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How to create a presentation that doesn’t suck

By Patrick Gant

Most presentations suck.

They go on too long. The speaker’s compelling idea gets buried in a lot of noise. They make it feel like work for the audience to follow along. And we quickly forget what was said.

And yet some presentations don’t suck. Instead, they persuade. Some do this despite the fact that they’re long and packed with details. We remember what was said.

So why does that happen?

As someone who holds a lot of workshops and teaches what I know, I spend time studying what works well, based on the research and field work of people who are masters at their craft.

There are ten take-aways I’ve learned that you can apply to any presentation to make it connect better wth your audience.

All great stories are about structure

Even when presenting an idea, you are telling a story. Writer Steven Pressfield says it best: “the arc of the hero is a structure that is at the heart of every story.” That means every story we tell needs to define a problem, show a solution and then show what we learn by applying that solution. As a speechwriter, that’s at the core of every keynote I work on. It applies just as much to how you present your work. In your introduction, show your audience what they’re going to see in your talk and refer back to it as you move from point to point. If you don’t have structure, your presentation is going to suck.

Know your goals

The goal is not to make people know things. You can’t make people do anything. All you can do is persuade. Harvard’s Stephen Kosslyn, a well known cognitive neuroscientist, wrote what I consider an essential speaker’s guide on presentation clarity. He points out every presentation has three goals: earn an audience’s attention, keep that attention, and make it easy for people to both understand and remember what you talked about. If you miss any of these goals, your presentation will suck.

Slides don’t tell your story: you do

Your slides are designed to do two things: help your audience situate themselves in your story, and hold their attention. They are not your speaking notes or your TelePrompTer. In fact, they’re not for you at all. They are for your audience. If you find yourself reading from your slides, your presentation will suck.

Busy slides defeat your purpose

Busy slides either get read at the expense of listening or they get ignored. Here’s why. People can read faster than they can listen. So if you cram all your facts on your slides (and if it’s legible), your audience will read them. And they won’t listen to you while they do this, which raises questions why they’re there in the first place. Don’t do that. Treat each slide as the bare minimum of the point you’re driving at in that segment of your talk. Busy slides are the Batman signal of a presentation that’s going to suck.

Bullets kill attention

This point is a matter of opinion, but it’s an informed one based on what I see that works in the marketplace. Don’t use bulleted lists on slides. Bullets are used in long reports and in articles to compress ideas to keep a reader reading. But presentations aren’t documents. They are talks designed to hold your audience’s attention while you communicate persuasively. Even if you do decide to use bullets, heed the advice of Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen: “people will tire quickly…if several slides of bullets lists are shown, so use them with caution.”

Pictures do more than words

Reynolds’s book on presentation design has a terrific section that illustrates the power of visuals to complement your message. He also shows how easy it is to undermine that power by trying to convey too much information on a slide by adding text and data. He describes it as a Signal to Noise ratio. The harder it is for your audience to understand the difference between one data point and another, the greater the likelihood your presentation is going to suck.

Don’t report numbers: show meaning

Behavioural science tells us there are two kinds of learners: visual-driven and data-driven ones. Even the latter group get frustrated and bored if all you do it use the “spray and pray” approach to reporting on a series of complicated facts. Stop making it feel like work to understand the point you are driving at. If you are showing a bar chart with five data points on it, your focus should not be on reporting each of those five points. That’s self evident. Show the relationship between these numbers. Is there a 38% jump in activity from point#1 to point#5? That’s your story.

Understand cognitive load

It’s not that people have short attention spans. It’s that time is limited and people are busy. Presentations communicate a lot of information in a compressed period. And generations of cognitive research reaffirm that audiences have far less capacity to retain and makes sense of messages than we give them credit for. You’ve had weeks and months and even years to think through what you want to talk about. They have maybe 20 minutes. Even less if they’re tuning you out because your presentation is sucking.

You is a magic word

I talk about this point often in the context of writing for the web and other copywriting. It matters just as much in presentations. If you write a presentation that talks to an audience like they are a mass of people, your presentation will suck. Talk to them as individuals. It is a profound need of all human beings to feel seen and heard. The less likely it is that each audience member feels you are saying “I see you,” the more likely your presentation is going to suck.

Polish your closing

Admit it: most of us who write a presentation devote 98% of our time working on having a strong opening hook and making sense of our most salient points. Your conclusion tends to be an afterthought. Usually because you’ve run out of time. I like how Garr Reynolds explains this. He points out that Japanese culture speaks of “Hara Hachi Bu,” which is to eat until 80% full. I try to adopt that principle when writing a conclusion: polished and filling, but not too much.

What Miles Davis teaches you about simplicity

By Patrick Gant

Miles Davis was unhappy.

“The music has gotten thick,” Davis said. “Guys give me tunes and they’re full of chords.”

It was a problem he was ready to solve.

He assembled a group of legendary musicians and over two sessions in March and April of 1959, they performed and recorded Kind of Blue.

The sessions featured almost no rehearsals. There was no sheet music.

