Decluttering Your Materials

Continuing on the theme of paring down your presentations and workshops, so that you can focus on the NEED TO KNOW information, it is now time to reflect upon your materials...

We've all seen presentations containing tens or hundreds of similar slides with a handout the size of Encyclopaedia Britannica as we leave...

We've all laughed at Don McMillan's brilliant parody of cluttered PowerPoint slides on YouTube (and if you haven't, just follow this...http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cagxPlVqrtM )

But in the spirit of decluttering, ask yourself these questions:

* What information do my listeners or learners really need to take away from this event? ... Can I fit it only a credit card as a takeaway?
* What slides or images do my learners really need to look at during my event?... Can I eliminate slides all together?
* For each piece of NEED TO KNOW information, what would be the simplest way to convey that to my learners?

Don't think that if you have shunned PowerPoint for flipcharts then you are off the hook. Last weekend I saw some dreadfully cluttered, overly colourful flipcharts where the presenter was trying too hard...

Let's say that you have presentation with a year's worth of figures (broken down monthly) that you need to present - perhaps your instinct is to choose a bar chart to display them. But it might only be a single month that counts - a peak in August, or tumble-weed blowing through the cash tills in February.

So do you display them all, then use your laser pointer to highlight the key month...
Or, do you have a single figure or percentage next to the name of the month on a slide and tell your audience why that figure is important?

Which is most likely to grab their attention? Which one tells the most powerful story?

Look at all the materials you use during your presentations and workshops and eliminate any that do not 100% enhance your learners' experience during your event.

Then you can use the fire test. When decluttering your house, you pick a single box of items you can save in a fire. So in a similar vein if you had only a handful of slides/ notes/ handouts which of these would you pick?

Now look at the ones you didn't pick - how could you either eliminate them, or make them great enough to be in your final selection?

Remember - what your audience takes away from a presentation is not determined by the pages in your handouts.....

Keep your message simple and strong and they will take it away in their minds and hearts instead.

Decluttering Your Message

The New Year is a great place to start putting some new habits into practice, so let us have a little clear out - or in some cases a really big clear out....

Let us start by decluttering your message.
Many of you will have heard of the 80/20 or Pareto rule...

Well the same applies in presentations and workshops: 80% of your impact will come from just 20% of your message,

So now is the time to declutter your message so that you get clear about the 80% that really makes a difference. Using the Pareto rule, mandatory training could be cut to 20% of the time it usually takes by cutting to the chase.

Using Post-It notes, write down all the key things you normally say in your presentation (that last a few minutes at least). Count the notes and work on getting down to one-fifth or 20% of that number.

There are two rules now for dealing with each note: Ditch It or Do It.

If you feel it falls into the 80%, ditch it.
If you feel it falls into the 20%, keep it and keep doing it.

This is a great method for getting clear about what you should be saying and what you pretty much can leave out with very little detriment to your listeners....

Now you have something sleek and elegant - and can design some interactive exercises that reiterate your core message, rather than adding in non-core fluff.

Keep an eye out for part 2, where I will talk about decluttering your materials.

Go the 2nd December 2008 to find out more about the NEED TO KNOW basis for content design.

Memorable Body Language

If you want to know how to use your body language and facial expressions to convey feeling, emotion and story, then look no further than this video. It is surprising and humourous, combining into a short yet powerful experience.

Editing Your Content: the NEED to know basis

Last week I sat through a number of presentations at a networking event. The event was designed to help women grow their business and one of the topics was marketing.

The presenter had great charisma and personal style - she was passionate and enthuiastic about her topic, which she obviously knew a great deal about. She spoke without notes, which meant she could engage with us directly. She even made her talk interactive by asking questions of the audience to demonstrate how some of us had approached marketing for our own businesses.

But she talked about nearly every aspect of marketing known to man: from blogs, to social networking, local and national media, radio interviews, direct marketing and so on and so on. I knew we were in trouble when I saw her handouts - copies of her bullet point ridden slides (never a good sign).

