Readers of this blog will know that I often take on PowerPoint (and its cousins) as detrimental to speech giving.  It’s probably time for a corrective blog, especially after my “Imagine there’s no PowerPoint” spoof of last week. 

Let’s be clear.  Slides, done right, can greatly strengthen a presentation. 

So what’s the right way to use PowerPoint and the other slide software programs?  Think of musicals.  A character breaks into song when the emotions are too strong for mere words.  Songs in a musical mark the high points of the story – when the characters fall in love, or discover the truth about themselves, or decide to leave home. 

Slides in a speech should cover the same ground.   If you’re talking about a person, a picture of that person will bring him or her into the room in a way that mere words won’t.  If you’re discussing some part of the world with enormous visual impact, then go for the visual impact.  A client we’re particularly fond of has climbed Mount Everest, and I was the first person in line demanding pictures.  Those pictures are most likely the closest I’ll ever get to that mountain, and they had to be in the speech. 

More subtly, if you’re talking about a situation that invokes human emotion – one of great happiness or sadness – then pictures can bring that emotion immediately into play in a way that words do not.  Ask any fundraiser about the importance of pictures of children to various charitable appeals! 

More prosaically, use slides when you’re illustrating complex numbers or numerical relationships – a chart or graph can show in a glance a relationship that’s much harder to describe in words.  But don’t fall into the trap of putting all your data on the screen.  Just as a presentation should tell us what’s important, not tell us everything there is to be said on a subject, a good slide should show us the one or two important numbers, not the entire data set just because you have it. 

It’s the speaker’s job to tell a convincing story, one with a single clear point, to the audience.  Use slides to help reinforce that single point and that story.  Don’t use slides as agenda place-holders, speaker notes, or bulleted lists of things you couldn’t be bothered to narrow down to the important one.  Don’t make the audience work harder than you.  Your job is to make a persuasive case for a point of view, not to drown your audience in data, and that goes for the speech and the slides.

Imagine there's no PowerPoint
It's easy if you try
No screens before us
No piles of printed slides
Imagine all the people focusing on you

Imagine there's no clip art
It isn't hard to do
Nothing clichéd or stupid
No dumb cartoons
Imagine all the people focusing on you

You, you may say
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And conferences will be more fun

Imagine no bullets
I wonder if you could
No dissolves or fly-ins
Just stories, from the heart, and good
Imagine all the people focusing on you

You, you may say
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And conferences will be more fun

(with apologies to John Lennon)

A few years back I did a version of these.  Today, I was inspired to update them. 

 

I.  Thou shall speak authentically, from the heart.

 

II.  Thou shall focus on the audience.

 

III. Thou shall not use Power Point as speaker notes.

 

IV.  Thou shall not begin thy speech with a joke*. 

 

V.  Thou shall speak with all appropriate passion, and not be boring.

 

VI.  Thou shall tell stories and not kill thine audience with endless data.

 

VII.  Thou shall not make a sales pitch for thy company or thy services.

 

VIII.  Thou shall not begin with talk of thyself.

 

IX.  Thou shall not speak through thy nose, or at the floor, or while advancing thy slides.   

 

X.  Thou shall not exceed thine allotted time.

 

 

(*unless thou is really, really funny.)

 

What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

3.  Don’t start with Power Point.   Most people create a presentation by sifting through the collection of slides they’ve accumulated – and maybe a few from Ed down the hall – and grabbing the ones that seem vaguely relevant to the talk.  Then, a little shuffling around, and maybe a few new slides, and you’re good to go, right?

Wrong.  That almost guarantees that your talk will be a collection of slides, weakly linked together, rather than a strong story, a narrative that makes sense for your audience and engages them for the full 45 minutes.  The collection of slides may make sense to you, because you already know the territory, but will it to the audience, who is hearing the talk for the first time?  Unlikely.

Instead, think of a talk as a series of steps you take the audience on, beginning by framing the idea, then delving into the problem, then the solution, then closing with the action that you want the newly convinced audience to take.  Figure out what you want to say for each of those 4 steps, and then – and only then – decide if a slide will help illustrate each step.   That's an audience-focused speech.  It takes a little more work than shuffling slides, but your audience's response will make it worthwhile.   

