Slide Crimes

Like splinters from a rickety church pew, mistakes in the creation and delivery of slide decks can all too easily unsettle technical audiences and set them off on a course to Distraction Land — or worse, Tutting Land — never to return.

All that time we’ve collectively spent typing, dragging, aligning, inserting memes, up in smoke because of some silly thing we’ve overlooked.

Herein is my personal hit list of slide crimes that I hope will dissuade you from making some of those mistakes that I’ve made, and that will keep your audience engaged throughout, convinced that you are a hero.

Procrastination

Often, it is easy, nay preferable, to ignore the people in an audience who know more than me. Indeed, the dress-sense of highly technical individuals is enough to dissuade one from direct eye-contact ever.

But in presentations of a technical nature, especially by Philosophically Advanced Beings such as ourselves, dear reader, to amble along with all manner of detail before getting to the app / website / API / log file / code does nothing more than distract from the power and gravity of our stories.

Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash

Get to the tech early: then allow your mind to relax into explanation mode knowing you have caught attention first and have shown them something that they have spent 20+ years training and learning and using — and which they were really here to see anyway— really hot-damn-cool gadgets.

Speed

In days gone by, I was a lover of rollercoasters. Well, still am — if it weren’t for my forty-something hip. But I am often trapped in wanting to carry my audience at speed to the point of near-vomiting, and to induce such fear of sudden and uncontrollable death that individual members scream, arms flailing, some becoming unconscious.

I must remind myself: Rollercoasters my presentations are not.

I must think on the minds of those souls selecting to spend their time with me as cress-growing eggs: needing careful nurturing, not nearly smashed to bits with a big spoon of IMPACT MESSAGE nor nearly obliterated against a wall with TECHNICAL DETAIL.

Photo by Michel Bosma on Unsplash

Design Islands inside your presentation. On these Islands — of which no more than 5 — you will permit your audience to absorb the radiance of the knowledge you are imparting.

At the outset, tell them about these Islands you’re going to visit, show and tell them when they have arrived at each, and build in a moment to let them enjoy that beach, that ice-cold beer, that steak, the sunshine, by saying absolutely nothing at all for at least three breaths. Then when all islands have been visited, remind them of their visit, the sights, the sounds, the smells, and how far they’ve come.

Inaction

It is essential to conclude with an inspiring, realistic Call To Action on conclusion of my talk. (Else why am I bothering?) But let’s be clear: if my request is to ask my congregation to create a brand new planet a la Slartibartfast out of cake and olive oil, I’m wasting everybody’s time.

“Begin with the end in mind,” and plan your presentation accordingly. Talk about the tools and skills required, the full gamut of building blocks, that make that moment you do call them to action just the easiest and most natural thing in the world to do next.

Pinterestless

The world and their fish have smart phones. And each of those little fish are poised to take photographs of every single slide that you are going to show. And when they’ve caught one, OMG the rush, the rush of capturing a slide in perfect clarity and with perfect alignment and no perspective problems and OMG the colours look amazing!

Photo by Erika Giraud on Unsplash

Like a comedic writer leaving “pause for laughs” in a script, identify slides you believe — or want —your audience to record as a photographs. Make these astounding, remarkable, noteworthy on mobile phone cameras. Test that they work. Design them surgically to be referenced and shared again and again.

For goodness sake, when you have a slide you know deep down is important and interesting, do not take on the How Dare They! pose and face as those little fish raise their mobile phones. Instead, magnetise those little fish — turn that slide into the Monet you know it is. Let those little fish marvel, let them. Let them bask in your creation.

Go on. Make them take a photo…

Yawn

Presentations without a BANG or two — whether that’s a story, prop, picture, giggle, curiosity, whiteboard, flipchart, expert opinion, banter, question, giveaway, handout, quote, current event, or reference to a famous person — are like a Rum and Coke® without the trademark symbol — unremarkable.

A simple search online will reveal the tricks and the purposes of Limbic technique — it’s powerful and, arguably, necessary.

Lazy Language

Technical audiences are easily dipstracted by spleelling mistaches and unusual language and terminology.

Photo by Andrew Buchanan on Unsplash

Many of us live on a planet. And the planet, shockingly, is inhabited by other people. Amongst Other People Who Can Assist Writing Things Better are Colleagues, Friends (who lie less than colleagues!), Family, Children, and professional Copywriters.

These people may not always be awesome spell-checkers, but they can all open your mind to different ways of explaining what it is that it is that you want to say.

Fortune Telling

For many years, I studied eschatological belief systems. In those years, it was not uncommon to encounter individuals laying claim to insight into the future, good or bad, of people, of places, of the planet. This fascination with the future — and particularly the promise of rescue from imagined dire straights — reaches into all matters from ecology to economy.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Technologists are humans too, equally interested in heroic views of the future of some technology or other — and this is fine. Many things evangelists speak about are future-focused.