I left in feeling totally overwhelmed - and I was not alone. Various people made comments about how they needed a break now to take it all in.
I was left with that feeling "I am sure I have learnt something, I am just not sure what".

She was suffering from an inability to focus and edit her ideas down into manageable chunks.
As a result her NEED TO KNOW ideas got lost amongst the rest of what she said.

Whatever the presentation or workshop you are designing, before you start cramming in every thing you have learnt in the last ten, twenty or thirty years, think about this...

What does your audience really NEED TO KNOW?

You might brainstorm lots of ideas, but it is vital that you pick out just one thing that you really feel is the most important thing for your audience to learn. You can add in a few more (depending on the time available), but do make sure that you know what thing or few things you really want your audience to leave with.

Presentation Visuals

This week I have been putting into practice and experimenting with new approaches to presentations and the design of PowerPoint (or Keynote) slides... Whilst I know that you can create workshops and presentations without ever touching a computer (and sometimes they are all the better for it), I know that PowerPoint is embedded within the cultural mindset.

So I feel that if you are going to use slides, they had better be brilliant and enhance what you are saying rather than repeating it (and hence distracting the audience's attention, see yesterday's blog)....

PowerPoint itself does not exactly help you to design great slides - it contains ghastly templates that encourage gruesome colour combinations that are way too busy, with a whole host of bullets or text over the top. Whatever you do, please leave all that alone.

The most important approach is one that says: less is more.
There are three key questions to ask yourself about each visual that you use:

1) Is it simple? Can anyone understand the point you are trying to make easily? That means that large amounts of text or data or points on graph or images are out. Think one key point per slide.

2) Is it beautiful? Does anyone want to look at ugly or cluttered images, clipart or fonts? Why not strive for a beautiful image that people will want to look at?

3) Does it add to what I am saying? The images should be a powerful way of enhancing what you are saying, focussing in on key messages that you want your audience to remember.

Step away from the PowerPoint templates and backgrounds.
Step away from bullet pointed lists.
Step away from clipart.

Embrace full slide photographs.
Create your own simple graphs and diagrams (or even better get a designer to do it).

Making PowerPoint Powerful

Where are people going wrong when they design slides that result in the muttered phrase "Death by PowerPoint"?

There are two basic mistakes:

Mistake 1 - Designing Slides as Handouts.If you have enough information on your slides for them to work as handouts, then your slides are wrong. Why not simply print out the slides and circulate them, instead of becoming the voice in your audience's heads as they read them?
These slides are Death by text.

Mistake 2 - Designing Slides as an Autocue.The next mistake, is to design your slides to help remind you what to say. Your audience will still read your slides, as you fill in some extra gaps.
These slides are Death by Bullet Point.

Research has proven that it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at your both verbally and in written form at the same time.

So your audience should not be both listening to you and either reading handouts or reading slides. If they are, then they will be doing neither well.

The point of slides is that they provide a strong visual backdrop to complement your words, with the audience focussing on listening to you, your passion and knowledge. They are the stills and you are the narrator.

To avoid these mistakes, you must design your slides, your prompts and your handouts as separate items. You can use PowerPoint for all three, but they are likely to be separate files not the same one.

Next time you are designing a presentation, see if you can think of the slides as a visually exciting film, which you are narrating.

The Power of Passion

I watched an incredible speech over the weekend, by a 12 year old girl.
She spoke with simple phrases to an audience at the United Nations.

This would daunt even the most extrovert presenters, yet she spoke calmly without a hint of nerves.
What is most extraordinary about her short 6 minutes is the strength of her passion.

She talks about flighting for her future, and how it is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. She pleas for us to stock breaking things we cannot fix (like a desert that was once a forest). She asks us why we are so greedy, why we cannot share. Simple questions that perhaps we forget to ask anymore.

Watch this and learn how to write a great speech that could also silence the world.

Watch it by following this link:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmz6Rbpnu0

The video is rightly entitled: The Girl Who Silenced The World.