I’ve blogged often about the abuse of Power Point and other slide software programs – using them as speaker notes, and making them more about words than images.  And of course, the over-use and over-dependence on software instead of just connecting with your audience, person to person.

But there’s a further problem with the software, one that’s even more insidious and destructive to good presentations.  Because slides are created one at a time, they encourage people to think in terms of vertical slices rather than horizontal storytelling.  As such, they promote an ADD approach to presentations – and thinking in general, since so much of organizational life and intellectual capital is captured in slide decks rather than in documents. 

It’s hard to tell a good story with a slide – or a series of slides.  And stories are what we remember – because stories naturally fit our brains.  We remember good, emotional stories especially easily.  Data is something that we forget just as easily. 

That storytelling power is undercut by Power Point deck building.  You create a slide by putting data (or words) on it.  Perhaps you find a slide from a co-worker that has a great chart on it.  You put the two together.  And then you repeat the process until you have enough slides to fill the time allotted.  What you now have is a data set, or a set of boxes with words in them -- both hard to deliver in a presentation in an interesting way, and harder still to remember.  Your Power Point slide creation technique is therefore ensuring that your presentation will be forgettable and boring. 

So don’t start with Power Point at all.  Tell your story first, so that you can be sure you have one.  Tell it in a word doc, or a storyboard, or scratch it with a quill pen on vellum, but whatever you do, create a story first.  Make sure it flows horizontally.  Then, add some illustrations with a slide program if your story calls for illustrations.  Don’t start with Power Point – it will only hurt your storytelling and therefore your presentation. 

One of the modern masters of data – and specifically data presented to an audience on a slide – is Hans Rosling.  He’s spoken regularly at TED and TEDx talks about big issues like child mortality, and his talks are mesmerizing.  He’s an example of a speaker that presents data in ways that prove his point, never become confusing or boring, and draw the audience in.  Check out one of his recent TED talks here, and below.   What the heck, check them all out.  If you have to present heavy data, here’s how you do it. 

1.  Present with passion and clarity.  Rosling has wrestled with the data, and he know to pick out just the important points.  Each of his pieces of data serves the main thesis of his talk.  But even when he’s deep in the difference between countries in sub-Saharan Africa, he never loses his passion for the subject, and that is electrifying. 

2.  Don’t talk to your slides.  Rosling occasionally points to data on his slides, but he spends most of his talks facing the audience, giving insights about his data.  I’ve worked with many presenters in fields that involve lots of data, and they always argue this point.  My answer is, “Watch Rosling!”  You don’t have to talk to your slides.  You have to talk to the audience.  The audience is why you’re there. 

3.  Vary your pace.  Numbers can be overwhelming, but Rosling keeps our interest with the instincts of a good actor, varying his pace and intensity to keep our interest.  His voice rises and falls, his volume shifts with the urgency of his points, and he pauses and delivers the main punch lines with drama, slowly, and clearly.  Take a lesson from the master.  Don’t speak in a monotone at the same pace for 60 minutes.  You’ll kill your audience. 

4.  Use the right kind of animation.  It was a cursed day when Power Point (and Keynote, and the others) added all those bells and whistles, so that you can make your boring word slide more interesting by swooping the headline in from the left, exploding the words off the screen to the right, and building – forever building – with one bullet after another.  Rosling does none of that.  Instead, he animates the data to make a point – how child mortality changes over time, for example – and then narrates it like an announcer talking us through an exciting sports event.  It’s masterful.  And not a single headline swoops in from either left or right. 

5.  Spend several minutes per slide.  Rosling makes us care about his data because he spends time with it.  It’s interesting; it repays study.  The trend nowadays is to build slide decks with 100 slides in, say, 45 minutes.  To be sure, the graphics have improved – glossy pictures whizz past us at an ever-increasing rate – but that’s no excuse for shallow talks, shallow slides, and taking your talk at speed because you don’t have much to say.  Take a page from Rosling, use fewer slides, and dig into them with your audience. 

If you must use Power Point, then use it intelligently.  Data can provide astonishing insights, offer real clarity, and motivate us to change.  If it’s used like a master does.  Hans Rosling is one such master. 

