Episode #337: The Danger Of Audacious Visuals

I have a couple of very good books here at home on how to create your visuals for the slide deck. The layout clearly does make a big difference to the quality of the message. If you ever doubt this, take a look at most Japanese business presentations. The slide will usually be amazingly overcrowded and dense to a degree you cannot comprehend in a traditional culture, which has embraced zen simplicity at its highest levels. Four or five slides worth of content will be crammed on to one slide and the messages feel like they snapping at each other for our attention, like small dogs nipping at your heels.

Occasionally, here in Japan, you do see a professional job on the visual side of the presentation. In my experience, this is usually the case of a foreigner giving their presentation. The counterpoint from some Japanese to this exemplary effort is to tell me that okay for foreigners but “we Japanese have own way” of doing presentations. This nationalistic anachronism is basically crap and what I see as a pathetic exercise in justifying the unjustifiable.

“Whoa Greg! Mate, you are going a bit hard there on the Japanese aren’t you?”. Trust me after living here for 38 years and having seen hundreds of Japanese presentations in business, I feel my scepticism is warranted. Message clarity is message clarity. No amount of nationalistic posturing and excuse making will overcome the basic fact that you cannot have four different fonts and five colours on a massively overcrowded screen and expect that your principal message will be getting through. You might think I am kidding about multi-font and multi-colour slides, but I am merely capturing what we see here from some Japanese business presenters.

Okay, Japanese presenters are not the only ones who do crazy stuff on screen and I have certainly coached Western executives to change the way they present, to make it more clear and powerful. The point is what we put up on screen should be clear and easy to digest. I believe if the audience cannot get the key message on screen in two seconds, then the content is too complex and needs to be simplified. This has always been my motto. Today, thanks to social media, the attention span of people has radically shortened and the time on screen equation has gotten even tighter, than say ten years ago. For all of us, the pressure is really on to improve our communication ability, regardless of nationality

Another trap with visuals is making them too good. That sounds counter-intuitive I know and there are plenty of authors doing well by teaching us how to pimp our slides. What I mean is we can suffer the opposite problem of the dismal slide effort and have something that is so attractive, it cuts us out of the limelight. Never forget, our face rather than the screen is the most valuable real estate during a presentation.

Using our facial expression is one of the most effective tools we have. Think back to stage plays you have seen where the character is using their face to communicate an emotion or a thought on a bare stage with a simple set. Their face can transmit so many ideas, emotions and thoughts and do it in nano seconds. A quizzical look, scowl, grin, sneer, smile, puzzlement, triumph, loss are all facial expressions at our disposal as speakers, to be matched with our words and then add on our gestures to create a powerhouse of communication.

Presenting gets a bit harder when the venue is quite big and there are two enormous screens up high behind us, competing with us. The sheer size of the images dwarfs us on stage and we shrink in importance. If we are ever in that situation, then we have to really work hard to counter the competition we are getting from the visuals. We need the audience to stay with us. We don't want them ignoring us because they are captivated by visuals which are overpowering the speaker.

In these situations, we have to amp up our voice and gestures to keep the audience with us. By using pauses, we can tap into pattern interrupt psychology, to force the listeners to refocus on us and what we are saying. When the visuals are super attractive, we can easily become some annoying white noise going on in the background, while the audience is fascinated by the visual images being presented. When we stop speaking, the listeners get their fill of the visual image and are then looking for the next round of stimulation. That stimulation has to be focused on what we are saying.

We should definitely use this if we are playing video during the presentation. Most video is off the mark anyway, being produced by the PR department to fit across a general need, rather than the specific needs of the topic we are speaking on. Sometimes the visuals can be very attractive in the video however and the audience can get engrossed by the action and images. The danger is we are the next item and we are boring, nowhere near as attractive as the models in the video and a bit dull visually compared to what has just been presented.

This is why as the speaker we should inject a longish pause after the video, rather than just carrying straight on. By doing this we create some space and distance between what they saw on screen and they have some time to adjust to us back in the room. They are also anticipating what we will say next, because we haven’t started speaking immediately and there is a slightly disconcerting pause in place. Fifteen seconds is a long pause and it will be a very valuable fifteen seconds to get the audience to forget what they just saw and get them back concentrating on us.

“Never let the visuals dominate your presentation” should be the basic rule. They are a slave to our will and a tool at our disposal and that is all they are. Let’s keep the power equation in our favour and always remain the centrepiece of the presentation. Our face, gestures and voice are more than up to the task, if we know what we are doing.