It’s a slow and painful death, akin to torture. The bullets come, one by one. They shoot directly into your eyes, penetrating your skull in slow motion and confusing your brain into puzzled confusion.
Yet the impact is not immediate, sluggishly puncturing your will to stay alive and awake, causing your mind to become befuddled and comatose — then you give up.
First you shut your ears, then you close your eyes and idly put off your consciousness as you enter that peaceful world of sleep, with only your snoring betraying your current state, causing your neighbour to rudely interrupt in your new-found harmony as he gently shakes your hand: “Wake up, the presentation is over.”
If I lost you, I am refereeing to death by BulletPoint, popularly known as PowerPoint.
As you read this, in countless corporate conference rooms, in darkly lit executive five-star hotel meeting rooms, in small cramped offices, in beautifully crafted public auditoriums around the world, some poor corporate bean counters, fledging executives and tired board of directors are violently fighting sleep or have given in and are snoring and drooling on expensive note pads because some insensitive CEO, consultant or sales representative is busy elucidating his seventh bullet point on his 68th slide; and he is only halfway there.
They are cursing under their breath wondering why the speaker insists on dictating the whole of his speech, bullet by bullet, from his numerous PowerPoint slides with his back facing the audience.
Having to endure long and boring PowerPoint presentations seems to be an occupational hazard the corporate world has resigned itself to. The Microsoft software is the default programme that many a presenter runs to whenever faced with the chore of having to deliver any official communication.
This makes sense. PowerPoint is among the best pieces of audio-visual presentation technology available. By employing this, we are able to rope in both the auditory and visual learners allowing us to show as well as tell.
But any use of PowerPoint should be under the knowledge that it serves a secondary purpose to the speaker and does not replace him as always seems to be the case.
It is outright laziness to scribble your whole presentation word for word under the guise of bullet points so that in the end your audience could as well read the slides and will be equally informed of what you wanted to say without your involvement.
We read faster than we listen so when you scribble overcrowded statements on your slide, your audience is able to read the whole of it way before you finish explaining the initial part of the same.
The moment they read what you want to tell them before you do, they tune you out automatically and hence any communication done thereafter could as well be considered as noise.
The art of being a bore is trying to tell everything; especially if you insist on placing it on a slide. Abraham Lincoln put it best in his classic quote aptly captured in his autobiographical film released recently, “I could write shorter sermons. But once I start, I get too lazy to stop.”
Fitting eighty slides into a thirty minute presentation is neither fair to you as a speaker nor to the audience. The whole idea of a speech is that your audience should not finish listening to you before you finish speaking to them. Having excess slides is a recipe to this unwelcome outcome.
Mechanical presentations
I am an advocate of the very famous yet rarely practised 10-20-30 rule; that a PowerPoint presentation should contain no more than 10 slides , last no more than 20 minutes and have a font no lesser than 30 points.
But if there is a disservice that PowerPoint has done to business communication, it is to completely suck life out of presentations.
The idea of communication has been reduced to information sharing. With so much data to be shared, infographics, tabulations and bullets are crammed into complicated slide templates to perpetuate the knowledge glut on an already over-informed populace.
PowerPoint has rendered our presentations to be mechanical and academic. They are too technical and goal oriented. They are not engaging. They are not human.
Our presentations are devoid of the emotional element that creates life; that element that softens the edges of communication, creating laughter where hitherto only an indifferent facial expression sat. I dare submit, that PowerPoint, as currently used in many a presentation, is deadening to the soul.
The heart of proper communication lies in the most human of elements; a good story.
The heart of proper communication lies in the most human of elements; a good story.
An effective PowerPoint presentation, therefore, should be constructed within the realms of a specific narrative. And narratives are not built through bits and bullets; they are built through a free-flowing chit chat that comes from the heart.
All that PowerPoint needs to do is provide direction — to aid you as communicator, to offer a tease of the good to come and create a sense of wanting to hear more from you the presenter.
PowerPoint, in itself attempts to connect to logic in the head. But to be persuasive, you have to connect to the hearts of the audience. That will be achieved through more focus on the audience — greater eye contact with the congregation that reflects the sincerity in your soul, a moving storyline that places the listener at the heart of the presentation.
Let’s embrace information technology alright. But let’s remember ultimately, information technology is about information; not technology; especially information full of life. Life is too short to be wasted listening to a boring PowerPoint presentation.
Mr Sissey is a communication and management consultant. Email: feedback@marvinsissey.com. Twitter: @marvinsissey