 

 

 

 

The origins of Power Point were solidly grounded in good intentions.  Remember slides?  People put pictures on them, or graphs -- visual aids.  They were intended to act as accompaniments to lectures and presentations. 

The whole idea was that the speaker would talk for a while, and then occasionally show a slide that illustrated a point with a picture or a striking image, or made a set of numbers clear with a bar graph or a pie chart. 

Slides were time-consuming to create, and difficult to change.  So most people used them sparingly.  I once saw a speech by a National Geographic photographer that included a hundred slides, but each one was a uniquely wonderful picture he had culled from thousands, literally.  He was entitled. 

Then came Power Point.  People soon got the hang of creating slides; they were easy to make using this software, and easy to change. 

And somewhere along the line, Power Point ‘decks’ ceased being illustrative information to accompany talks.  They became speaker outlines. 

Now we watch in horrified fascination as a speaker plods through every word on slide after slide with 20 lines or more of text on them.  We wonder, as our consciousness slowly ebbs, ‘will he read every word, or will he occasionally vary the words slightly?’

And we have the Power Point Triangle of Death, where the speaker moves to the screen to point out some illegible word, drifts back to his computer, while mumbling something about the next slide, only to come to the third point of the triangle floating somewhere uneasily in between his screen position and his computer position. 

None of these moves has anything to do with the audience, communicating with whom is after all the purpose of the talk, isn’t it? 

Thus, Power Point, in the hands of most business speakers, commits the fatal sin of at once making the speaker and his talk irrelevant to the audience. 

If you’re a Power Point abuser – and more than one slide every 5 minutes qualifies you – then don’t bother to gather the audience together.  Just email them your ‘deck’ and save everyone a lot of trouble. 

10.  I will NOT run over my allotted time.

9.  I will NOT use Power Point word slides as my speaker notes.

8.  I will NOT dump information on my audience.

7.  I will NOT read my slides to the audience.

6.  I will NOT use clip art on my slides.

5.  I WILL use photography and imagery that tell a story on my slides.

4.  I WILL come out from behind the podium to connect with the audience.

3.  I WILL make my speech about the audience, not about me. 

2.  I WILL tell a story about a subject that I’m passionate about.

1.  I WILL remember that both the audience’s time and mine is precious, and I will give a speech that changes the world. 

Last week I attended a day-long conference at the Harvard architecture and design school, where I was speaking about how to pitch your project – your building, your design, your vision of a new landscape.  I was the last speaker of the day, so I had the fun of watching everyone else talk about the changing nature of design and how to sell it in the new world of complex teams and public input. 

But as the day progressed, I had to focus more and more on the spectacle of some very smart people failing to connect with the audience because of a very simple problem:  they talked to their slides. 

Now, these are polite people as well as smart ones, and there is no way that they would turn their backs on anyone while having a conversation with them one on one.  So why do they think it normal behavior to give the cold shoulder – or the even colder back – to a whole roomful of people? 

As designers, they were of course presenting a lot of slides, most of them beautiful.  Nothing wrong with that.  But so bewitching were all these slides, apparently, that the speakers couldn’t take their eyes off them.  And that’s where things started to go wrong. 

Put together a speaker with his back to the audience, a warm room, a long afternoon, and the roar of a projector, and you have a recipe for unconsciousness.  And that’s what happened.  By the time I was supposed to speak, the audience had lost most of its wits and all of its hope. 

More about how I woke them up in a later blog, but for now the takeaway is that you should never, ever turn your back on the audience to speak to your slides.  Know your slides.  If you have to look to see what the next one is, then do so, but don’t talk at that point.  Look first, then turn to the audience, then talk. 

The only motion that’s interesting to the audience is motion toward it (or away from it); take care of whatever business you have with your slides in the second or two between them.  Then turn to your audience and talk to them about whatever’s on that slide.  It’s disengaging, uninteresting, and rude to turn your back on the audience.  Never, ever talk to your slides. 

The New York Times recently ran an article on a Power Point slide.  The slide surfaced in a high-level military briefing about the US’ Afghanistan war policy, and it has to be seen to be believed:  http://nyti.ms/9FEtcv

As General McChrystal apparently remarked at the time, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.” 

