Episode #306: What Do I Leave In and What Do I Take Out

I am a hoarder. I never throw anything out and this habit spills over into preparing for my presentations. I always keep previous presentations and I plunder earlier slides for content I can use for the next one. Topical content has a short shelf life but other content, particularly images, can be used for many years. This is all well and good, however it does have one serious drawback and that is you face the dilemma of how much content to use and which content to select. Having given 548 public speeches so far, you would think I would have this problem under control by now. I am a glutton though for data and cool images and this sea of information gets harder and harder to swim through.

Invariably, I select way too many slides. Trying to prune them though is tough, because we can fall in love with the quality of our research or our numbers. The intentions are admirable. We want to deliver the highest quality content to our audience and so the pruning shears are not being wielded vigorously enough. Dropping out slides has a certain amount of pain attached to it, so the discipline to do it is definitely required. We have to keep reminding ourselves of the time limit we face for the presentation. We get caught up in the logistics of slide selection and other important aspects get missed.

One of my pet peeves with presenters is when they have bitten off more than they can chew and the last 20 slides are raced through or skipped at the end, because they have messed up their time control. We feel cheated. Here is some valuable information being whizzed through and we would like to know some more about these slides but we never will. We are trading our time for value, yet due to the speaker’s ineptitude we are not getting the full value of the transaction. So there are definitely brand damage elements to doing this and we should all avoid these every time.

Another casualty is we spend all the time on the slides and nothing on the rehearsal. Here is the irony. If we had spent some time in rehearsal we would have immediately realised we had too much material for the time allotted. This happened to me when I did my TED talk. I had prepared eight chapters for that talk, but in rehearsal, I realised I had to axe the last chapter or risk trying to rush it all through. One of the downsides of TED talks is that they are shown globally, basically forever. If you make a mess of it then that knowledge isn’t limited to the 100 people in the room, as per a normal talk, it now goes out to millions who see what a dill you are. So rushing it through would be a bad choice and cutting stuff out is the better option.

A lot of the time we are showing data, because we feel this is valuable information for the audience. That means slide after slide of numbers, bar charts, pie charts, line graphs etc. This can get very dull very quickly. Also, we tend to not remember the tsunami of numbers either, so is there much point to doing it this way? Being more selective on some key numbers would make more sense and help to cut down the pressure on time. Rather than just relying on visuals to make the point, we can use storytelling as well to really drive home the relevance of the numbers.

Let me use an example of Voice Of Customer scores. Say we are trying to highlight our positive reaction from our buyers for our product or service and we are referring to scores out of 100. We could just show trend over time and make a comment about the direction of the trend. Additionally, we could add in a story about the numbers. If we had a number like 72% for the Voice of Customer score, on the face of it, that isn’t particularly remarkable. We could make the comment that Japanese buyers are hard markers. Or we could go further and tell a story about the luxury goods industry in Japan which has a permanent dilemma. When buyers in Japan are surveyed on their happiness, the scores are substantially below similar surveys in the rest of the world. The luxury goods companies initially thought they had a problem in Japan, but what they found was the scores for their firms’ products and services were consistently lower than other markets. Ultimately, to make sense of the comparative scores they started adding in up to 30% additional scores to compensate for the Japanese buyer’s lower scoring scale. So that miserable 72% score actually represented 93.6%, which was more in line with other surveys in other countries.

It takes more time to tell a story like that, rather than just show a number like 72%, but the story is memorable and people will remember that long after the talk is over. So we have to allow time to wrap some numbers up in stories in our talks, which means we have to axe other slide darlings. We are providing more value in this way, because the audience will recall the key points more easily and so the time trade off is definitely worth it. So when you are thinking about creating your power collection of slides, stop right there. Instead think about which slides lend themselves well to storytelling. Absolutely do the rehearsal to be able to gauge how much time you have available to show the slides and tell the stories. If you do that, then the whole presentation will accentuate your personal and professional brands.