Impactful Presentation Skills The Art & Science of Presentations
Participant Workbook Š KNOLedge Corporate Services 2014
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PREAMBLE 01 Š KNOLedge Corporate Services 2014
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Ubiquity of Presentations
We are living in world dominated by presentations. From class rooms to war rooms to board rooms, presentations are everywhere. Emails and presentations are the currency of business communication. A 2001 estimate suggested that 30 million presentations are delivered everyday. The number of computers globally has grown manifold ever since. A 2012 article in the Bloomberg Businessweek estimated that the one billion copies of Microsoft’s PowerPointŽ are installed on computers across the world. The options for users are only multiplying with Google Docs and many other apps for the iPad and Android devices. And it went on to add that an average of 350 presentations are delivered every second of every day1.
international organizations and learning institutions to craft their presentations. This programs also borrows from the best in the world to enable you deliver presentations that create an impact.
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It would be entirely incorrect to claim that of these 350, only a minority are delivered well, only a minority end up really moving the audience, and only a minority achieve the objectives that were set forth at the beginning. A vast majority of us have come to associate words like boring, painful, monotonous and waste of time with presentations. This negativity has come to be accepted as normal and we have started to blame the tool, and death by PowerPoint is a widely accepted phrase today. We must take collective responsibility of this failure because presentations are about communication and not the tool. Done right, presentations can be and are an instrument of change. Effective presentations are not about the software at all, it is about the approach. This training program will expose you to a new approach to create presentations which do not rely on text and bullets. You will learn why is important to think beyond text, to think visually and communicate through images, it will also tell you how. This training program distills from our experience of working with national and
An average of 350 presentations are delivered every second of every day 1 www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-30/death-to-powerpoint
When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain. They use the emotional side to judge the way you talk, the way you dress and your body language. Often, people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you’re on the second slide. You can wreck a communication process with poor logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough. If all it took was logic, no one would smoke cigarettes. And every smart proposal would be adopted. No, you don’t win with logic. Logic is essential, but without emotion, you’re not playing with a full deck. PowerPoint presents an amazing opportunity. You can use the screen to talk emotionally to the audience’s emotional brain (through their eyes), and your words can go through the audience’s ears to talk to their logical brain.
Excerpt from Really Bad PowerPoint by Seth Godin
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Research points the finger at PowerPoint by Anna Patty, Education Editor*
If you have ever wondered why your eyes start glazing over as you read those dot points on the screen, as the same words are being spoken, take heart in knowing there is a scientific explanation. It is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you in the written and spoken form at the same time. The Australian researchers who made the findings may have pronounced the death of the PowerPoint presentation. They have also challenged popular teaching methods, suggesting that teachers should focus more on giving students the answers, instead of asking them to solve problems on their own. Pioneered at the University of NSW, the research shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time. It also questions the wisdom of centuries-old habits, such as reading along with Bible passages, at the same time they are being read aloud in church. More of the passages would be understood and retained, the researchers suggest, if heard or read separately.
“The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster,” Professor Sweller said. “It should be ditched.” “It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.” The findings that challenge common teaching methods suggest that instead of asking students to solve problems on their own, teachers helped students more if they presented already solved problems. “Looking at an already solved problem reduces the working memory load and allows you to learn. It means the next time you come across a problem like that, you have a better chance at solving it,” Professor Sweller said. The working memory was only effective in juggling two or three tasks at the same time, retaining them for a few seconds. When too many mental tasks were taken on some things were forgotten.
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The findings show there are limits on the brain's capacity to process and retain information in short-term memory. John Sweller, from the university's faculty of education, developed the “cognitive load theory”.
*Reproduced from the Sydney Morning Herald, April 04, 2007
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PowerPoint presentations. Boring stood out far above any other word. Why are audiences bored? Because they don’t understand the message and feel they are wasting their time. Boring does not refer to the presenter not having content that the audience wants or needs to hear. The audience wants to hear the information, but it is so poorly organized and presented, that the audience gives up trying to figure it out and decides that this was a waste of their time. Often it is because the presenter didn’t take time to decide what the core information was, and just does a “data dump” presentation. Too much information is being included in presentations, information that is not helpful to the audience understanding the message.
Presenters need to plan their presentations Another question in the survey is what else annoys audiences about bad PowerPoint presentations. The key aspect that emerged was the lack of or poor planning. Many talked about the presentation not having a clear message, flow, or structure. Respondents also commented that when presenters take a previous presentation or presentations from others and do not customize the content for this particular audience, it is annoying.
