compelling argument is a process of establishing a premise, then backing it up with data, then concluding with why it all makes sense and what to do. Think of a lawyer giving a closing argument to convict a suspect. That lawyer is going to create a meticulous argument based on the evidence and the motive, and weave that story together in a way that the jury can nod their heads and say yep, it all makes sense. You’re challenge isn’t much different.

Third, everything looks terrible. Yes, this is where we finally get to vent about those bullet points. Because they really are a terrible way to share information. Why? If you’ve listened to our other podcasts, you’ve heard about our Listen or Read rule. Simply stated, your audience can listen, or they can read, but they absolutely, positively cannot do both at once, no matter how much they claim to be multitasking geniuses. I’ve proven it over and over in our training, simply by putting content on the screen about healthcare, then talking about something unrelated like baseball. When I stop and ask everyone what I just said, I get blank faces.  Our brains are wired in a very specific way to consume and process information, and it does not allow for you to both listen and read at the same time. So here’s the rub with that. You just built a presentation that has all of the information you want to cover, and it’s written down on every slide you’re going to walk through. So at a minimum, you are guaranteeing that you’re wasting everyone’s time in one of two ways, by talking, or by speaking. Maybe you say, I’ll just have one word for each bullet, and I’ll talk about them one at a time so they have to focus on me. Now you’re headed in the right direction, but I’m going to call BS and say you won’t actually do that. We’ve had dozens of clients tell us “I really want this presentation to be visual with almost no words.” And that’s what we deliver. Later, when I ask them to share back the presentation they actually gave, I get back a deck with dozens of words on each slide. “What happened to the highly visual, I ask?” “Well, I needed to show X and Y and I just needed a deeper story.

“Needed”. That’s the key word here. It’s the crutch. I Needed to do it this way. What that shows me is that they don’t have an alternative that they’re confident enough to use. And in fairness, a lot of the time I think the presenter really DID want to show just the highly visual slides and have the audience focus on them speaking.

And that’s the crux of our discussion today. It’s the expectation that we most need to fight against. The “If I don’t show all this info, people will be mad, or they won’t know what to do.” We trained a team where the management explicitly told the people being trained that the reason they were there was to change how they thought about presentations. They wanted a complete shift in the approach, with a focus on all the lessons we teach. But the pushback was very strong. And the main argument was one of “this is how we’ve always done it, so it must be how people want to get the information.”

It’s time to change your presentation culture. It won’t be easy. It will take a strong leader, and strong evangelists who champion the cause. That person might be you. And since you don’t have a great reason to visit college campuses and find a great 25 year old,  the best place to start may be those TED talks we mentioned at the beginning. Watch them for how they take an idea, a single idea and make themselves the star for 10 minutes.

Let me wrap up with a quick way to create your own TED Talk-like presentation out of your average, every day presentation. Here’s an easy way to do it. Start with the conclusion. What do you want your audience to know AND do when they walk away? Put that conclusion on a slide. Now, without doing anything else, make an argument that supports that conclusion. Do it at your desk, in the shower, wherever you can talk to yourself. Can you support it? If you say “well, I need a data point that backs up my argument,” put that single data point on a slide. Just the data point with a descriptor. Now you have two slides. Back up some more and ask, will the audience know why they are here?” If the answer is no, or maybe, then add a slide that says why you’re there. You should be able to do that in just a few words, something like “Our customer survey results show positive trends in satisfaction.” Now you have 3 slides. A powerful intro, a data slide to back it up, and a powerful conclusion slide that tells them what to do with the info.

You can see you might need to fill in a few more slides of data to support your case, but ONLY the data that supports it. Lose the charts. Lose the graphs. Pull out that one, all important point and just focus on IT. And Look, you’ve built a TED talk where you are the star, and the slides just give the supporting points the audience requires.

Want to know the hidden side benefit of this approach? You also cut down the amount of time it takes to build your presentation because you’re focused on what you’ll say, versus trying to have the slides say it for you. You didn’t have to spend two hours with smart art and bad stock photos. You got a chunk of your day back, and put your confidence back into your ability to tell the story.

Give it a shot. See how it goes.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you on the next episode.