At least they’re laughing over at Army command.  Far too many businesses put their executives, managers, and front line staff to sleep on a daily basis with slides that are scarcely less complicated.  The advent of the Army Slide of Infamy and Confusion seems like a good time to write again about what a Power Point deck is not – or should not be. 

1. A Power Point deck should NOT be a set of speaker notes.   Far too many PP decks are designed to be exactly that.  Prepared in a hurry, under-rehearsed, and nervous-making, these sorts of decks contain densely worded lists of notes so that the speaker knows what to say.   And frequently, the speaker just reads slide after slide.  It’s difficult to imagine anything more boring.

2.  A Power Point deck should NOT be a template to design a talk.   This one may surprise you.  Why shouldn’t you use PP to design a talk?  Isn’t that what it’s for?  The problem is that when it’s used this way, PP contributes to a talk that is just a set of slides, with no beginning, middle, or end.  A talk needs to have an arc, so that the audience can follow it.  Lacking inherent structure, talks become lists of slides, and we can only remember 4 or 5 items in a list.  How many slides were in your last PP deck?

The giveaway for this sort of PP-designed talk is the transitions between the slides.  If the speaker says, repeatedly, “What this slide shows is XXXX,” then what you’re getting is just one damn slide after another, with no real structure. 

3.  A Power Point deck should NOT be a ‘leave behind’ deck of great density and length.   Power Point is a bad software program for long documents.  The headline–bullet-point-subsidiary-line format makes it very difficult to create a longer document that is actually readable.  And its limited capacity for handling dense charts, graphs and data sets makes PP a poor way to present lots of information.  Far better to use Word, or Excel, depending on the nature of the document or the data. 

4.  A Power Point slide should NOT contain more than six lines of prose.   A simple test to see if you have too many words on your slide is to print it out, and drop it on the floor.  Now stand over it and look down.  If you can’t easily read all the lines on the slide, it has too many words on it.  Typically, more than 6 lines becomes unreadable. 

5.  A Power Point slide should NOT contain anything except pictures, simple graphs and charts, and the occasional quote from Winston Churchill.  The proper use of PP is to illustrate your talk with a picture that conveys emotion, a chart that makes a numerical relationship clear, or a graph that does the same.  Very occasionally, a wonderful (brief) quote from some deep thinker can provide variety and a moment of reflection (but see #4).  For a great book on the right way to design and use slides in a talk, see Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen. 

 

1.  I will construct all my speeches to focus on one main point, removing all information that doesn’t support that central point.

 

2.  I will streamline, condense, and eliminate most of the data from my presentations, replacing numbers with stories and anecdotes to illustrate my idea. 

 

3.  I will cut down on the number of slides I use in my presentations, averaging about 1 slide for every 3 minutes of talk – or fewer. 

 

4.  I will eliminate the agenda slide from any talk less than 100 minutes long.

 

5.  I will never, ever use clip art again in my slides.  Instead, I will use high-quality photographs and images to illuminate my talk. 

 

6.  I will deliver my presentations with energy and enthusiasm, but I will keep my feet under control and not wander randomly around the stage. 

 

7.  I will adhere strictly to my allotted time and end before it has run out. 

I’ve blogged many times on how NOT to use Power Point.  Most people use it incorrectly, and it becomes a barrier between speaker and audience.  For example, they create word slides, really speaker notes, with many bullets of text, expecting – what? – the audience to read along with them?  Or, they go nuts with the animation, swoops, and flying headlines that make audiences dizzy to little purpose.  Or they use cheap-looking clip art that creates a tacky image of speaker and organization in the mind of the audience. 

But what about the right way to use Power Point?  What does that look like?  Is there any right way?  Following are 10 rules for using Power Point successfully.

1.  Write your speech, either in outline, bullet, or text form.

2.  Look for all the moments in the speech that could be illustrated using a photograph.

3.  Find high-quality photographs from an online stock house to illustrate these moments (if you don’t have your own photographs).

4.  Look for all the moments in the speech that could be illustrated using a chart or a graph to present numbers (that are hard to understand without a chart or a graph). 

