Making bad presentations

During my conference attending binge, I came across another interesting aspect of most speakers. They make not so great presentations. Let me modify that. They make bad presentations. And that’s surprising. Most of them are professionals who do it for a living. How come they don’t know the basics.

I guess the keynote speaker at one of the conferences summarized it well. “Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely”. And I guess that’s where the primary problem lies. PowerPoint has made it so easy to create slides, we tend to forget the ultimate purpose of a presentation. Ultimately, the primary purpose of a presentation would be to communicate, effectively.

I noticed 3 major issues that seemed to be consistent across presentations. The first was about the creation tool dominating. Just because PowerPoint could do a lot of stuff, easily does not mean it had to be used. So you’ll find ghastly templates, and awful transitions and multicolored slides, all of which not only make the presentation look amateurish, they distract. And don’t help communicate.

The second is what I call “Verbal Diarrhea”. Speakers feel that they need to cramp everything they ever learnt in the last 50 years in 100 slides for a 30 minute presentation. They are bound to exceed their time. You don’t have to be Einstein to figure that you can’t deliver at the rate of more than 3 slides every minute for 30 minutes.

The 3rd is the presentation itself. They read from the slide. Hey, guess what. The audience knows to read too. And they probably read much faster than you do. So it gets downright boring.

For making good presentations, there are a few simple things one could try. Foremost have 1 idea you’d like to communicate. And lead up to that 1 idea. Don’t have more than 1 slide per minute that you have, after setting aside time for Q&A. So if you have 30 minutes, keep aside 5 minutes for Q&A and so have between 20 -25 slides.  Use a simple template and have a large headline and large copy with not more than 5 – 8 words per point. And finally what you say, should be related to, but not be visible on the slide. All of this will require practice and hard work. But then if you want to win over your audience, you’ll need lots of practice and even more hard work.