Story first. Slides second.
I’ve sat through thousands of presentations - listened to many bad ones and gave my share too. It is not lack of preparation, rather a focus on slides (content) over story that is the cause of poor presentations.
Conventional advice for a successful presentation is more accurately a corpus of what not to do -add more slides, anticipate and proactively address all questions, add supplementary content to a bloated appendix, add sub-bullets, explain the bullets, decrease the font size. It’s awful. Decks resemble fully-cited research papers rather than engaging and informative presentations. More content is the answer to everything.
The tragedy does not end there. Given fifteen minutes to present an hour’s worth of material, presenters are speed-talking and reading the very slides they said they were not going to read. Audiences are gobsmacked, disengaged, and silent. Tragic given all the effort put into the presentation.
There is a better way.
Start with a story. I am not talking about illustrations or a personal anecdote. No, I am talking about the arc of the presentation, the skeleton, the outline. Three to five sentences of what you would say if you had just thirty seconds and no slides. For example,
We have been working on Project X for three months
We have had many successes and some challenges
Things are going well but we need help with Y
We are going to do Z next
Thanks to the sixty team members who could not be here
That is the story, the outline, and chassis of your presentation. The rest is window dressing, props on the stage in a theatrical production. The story is the star, not the slides. Some additional tips:
Keep the slides sparse
Be comfortable leaving content unwritten and unsaid
Build your outline into the headlines (use them to prompt you as you tell the story)
Memorize your first sentence. A fumbled first sentence undermines your confidence and makes everyone uneasy.
Look forward to questions - they are a sign of success not failure
Audiences are reluctant to interrupt a story, but they will cut in if they don’t think an opening is coming (or if they believe they need to rescue a runaway train).
Do it differently next time time and put the power back into PowerPoint (and your presentation).