5.  Create these charts and graphs. 

6.  Look for all the moments in the speech that could be emphasized by using one single number to highlight your point. 

7.  Create a slide with that one number in really large type – with no more than 5 words describing it.

8.  Assemble these photographs, charts and graphs, and numbers in a Power Point deck.

9.  Throw out all but the best ones; no more than one for every three minutes of talk – in other words, no more 20 slides in 60 minutes.  Fewer is better.

10.  Create an opening slide with your name, contact information, company logo and so forth, but resist the temptation to create an agenda slide unless you’re speaking for at least a half-day. 

Follow these rules and you’ll be using Power Point in a way that enhances, rather than detracts from or competes with, your presentation.  For a brilliant look at how to style your sides, try Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen (http://tinyurl.com/3mtu4h).  For how to structure and write a persuasive speech, look at Give Your Speech, Change the World (http://tinyurl.com/mhhdd3).  For how to deliver the presentation with authenticity and charisma, try Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma (http://tinyurl.com/mfs7ve).  Good luck!

Imagine you’re settling into your seat in the movie theatre, popcorn and soda at the ready, waiting happily for the latest James Bond movie to start.  You can’t wait to see what the proverbial high stakes opening chase before the credits will be – how many explosions, how fast, how many bodies littering the ground. 

Instead, as the lights dim, an image of Daniel Craig, wearing a business suit and tie, appears in front of you on the big screen.  He’s standing in front of a Power Point set up, and he proceeds to put up an agenda slide for the upcoming movie.  He then reads the half-dozen or so lines off the screen, telloing you in some detail about what's going to happen, saying between each one, “And then, and then, and then.”  And at some point, he says, “Oh, and the item you’ve all been waiting for, the coffee break.  We’ve got donuts and muffins.”

How’s your experience of the movie so far?  And yet, this is precisely what way too many speakers do in meeting after meeting, presentation after presentation, telling people what they’re going to say before they say it.

How much of a Bond movie is the surprise and the suspense?  Why do people purposely set out to kill the surprise and suspense (what there is) in a business presentation? 

Instead of an agenda slide, then, here are several ways to get your audience through the experience with a little more grace and excitement.

First, since audiences come into a presentation asking Why? – why am I here, why should I care, why is this important to me? – answer that question for them with a quick story that sets the scent.  It should be one to three minutes, tops.  And at the end, point the moral and set the scene by saying something like, “So it’s people like Jack that are demanding change, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today – why change is so important in this industry.” 

Now the audience knows why it’s there, what the subject is, and they have some taste of the urgency of the subject because of the compelling story you’ve told them. 

Second, begin with a startling statistic.  “Did you know that one out of every three students at State Univ is considering dropping out because of financial difficulties?”  Again, that sets the scene and tells everyone why they’re there without giving away everything in advance. 

Third, begin with an audience poll.  “Let me begin by finding out something about you.  How many of you have done time?  How many are on the lam?  How many are considering returning to the state of their original arrest to clear their records?”  This kind of interaction with the audience immediately involves them and begins to make the room “smaller” – and your talk more of a conversation.

Fourth, start with a contest, or a quiz.  Award prizes.  I’ve seen this work well many times.  Ask easy questions.  Or provocative ones.  I once saw a speaker (back when the Internet was young) use this technique to talk about coaching businesses to use the power of the Internet to make boring products into interesting (and profitable) services.  She held up a tube of toothpaste and asked the audience, “Is this toothpaste a product or a service?”  After a second’s thought, some smart, awake person shouted out, “A product!”  The speaker smiled, said, “Great!” and gave the toothpaste to the audience member.  Again, she held up another tube of toothpaste and said, “Is this a product or a service?”  Another bright spark in the audience said, “A service!”  Right, said the speaker, and handed out the toothpaste.  Now the audience had the idea, and soon they were shouting out answers with enthusiasm in order to pocket the (modest) gifts.  It was a perfect way to energize the crowd and introduce the topic, which the speaker then went on to discuss seriously.

