8.2. SHOPTALK: PRESENTATION DESIGN STYLES AND APPROACHES
Jazz musicians have their scales; artists have figure drawing; and writers have grammar. Every creative outlet has parameters that guide expression. It's how we keep our heads from popping off. The difference between a toddler whacking a pot with a spoon and a jazz drummer riffing through syncopated rhythms is an understanding of fundamental rules. Such is the difference between a beatnik art house monologue and a stellar presentation.
Garr Reynolds first introduced me (and many others) to the world's leading presentation styles in his landmark blog and book, Presentation Zen. I have been studying and following the preeminent presentation design methods in the world ever since. Even more, I've been employing them in my own presentations and hearing feedback from others. Undoubtedly, everyone will respond to one method more than another; however, we need to consider these methods like gambling in baseball. You may be a diehard Red Sox fan, but are you really going to put your money on them against the Yankees? I mean, you've got to put food on the table.
Okay, so now that I've lost the respect of all Bostonians, let's take a look at the prevailing approaches of our time.
8.2.1. The Godin Method
The Godin Method, named after the illustrious Seth Godin, is based on a hilariously simple concept: The art of presenting is actually composed of two different elements, the speaker and the slide. Mind-blowing, huh?
Actually, it is. The speaker, as the name suggests, speaks. Speakers use words. They are the experts whose thoughts everyone has gathered to hear on the matter at hand. With that in mind, doesn't it strike you as oddly repetitive to plaster slides with words, sentences, and even paragraphs? After all, do you want the audience to listen or to read? Have you ever tried doing both at the same time?
Of course, no speaker wants the audience to read. Why not just mail them pamphlets and save everyone the trouble of gathering in the first place? No, we give presentations because we understand, on some level, that words by themselves are insufficient to communicate the material.
Then we have the slides. Everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words. Imagine the number of memories you create just by looking at a photograph of a barn. You could be transported to the old family farm, to childhood, to vacations with your children when they were young. These memories, in turn, generate a tempest of feeling, from joy to pain to somber reflection and back again.
Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But which words? Without the separate, complementary presence of a speaker, pictures are nothing more than random associations. This is fine if your ultimate purpose is to simply elicit feelings from the audience, but it is grossly insufficient if you are tasked with moving them to action based on those feelings. Artfully weaving the strength of the presenter's presence with the raw power of slide imagery is what makes the Godin method so utterly effective. So how does one employ it?
Remember: You are an expert. All of the neurons inside your head are connected just right, helping you understand your particular area of expertise. But the neurons of your audience aren't situated for that information, and your job is to get them there in the span of a 45-minute keynote. The slide images, as used in the Godin method, are your trusty sidekicks. They allow you to focus on deep, meaningful content without scorching your audience's cerebellums.
Let's put it this way: You're giving an in-depth talk on the underlying neurological processes that govern how grief is navigated. You can put bullet points on each slide that repeat exactly what you just said, or you can utilize deeply personal images of denial, guilt, anger, and so on. Analogous and poignant imagery entertains the audience in a way that projected sentences cannot. Far from being distracting, entertaining imagery actually keeps the audience alert and in a state that facilitates learning and engagement.
8.2.2. The Takahashi Method
For Masayoshi Takahashi, slides are like the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel: They mark a path for the audience. Takahashi stumbled upon his technique when confronted with what, for many of us, would be an absolute nightmare: a presentation opportunity without our precious slide decks, editing software, or advanced technology. Yet by rolling the dice on a startling assumption about the human brain, he won big.
Takahashi approached the presentation with the simple belief that his audience would have an open mind and a basic willingness to engage—so long as he didn't get in the way of his story. For each slide, he distilled his key points down to a single, powerful word. He told the story and let the bold, raw power of each single word emblazon his message into the minds of the audience members. No glitz, no glamour: just a powerful message with a roadmap the audience could follow.
The Takahashi method is not so different from the Godin method. After all, where do we cross the line between pictures and words? When we're young, letters are just primitive figures on a page. Only later do we become desensitized to the word as imagery. But by isolating key words and displaying them with sovereign weight on the projection screen, we access that primal sense of words as art.
Think about a word like "breathe." We breathe every day—nothing new there. Yet within the context of a presentation on stress relief at work, with the lights set low, that single, suddenly odd-sounding word—breathe—develops layers. What does it mean to breathe? When are we ever conscious of breathing? When our kids are born? When we're afraid? When we're physically exhausted? The more we contemplate the underground life of even the most pedestrian words, the more we encounter our own introspective natures. When I set out to teach a group of people something dynamic and new, that's the headspace where I want to put them.
8.2.3. The Lessig Method
Like Godin and Takahashi, Lawrence Lessig considers the slide deck to be supplementary to the speaker's personal expertise. The slides are a lifeline between the audience and your content: They can visually hold on to your thought process as you bumble down the road.
Unlike Godin and Takahashi, however, Lessig isn't focused on whether imagery or stark words are superior. His method combines the two and instead focuses on brevity and slide volume throughout. Rather than boiling all of your content down to a key word (as with the Takahashi method) or an image (the Godin method), Lessig ratchets up the slide count so that each concept has multiple slides that batter the point home. In fact, I've seen Lessig deliver 20- to 30-minute presentations that had over 200 slides. It's almost like watching a narrated flip-book.