The audience cares about slide design Presenters may not think that the audience notices or cares about the design of the slides, but the respondents to the survey certainly expressed how much they care. Poor selection of colors and fonts that make the slides hard to read were cited a number of times. Respondents also commented on formatting and layouts that were inconsistent from slide to slide. Anything that
Too much information is being included in presentations, information that is not helpful to the audience understanding the message.
distracts the audience from the message is counter-productive to the success of the presentation.
Presenters need to pay more attention to the content of the slides Audiences are rather annoyed when presentations are basically reports copied onto slides, with nothing but a wall of text greeting the audience each slide. When presenters choose to use a visual, they don’t always choose wisely. Spreadsheets were cited a number of times as a visual that is often misused. Other poor visual choices included overly complex graphics, poorly chosen images, and cheesy ClipArt. When the visual can’t be understood, it confuses the audience about your message. Animations also were commented on by a number of respondents. Audiences want presenters to use them to build the points and give context as they explain the slide. But the goofy animations distract and annoy the audience.
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Can We Deliver Interesting Presentations?
We’ve all hear our teachers shout a phrase almost every day during our school and even college days - “Please pay attention.” Thats because they have intuitively or otherwise known that anything we attention to, we retain. Or the more attention we pay, the more we remember.
poor people should have the experience.” Not only was it effective in capturing the attention of the audience, it grabbed headlines in newspapers across the world the next day.
However our attentions dips and wanes at the ten-minute mark. What happens at this mark for the brain to take a mental jaywalk, we don’t know yet1. So are there ways to grab the attention of the audience? We know one thing for sure that novel stimuli (the unusual, unpredictable or distinctive) are fairly effective in catching people’s attention. So you would have heard and read presentation advise that says open your presentation with a strong start or open it with a story. Thats a great way to start, but how does one hold the attention in a session thats lasts about an hour. As presenters, we just need to remember a few things. 1. Emotions can grab attention: Events and instances that are emotionally arousing are better remembered than events that are neutral. An emotionally charged event is usually called a emotionally competent stimulus or ECS. An ECS stays in our memories longer and are recalled better, that is with greater accuracy. Bill Gates used this to his advantage in his presentation at TED 2009. During his talk on the importance of malaria eradication, we let loose a few mosquitoes into the hall and quipped, “I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only
Bill Gates releasing mosquitoes into the audience to emotionally emphasize his point on the importance of eradicating malaria.
1 Medina, J. (2008). Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle: Pear Press
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PLAN 02 Š KNOLedge Corporate Services 2014
The Mood of the Audience It takes an answer to just one simple question to get a rather clear assessment of the mood of your audience. Does your audience have to be there or do they want to be there? In essence is their presence mandatory or is it a matter of choice. If your audience wants to be there, their resistance to learning and their receptiveness to the message will be high. Expect the exact opposites in the other case.
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Decoding The Broad Spectrum Audience
Audiences of business presentations are usually very diverse, yet they can be broadly categorized into two types - the narrow distinct and the broad spectrum. The narrow distinct audience is usually encountered at specialist conferences and seminars, and internally at department meetings. At a marketing conference, for instance, the audience will comprise of people with varied experience coming from a variety of industry verticals but their interests will be aligned. The broad spectrum audience on the other hand comprise of people with varied backgrounds and varied interests. The members of such an audience have different objectives. The TED conference, for instance, is a perfect example of a broad spectrum audience. They come with varied experiences with equally varied backgrounds and seek to engage at different levels. Closer to us, the annual review meeting is actually no different. The members of the audience comprise of people from different departments or functions, across different experience bands representing different geographies. Thus the needs of the representatives for the finance department will be strikingly different from those of the representatives of the sales department.
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Think of the narrow distinct audience as different shades of blue. They are all different, yet they are similar their interests are aligned.
Think of the broad spectrum audience as a collection of different shades of different colors. They are all different, and their interests may not be necessarily aligned.
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PREPARE 03
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c. The quantitative information has more than one units of measure A graph on the other hand is a visual display of information, where the values are displayed within an area that is enclosed between two axes and the axes also serve to provide a scale.
Now lets convert these numbers into a simple graph.
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Population
million 1,300
India
The primary difference between the two is that table encode quantitative information as numbers (and text) while graphs represent quantitative information visually. Since graphs represent quantitative information visually, they end up giving shape to data. These shape reveal patterns and trends that can be visually identified which is not possible in tables.
USA
Lets look at an example. The table below depicts the populations (in ‘000s) of India and USA. 0
Year
India
USA
1981
716,493
229,466
1985
784,491
237,924
1990
873,785
249,623
1995
964,486
266,278
2000
1,053,898
282,172
2005
1,140,043
295,753
2010
1,224,614
309,330
1981
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
Converting the table to a simple graph has immediately given shape to the data and also meaning. We can decipher so many aspects from this data now that were otherwise impossible to take away from the table.