Finally, begin by appealing to a different on of the five senses than hearing or sight.  Hold up a prop, one that is relevant to your talk, and pass it around.  Let people touch it, heft it, smell it, and so on.  I once saw this technique used very powerfully by a doctor who was advocating for a kind of radiation therapy in front of a Congressional committee.  The topic was intensely technical and complicated.  The doctor was asking for more money and insurance coverage for a treatment program that worked better than the standard one.  It involved a copper tube that aimed the radiation more precisely than the standard treatment.  So the doctor passed the copper tube around the congressional committee members.  It made an otherwise mysterious and difficult-sounding treatment surprisingly down-to-earth and understandable. 

Avoid the agenda slide.  Be creative.  Keep your audiences awake with these other techniques. 

The controversy on Power Point and visual aids will rage as long, I suspect, as we have bad presentations in the business world.  Which is to say, forever. 

The fundamental question is what else beside yourself do you need as a presenter?  What add-ons will enhance the experience of the audience rather than detract from it?

Here, it’s helpful to think about what the range of options are, and what the competition is like.  Of course, the bar is set very low in the business world.  Most people don’t expect riveting presentations, and they are not disappointed.  But lurking at the back of even these Stoic minds is the competition.  ‘I could be playing a video game….Or at the opera….Or watching a football game…Or attending a performance of Cirque de Soleil….’  That’s because even the worst business speech competes for our brain space with all the other things we have to pay attention to – from our BlackBerrys to the financial meltdown to our entertainment choices. 

If we take the most extravagant of these entertainment options – say, Cirque de Soleil – we have performers enhanced with movement, costume, music, lighting – in short, spectacle.  When you add a Power Point slide deck to your own presentation, you are taking one tiny little baby step toward that. 

But does it enhance the experience, like Cirque de Soleil’s costumes and music, or is it merely a distraction?  Ask yourself if the PP deck supports your talk or competes with it.  Is it a speaker outline, a series of slides filled with words which you either read or not, or is it a visual accompaniment to your talk?  Cirque de Soleil integrates all the aspects of the performance to give you one amazing visual spectacle.  When you put up a speaker outline, you’re in essence giving the audience 2 speeches, not one. 

In short, you’re distracting the audience, not enhancing its experience. 

Real visual aids, on the other hand, can enhance the presentation.  Think again about the range of options open to you.  Props, pictures, video, even the humble white board or flip chart – not to mention music and lighting – all can support and enhance your talk rather than rivaling it. 

If you are ever tempted to put a PP slide up for an audience that contains more than 10 words, lie down until the temptation goes away.  Instead, look for a real, high-quality photograph that tells the story.  Find the single number that makes the point.  Put a picture behind it.  If you must present numbers, find the one line graph or pie chart that gets the point across.  Visual aids are good.  Slides full of words are bad.  The next time you open PP and start typing a long heading, stop and remember Cirque de Soleil. 

I've finally found the exception to the rule that Power Point is a bad tool for preparing speeches, delivering speeches, and reading them afterwards.  Most speakers misuse PP as speaker notes, to the detriment of their speaking style, and to the horror of the audience.  But Garr Reynolds proves that PP (or its equivalent) can be used by an artist to create something very special:  http://www.publicspeakingforgeeks.com/2008/07/18/the-brain-rules-for-presentations/. 

Amazingly, this presentation is 131 slides and yet I guarantee that you'll tear through them all right to the end.  All hail Garr!

Reynolds presents a very engaging, witty slide show on John Medina's new book, Brain Rules.  The book consists of 12 rules your brain runs by, and it's stuff you need to know, especially if you're a student of the craft of presenting. 

Of course, Garr focuses on one rule primarily, the one that says that your brain learns best visually, so indulge it.  But another one that caught my eye is equally important for speakers and their audiences.  Medina says that audiences don't like to be passive -- they find it boring. 

Amen, brother.  So, what do you do?  How do you engage your audience? 

Following are 7 ways to engage audiences that I have found gets them active and using their own energy to take what you say and make it their own.

1.  Get them to tell stories about who they are (in relation to your topic). 

2.  Ask them to brainstorm a problem or a solution.

3.  Get them to play games (and award prizes).

4.  Ask them to report to the group (on something you've asked them to think about, or discover, or learn).

5.  Ask them to teach others (the fastest way to ensure that an audience learns something well).

6.  Get them to design responses (to some challenge or problem you've set for them).

7.  Ask them to design a path forward (imagine what you'd want them to be doing back at their offices once the speech is over, and get them to start that activity now). 

