8. Presentation Advice from Mike Nichols: How to Find Value in Your Story

Mike Nichols, the noted director of numerous Hollywood films (including The Graduate, Catch-22, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Broadway comedies, and television productions, is a master of his craft, with many Oscar, Tony, and Emmy awards to his credit. The creative approach Mr. Nichols uses to develop his theatrical stories provides an object lesson to help you develop your presentation story.

In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Nichols described how he prepares for a film: “I really do think it’s important to sit with a text for as long as you can afford to, reading and talking.” He called this process “naming things,” which he described as “just explaining what happens in every scene.”^F8.1

You can use the “naming things” process in preparation for your presentation, but do so after you have shaped your story. Mike Nichols employs his process with a shooting script in hand. In that same manner, you can use his approach only when you have evolved your presentation to an equivalent stage by going through these important developmental steps:

• Set the context, the presentation objective, and how it relates to your audience.

• Brainstorm all the potential ideas that support your objective and provide benefits to your audience.

• Distill the essential ideas and discard the excess.

• Structure those final ideas into a logical flow.

• Design graphics that illustrate your story.

When you have accomplished this, you can proceed to implement your own “naming things” process. Look at each slide in your deck and decide its main point. Then go back through the deck and speak your narrative aloud in rehearsal, stating those main points. As you move through the deck, maintain the flow by making each slide relate to the preceding and following slides. Then go back through the deck once more and, this time, punctuate each slide with either a restatement of your objective or a benefit to your audience. This puts the icing on the cake and lifts your presentation to its optimal level.

Contrast this comprehensive approach with the more typical method of a last-minute cobbling together a disparate assortment of begged, borrowed, or stolen slides, and then standing up in front of a mission-critical audience and reading the slides to them verbatim.

Although an expert at comedy, Mike Nichols would not be amused.