Your Presentation Sucks

What's the point of PowerPoint if it isn't helping you make your point?

I love words.

Here are a few of my favorites.

Start.

Cloud.

Tremolo.

Horizon.

Swing.

Contraption.

Tintinnabulation.

I could go on. But the point of this post is about being more precise and disciplined with words.

Especially when it comes to presentations.

Last week I did a Presentation Skills Workshop with one of our agencies.

It was fascinating.

I offered up examples and frameworks, but the best part of the day was when the participants shared presentations they had done.

The purpose was to understand how these presos could have been better now that they had learned some theories, frameworks and seen some examples of great business storytelling.

What was truly fascinating was the divide between the brilliant, energetic and creative people in the workshop and their meandering, dull and overly verbose presentations.

What’s with the words?

What’s worse, what’s with the wall of words on every slide?!

And where were the images? After all, we know the eternal calculus: a picture is worth a thousand words.

As I watched and listened I kept asking myself, “What in the world is this person really trying to say?”

Presentations are hard. Lord knows, I’ve written and given my share of clinkers and stinkers.

My biggest observation is that slides are either your friend, or in most cases, your foe.

We rely far too much on slides because we don’t really have the logic down.

We don’t have the story.

We don’t know what we really want to say.

I’ll offer up one of the exercises we did that just might help you.

We started our session by watching Amanda Gorman’s inauguration speech — her poem, “The Hill We Climb.”

After she delivered it, I asked the team: “What did you notice?”

The team came back and commented on how emotional they felt, her presence, the power of her words, her ability to tell the story of our nation and her alacrity in offering up hope and optimism for the future.

I captured these thoughts and a whole lot more on a whiteboard. And after the team had expressed all of their observations I posed a final question for the exercise.

“So, what did you think of Amanda’s PowerPoint slides?”