Despite the completeness of information in the table above, nothing really stands out and its difficult to build a connection.
So tables work great for looking up individual values but do not reveal trends or exceptions. The visualization of data through a graph comes at the expense of precision in data (you might not be able to discern the exact population from the graph) but creates a picture that is easy to comprehend and interpret.
1 RG McFarland, GN Challagalla & TA Shervani (2006) “Influence Tactics for Effective Adaptive Selling,” Journal of
Marketing
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PACKAGE 04
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Saving Money Through Good Information Design
Electricity bills in the United States have not been significantly redesigned in more than 20 years. Which would be fine if the thing were easy to read in the first place.
A sample of a Chicago ComEd bill from 1988. A Chicago-based startup Power2Switch runs a a free service that helps consumers comparison-shop for electricity suppliers. They used a freelance designer to slickly package the bill using color, charts, and typographic variation to emphasize the bill’s most important information and de-emphasize the information that has to be there.
Using good information design, Power2Switch wants customers to understand their energy usage, and its impact on their pockets and the environment.
This is an abridged (and adapted) form of the article, How A Redesigned Electricity Bill Could Make You Smarter And Save Cash. The full article is available on www.fastcodesign.com/1669931/how-a-redesigned-electricity-bill-could-make-yousmarter-and-save-cash
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Color A Primer
From the walls of our rooms to the exterior of our cars, color is everywhere and plays a critical role is every aspect of our lives. According to an American Psychological Association study, The Contributions of Color to Recognition Memory for Natural Scenes, color helps us to process and store images more efficiently than monochrome (black and white) images, and as a result, to remember them better. A similar study conducted by the Pantone Color Institute indicates that consumers are up to 78 percent more likely to remember a word or phrase printed in color than in black and white. While everyone of us has a favorite color, our color preferences change with age. In his book, Color Psychology and Color Therapy Faber Birren says that yellow is popular with children but as become move into adulthood it shows less popularity. However both boys and girls continue to have a high degree of liking for blue and red throughout life. He also found that with maturity comes a greater liking for colors like blue, green, purple than for those like red, orange, and yellow. He also added that color preference is driven by cultural context. For instance, black is a color of mourning in Western cultures and even though, white is associated with purity, it is also used in mourning. Color is a complex, rather, is a colorful subject with various tints lending different shades to our comprehension and retention. Since information, today, is being projected in classrooms and boardrooms, color is playing an even more important role in getting key messages across. It will help to understand the fundamentals of color and how it can impact our presentations.
Understanding Color Sir Isaac Newton developed the first circular diagram of colors in 1666. Since then, scientists, artists and designers have built on and developed other versions of the original concept. In traditional color theory, primary colors are those colors that cannot formed by mixing or combining any other colors. All other colors can derived from mixing these three colors in different proportions, thus they are also called additive primaries.
Yellow
Red Blue
The three Primary Colors of the traditional color theory
Orange
Blue
Secondary colors are formed by mixing the primary colors. So when you mix yellow and red in equal proportions, you get orange. Similarly purple is derived from red and blue, and green from blue and yellow.
The three Secondary Colors formed by the combination of the three primaries
Tertiary colors can be derived from mixing one primary with one secondary color.
Yellow
Red
Green
Purple
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Anatomy of a Typeface Serif font Times New Roman (50 pt)
Sans Serif font Helvetica (50 pt)
Script font Snell Roundhand (50 pt)
Spent Prodigy Family
Ascender height x height
Cap height
Descender height
Serif
Serif Typefaces
Sans Serif Typefaces
A serif is a slight projection that finishes off a stroke in certain typefaces and such typefaces are called serif typefaces.
Sans, in French, means without. So sans-serif typefaces do not have serifs at the end of their strokes. Unlike serif fonts, the strokes in serif typefaces is of uniform width and shows no variation around curves and curls, as you would notice in a serif typeface.
Baskerville Goudy Garamond Palatino Book Antiqua Georgia All the above serif typefaces may look similar to you. There are subtle difference that many times don’t seem apparent to the untrained eye. Serifs are the best typeface groups to use when we are using a lot of text. They are thus not recommended for use in presentations.
Avenir Arial Gotham Palatino Franklin Gothic Gill Sans A good san serif type family will have many weights ranging from thin to extra bold, giving you the ability to introduce character in your presentations.