The sin of telling people about the next slide is like — well, actually let’s come back to that. For instance, all those bits you’re about to read about — well, ok actually, let’s cover that at the end. And as for — well, you know what, someone else is going to cover that…

Keep your consumers locked into your current message with every fibre of your being — avoid introducing words and concepts too early: consider your slides as a queue of instructions and ask — as any software engineer would- what priority, what effort, what atomicity does each slide have, and then arrange and scope them accordingly.

A Proper Face Full

I am in the unfortunate bucket of individuals passionate about creating astoundingly complex diagrams nobody ever looks at.

Yes, I was once an Enterprise Architect.

The upshot: I very easily slip into trying to create slides that contain everything someone could possibly want to know, and the viewer receives a step-by-step demonstration of my prowess in layout and Fade In On Click, and not the story I am telling!

I am a terrible human being, and I know it.

Photo by Hanna Morris on Unsplash

Having read BPMN Method & Style and Idealized Design while learning Archimate, I had a big shoulder-chip to get over: yes, I am great at Left Align and Snap To Grid, but my audience doesn’t care. I needed to put my audience first, and to create individual diagrams, tables, and / or matrices with a maximum number of facts. I chose five — at a push seven — individual boxes, bullets, or rows on one slide. Any more, and a second slide is needed. More than 25 in a single presentation? I’ve lost sight of the consumer, and have slipped into the trap of hugging my inner child.

Read quotes Word For Word

Apparently, I am a bit strange: as I write words on whiteboards, entirely different words — often on another topic — will spill from my mouth. This observation, first communicated to me by the inimitable Paul Buchan during my time at Associated British Foods, came as a big surprise.

“What do you mean that’s weird? Doesn’t everyone do that?!”

“No, Pete. No they don’t.”

And then, after my move into sales with Profisee and then Imply, another shocker: I do it when I’m presenting, too.

“You know, Pete,” says the equally inimitable Mike McLaughlin, “you have words on the slide and you don’t say any of them.”

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

When I have something important to communicate, important enough to put onto a slide or a whiteboard, why the hell do I skip saying the words out loud?

And I’ve seen this a lot. Speakers that have very clearly spent days working on presentations forget that this is the first time someone has encountered them. The constant iteration required as we build out our slide decks breeds familiarity in the speaker, even contempt for the content, and we forget to read the text out loud, to reinforce what it is that we have written.

An excellent bi-product of this practice of saying what is on the slide is to know in our guts whether there are superfluous words on a slide. If it takes 5 minutes to read out loud and you still haven’t said all that you need to say, there are simply too many words on the screen. Be brave and prune.

CFAOYRCEATWKWYFTA

Check for acronyms: or you risk confusing everyone and they won’t know what you’re talking about.

Words are tasty and delicious. Words are infinite, impeccable, instant, enticing, emotive, and endless. They are powerful and astounding. They are a palette of gigantic proportions.

I’m aware when I use acronyms that I am at best just plain lazy, and at worst being needlessly precocious. So I replace them with the beauty and vigor of Words, and reward my audience with the richness of syllables.

Borders

SCREENS ARE REALLY BIG NOW.

I know, this is a silly thing to get wound up about. Maybe this is less a “sin” per se and more of a cheese grater to the chin, and probably related to my obsession with really cool AV equipment and lighting…

In any case, please forgive me, dear reader.

We have so much real -estate — especially at conferences — to bring our messages to life. The content shown on screens does not require a white border to ensure it doesn’t get clipped when it’s printed out. Words can be at 466277277742pt. Images can fill the screen in high resolution.

Our opportunity in the land of HDR 8K displays is huge. We’re not wiping OHP transparency film clear any more. Let’s make a pact: make presentations that are a visual feast.

SO WHAT?

And finally.

Who cares.

You care. We know that. You’re that kind of person.

But so what?

The approach of asking So What? is essential. It arises in many sales training courses and approaches, and I wholeheartedly suggest having a critical friend challenge you repeatedly, even annoyingly, until you get to the core of what it is you are trying to say.

And when you get there, to revisit each Island, each slide, each call to action, to ask whether you are connected with that purpose.

This article, this publication as a whole, is my way of creating opportunities for anyone (but especially my friends and colleagues) to not make the mistakes that I did. But so what? So that if you are making the same mistakes that I did, the way you present yourself, you ideas, your predictions, your hard work, your products and services, will be improved. So what? So that audiences are more engaged. So what? So that we are all more successful in our endeavour to call on people to act and think differently.

Here’s hoping I’ve done that!