If you're not already doing any of these things in your speeches, you're not allowing the audience to be anything but passive.  That's bad.  Turn them loose!  Get active with your audience.  The burst of energy will at first alarm you, then thrill you once you learn how to channel it successfully.  And your audiences will reward you with a vastly better reception. 

I've fought the good fight against bad Power Point (PP) for some time now, and the forces amassed against the Microsoft Juggernaut have made some headway at the level of the debate, but not much at the practical level.  There's still a whole lot of bad PP going on. 

Let's get some things clear.  First of all, bad PP NEVER helps a speech -- whether it's a presentation to a team, or a keynote, or a Senator's filibuster.  All bad PP does is document the horror.  What do I mean by bad PP?  Anything that involves more words than pictures.  Those are speaker notes, and they should not be shown to the audience.  I gave a speech this week, and there was one speech before mine at the event.  That speaker included two columns of bullets on one slide, which he introduced by saying, "You probably can't read this, but...."  Please!

Second, PP rarely improves a bad speech.  A bad speech is just that, bad.  Whether it's because the speaker hasn't adequately prepared, and rambles, or the non-verbal conversation is at war with the verbal, or the topic is not right for the audience -- there are a million possible ways a speech can go wrong -- when it's bad, it's bad.  Of course, PP gives you something to look at if your mind is wandering, but that's like starting to study the scenery in a bad movie -- you're still not having a good time.  Worse than that, your time is being wasted.

Third, good PP (see Presentation Zen, which I've recommended before) CAN add to a good speech, under certain conditions.  First of all, the PP has to do something that the words can't do.  So, a great picture can bring something to life in a way that it takes too many words to do.  A bit of video can add emotion and context, and put you in a place that words can't do so easily.  And so on.

But, NEVER use even good PP as wallpaper, especially for a speech, such as a keynote, when inspiration is supposed to be part of the deal.  Here's what happens:  you're asking the audience to multitask, and the studies show that multitasking makes us STUPID.  So don't do it.  Of course, we're used to multitasking, and having lots of distractions, and some people think they're not being fully utilized, or pampered, unless all that's going on, but a GOOD SPEECH holds an audience WITHOUT the need for PP. 

Bottom line:  use PP with care, make it about pictures, and focus on getting the speech right first.  If people need PP to get through your speech, there's something wrong with the speech.

The origins of the use of Power Point were solidly grounded in good intentions.  Remember slides?  People put pictures on them, or graphs -- visual aids.  They were intended to act as accompaniments to lectures and presentations. 

The whole idea was that the speaker would talk for a while, and then occasionally show a slide that illustrated a point with a picture or a striking image, or made a set of numbers clear with a bar graph or a pie chart. 

Slides were time-consuming to create, and difficult to change.  So most people used them sparingly.  I once saw a speech by a National Geographic photographer that included a hundred slides, but each one was a uniquely wonderful picture he had culled from thousands, literally.  He was entitled. 

Then came Power Point.  People soon got the hang of creating slides; they were easy to make using this software, and easy to change. 

And somewhere along the line, Power Point ‘decks’ ceased being illustrative information to accompany talks.  They became speaker outlines. 

Now we have the dreaded phenomenon we have all lived through (barely) in which we watch in horrified fascination as a speaker plods through every word on slide after slide with 20 lines or more of text on them.  We wonder, as our consciousness slowly ebbs, ‘will he read every word, or will he occasionally vary the words slightly?’

And we have the Power Point Triangle of Death, where the speaker moves to the screen to point out some illegible word, drifts back to his computer, while mumbling something about the next slide, only to come to the third point of the triangle floating somewhere uneasily in between his screen position and his computer position. 

None of these moves has anything to do with the audience, communicating with whom is after all the purpose of the talk, isn’t it? 

Thus, Power Point, in the hands of most business speakers, commits the fatal sin of at once making the speaker and his talk irrelevant to the audience. 

If you’re a Power Point abuser – and more than one slide every 5 minutes qualifies you – then don’t bother to gather the audience together.  Just email them your ‘deck’ and save everyone a lot of bother.