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Mixing Typefaces Like colors, typefaces have personality and we tend to perceive certain type families in certain ways. For instance, sans serif are perceived to represent a modern look while serif typefaces deliver a more classical feel.
An effective way of using typefaces is by introducing variation in size. A larger word not only catches the attention of the audience, size also implies importance.
So mixing of typefaces in a presentation can deliver an impact in a way that is otherwise not possible. Its best to mix a sans serif typeface with a serif typeface. The key aspect to remember is that serif typefaces are best used for long bodies of text and are thus not good for use in slides. Sans serif fonts are best used in slides because they are easily readable from a distance too. The eye is automatically drawn to 5 sec, which happens to be the most important idea being communicated through this slide. The variation in size should be so much that the difference is immediately visible. By increasing the font size by a few point does not help. Make the difference large because the audience are spread throughout the room and difference should be noticeable.
Notice how a different font is used in combination with this picture within this book, as opposed to on a slide. Notice aspects of both the volume of text and the typeface used.
Also avoid the use of text in all caps because it is akin to shouting. And more importantly all capital text is difficult to read from a distance. Use size or even color to make the words stand out.
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Rule of Thirds Creating a visually appealing slide
The various elements that make up a slide must be aligned with the other elements on the slide. This creates a sense of unity, thus contributing to the overall balance and appeal of the slide. In aligning text, you can either align them to the left or the right. These two are far more powerful than center align, which is not generally used when the volume of text to be displayed is large. One way to build alignment in your slides is to apply the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds can be applied by dividing the slide into three equals parts both vertically and horizontally. This creates a three by three grid, with four points of intersections, which are interestingly called power points. To create visual interest the most important element on the slide must be then positioned on an intersection of the grid, or along the vertical or horizontal lines. The asymmetry of the resulting composition is interesting to look at, and generally agreed to be aesthetic. The rule of thirds generally works well, is easy to apply, and should be considered when composing elements on a slide.
Power Points
Using the rule of thirds to layout elements on a slide pushes the attention of the audience directly to the most important element on the slide.
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Principle of Enclosure
Principle of Continuity
The principle of enclosure states that the objects that are enclosed by a shape are seen as related to one another versus those outside the shape.
The principle of continuity states that the objects that are arranged on a line (or a curve) are perceived to be related than those not on the line (or curve.)
Principle of Closure
Principle of Connection
The principle of closure states we strive to perceive shapes as complete even though they may not be.
The principle of connection states that the objects that are visually connected to one another are perceived to be related to one another and not to the unconnected ones.
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PRESENT 05
TED has done more to advance the art of lecturing in a decade than Oxford University has done in a thousand years.
The Economist Mar 15, 2014 From the article “TED has revolutionised the ideas industry, in part by putting old wine in new bottles�
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MOHIT CHHABRA
Co-Founder & Principal Consultant Mohit is the Co-Founder and Principal at KNOLedge Corporate Services. Before founding KNOLedge, he was leading the global marketing of Petro IT Limited (a part of the Chimes Group), a specialised IT products and services company providing end-to-end solutions to asset owners in the Oil & Gas industry. He continues to consult with them. In his previous role within the Chimes Group, he was the Business Head, Skillment Edu, leading a team of professionals to deliver training and coaching services to corporates and academic institutions. He has served as Director – India (Mobile TV Platforms), MIH Group, where he was heading the company’s India operations and its foray into Mobile TV. He was responsible for the company’s operations and strategy in the country. MIH India currently also runs www.ibibo.com and is a strategic investor in www.flipkart.com In his previous assignments as Principal Consultant at FiNoble Advisors and as Consultant at Tecnova India, Mohit successfully assisted multinationals incubate and grow their businesses in the country. His notable achievements in his consulting roles were the successful setup of two engineering design centres through the BOT model. He also successfully led the team that helped setup a conditional access technology company. His larger role involved end-to-end transaction execution and involved playing an integral role in all or a combination of research, due diligence, business and marketing plan development and organisation structuring. He has also worked as Asst Editor (Research), Dataquest, the leading IT publication in India. A Masters in Management, he has been actively associated with training and development for nearly fifteen years now and is a regular speaker at Birla Institute of Management Technology, Greater NOIDA; IMT, Ghaziabad; IMI, New Delhi; FORE School, New Delhi; OP Jindal University, among other institutes in India. He was also featured on the inaugural show of Gadget Guru on NDTV Profit. An avid reader, Mohit is also the Curator of TEDxKnowledgeCity (2011 & 2012) and has attended TEDGlobal 2011. LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mohitchhabra
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Twitter: www.twitter.com/mohit_chhabra
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Slideshare: www.slideshare.net/mohitchhabra