The logic behind the method is simple: Think back to how you learned the alphabet, or how you taught your kids. The letter A is presented both as a word, Apple, and as an image of an apple. B is for Book, and an image is there for visual reference. Humans are meaning machines—a bad maize harvest in the Mayan empire inevitably produced a corresponding angry maize god—and we perform our vast calculations rapidly to whatever end we're given. Lessig became a master at making the meaning-machine mind work for him. Every concept is broken up into the fundamental parts and then represented in slide form with a key word, image, or both. Every slide in this method is perfectly clear, because every concept is perfectly reduced to bite-size form.
The Lessig method also gives the audience a feeling of rapid transit. Moving through 20 to 30 slides a minute, with each slide in perfect synchronization with a prepared and rehearsed narrative, makes it exceedingly difficult to look away—even if you're not particularly interested in the subject matter. You get the sense that you could miss volumes of information in the space of a few seconds, and the slides change so often that you don't have time to get bored.
This method has its limitations—an hour-long keynote could approach 500 slides, creating a budgetary and logistical nightmare—and requires some dedicated preparation. Timing is more than just a personal touch here; it is crucial to the delivery and is as much a part of the presentation's success as the content or design. If you run out of time with your rapid-fire succession of slides, you'll look more like a drunk groomsman giving an unfortunate toast than a seasoned expert with valuable information to share with an eager audience.
8.2.4. The Kawasaki Method
Guy Kawasaki, venture capital phenom and honorary presentation god, has a method that has as its central tenet a concept we discussed earlier: don't ruin their day. His 10/20/30 Rule—10 slides per presentation, 20 minutes for delivery, and 30-point fonts—addresses some of the fundamental errors that plague most presenters today. Ten slides may seem grossly insufficient for your complex content, but Kawasaki raises the question: If you can't boil it down to that, how clearly do you really understand it? Likewise, approaching your 45-minute paid keynote slot with 20 minutes of material could come off as offensive to the group that signs your check, and 30-point fonts are pretty large, right?
But as Kawasaki is quick to bring up, what if it takes you 15 minutes to set up your computer? What if one key decision maker arrives 10 minutes late and the other has to leave 20 minutes early? And the more you speak to C-level executives, the more you need those big fonts, because with wisdom and experience come myopia and cataracts.
Every presenter needs to be thoroughly proficient with a Kawasaki-esque presentation; however, not every presentation lends itself to this method. This approach is your best shot when you have to give a big pitch to a busy, cut-the-bull decider who wants all of the pertinent information and none of the snap, crackle, or pop. Design these presentations with clarity and legibility as priority guideposts. Aesthetics won't be as important for the sort of audience you're speaking to when dealing in Kawasakis.
8.2.5. Pecha Kucha
As haikus or sonnets are to the written word, Pecha Kucha is to the presentation. Pecha Kucha is a rigid prescription for slide and content structure—just 20 slides shown for 20 seconds per slide. If you want to do 23 slides, or spend 30 seconds on each slide, that's fine. But it's not Pecha Kucha.
If you feel as though we've suddenly exited the realm of meaningful information and entered a disturbing, but ultimately harmless, attic apartment where presentation geeks make up arbitrary rules about information delivery, then this will erase any remaining doubt: Pecha Kucha nights, where individuals gather to brandish their brevity skills before peers, actually take place all over the world. There are no business contracts to snag at these forums and no political agendas to push. They are just presentations for the love of the game, the way you might have played pickup basketball as a kid.
Before you put down the book and start searching YouTube for your next viral Facebook post, let me explain. Pecha Kucha may not be fundamentally relevant for your presentation, but there is a lot to be gained by using this method during your training and practice. I cannot emphasize this point enough: when presenting, clarity and brevity are paramount. Nothing clutters the mind more than useless words, cumbersome sentences, and stumbling monologues. No one is going to force you to don a Darth Vader mask and attend your local Pecha Kucha night, but please consider putting strict limitations on your slide count and minutes/seconds per slide. Sometimes we can't find a better way to say something until we're faced with a time limit and have to cut. Pecha Kucha is a great practice method, and it really does help me eliminate previously unseen superfluity, no matter what approach I choose for my final deck.
8.2.6. Ignite
Now that you're a diehard Pecha Kucha night attendee, I have some bad news for you. There are others out there. In particular, a group called Ignite has disciples who scoff at your luxuriously long-winded 20 seconds per slide. These Spartan speakers are doing it in 15 seconds, and if that sounds like a trivial difference, just get out the stopwatch: Read a sentence that takes 20 seconds to complete, and try to pare it down to a comfortably articulated 15 seconds while retaining all of the important information. Ignite presentations force the brain to work the language like a crossword puzzle, finding all the possible permutations available to settle on information that is almost mathematically selected.
Yes, there are Ignite nights as well. Yes, I know you categorically refuse to attend. If you take anything away from these final two methods, make it brevity. Both of these methods are like lifting weights in a gym so that you can build a cabin out of logs. They're imitations of a truer purpose, sure, but they can certainly make you strong.