Band members were given rough instructions on how each song was meant to be played, instead leaning heavily on melody and improvisation.

The results were stunning.

Kind of Blue remains one of the best selling jazz records and is pointed to by many music critics as one of the most influential recordings of all time.

Simplicity is commonly pointed to among the achievements of this important record.

It’s an accurate choice of words here. But I’m reminded of how often simplicity gets misused to describe the ambitions of a wide range of creative work.

Maybe you’ve heard some of these at a boardroom table before:

“Let’s build with simplicity in mind…”
“We need to simplify the steps required to use this product…”
“Don’t complicate: keep it simple…”

Simplicity is not a process.

It’s tempting to think of simplicity as the act of paring until you’re down to the bare essence of an idea, product or message.

In fact, that’s just good editing.

As Jony Ive, head of design at Apple reminds: “simplicity is not the absence of clutter.”

Sure, as far as writing is concerned, tighter ideas and economy of language are important. But it’s a mistake to assume there’s a process you can adopt to yield simplicity. It’s much more elemental than that.

Turning back to Kind of Blue, it succeeds in its “exquisite simplicity” (as Bill Evans calls it in the album’s liner notes), because Miles Davis started with a clear definition of a problem he wanted to solve.

More than just to music, this applies to all creative work.

And that leads me to my second point.

Simplicity is an outcome of deep understanding.

Early in my career, I padded my writing with lots of literary ornaments: dense paragraphs and plenty of five-dollar words.

Why? Because I lived in constant fear that I’d be found out as a fraud and that I’d have to return my writer’s licence to the Bureau of People Smarter Than Me.

I was half right. Without first having a deep understanding of the problem I’d been tasked with solving, I was regularly putting myself at risk of seeming to dumb things down, rather than finding the heart of an idea.

I still struggle with this, but I do so now at least with the conviction that I’ll study the heck out of my customer’s business problems first before I even attempt to solve them with strategy and prose.

Simplicity is preceded by mastery.

One reviewer in summing up Kind of Blue says how it “sounded different from the jazz that came before it. But what made it so great? The answer here is simple: the musicians.”

Too often, simplicity is thought of as the act of making things look easy. Or that its spareness comes from a kind of idleness.

Simplicity comes only after you’ve begun to exercise mastery of your skills.

Even then, it comes slowly.

Miles Davis explained it best:“You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

As I see it, writing of all kinds can only start to achieve simplicity—satisfying simplicity—after you’ve dug deeply into your thoughts and have exhausted yourself by writing long form.

I don’t pretend to suggest I’m there yet.

But like you, I get closer, word by word.

Recipe for being a creative pro: think like a chef

By Patrick Gant

Your best work does not come from your ego: it survives in spite of it. To be serious about your craft and the outcomes of your efforts, focus instead on your work methods and allow the self to become small.

Just as master chefs treat their kitchen, their methods and their menu with respect, so too must you with your studio, your process and your product.

To illustrate how this works, consider how restauranteur Daniel Boulud concludes his book Ten Commandments of a Chef: each one resonates with anyone who is in the business of being creative.

1. Keep Your Knives Sharp

Your thinking must remain sharp, but that means far more than filling your head with facts. Sharpness of thought is much more about agility now. We underestimate how much our world is changing. We’re networked now like bees in honeycomb rather than tethered to the world by a single telephone line. Performance is rewarded best now for being adaptive rather than predictive. Empathy defeats self-centeredness. And yet we carry around this brain that’s still hardwired for hunting sabretooth tigers. Make regular exercise out of the notion that your assumptions about the world might not be correct.

2. Work with the Best People

Notice how this is framed. It’s not about surrounding yourself with people who are just as good or just as talented as you are. In fact, how good you are doesn’t even enter into this equation: look for excellence in others and they will seek it in you.

3. Keep Your Station Orderly

This is my least favourite item on the list. If I define my station as my work desk, then I have a lot of orderly work to do. But if I see my station as my MacBook Air and the flow I count on to generate clients, ideas and products I’m proud of, then I’m doing ok. Or maybe I’m engaged in a tiny bit of sophistry here just to get out of cleaning my desk.

4. Purchase Wisely

This has been a steadfast rule of mine for over 15 years. And I learned it from tradespeople: any tool directly linked to your ability to turn work into money is a tool you cannot afford to cheap-out on. A subset of this rule: own only what you need, not what you desire. I’m selective about what I keep: I sell or give away what I no longer use.

5. Season with Precision

Chefs know that seasoning doesn’t define but accentuates the dish. Writers know that adverbs and adjectives are like salt: there’s a fine line between enough and too much. Designers know that their best work happens when their product is made more understandable without explanation or ornamentation. Consultants know the hazards of over-explaining and that sometimes you have let an idea simmer with the client for a bit. It’s all seasoning. Know yours and use with care.

6. Master the Heat

Fear is fire. Learn to cook with it. And don’t let it burn you. You’re doing it wrong if owning a business doesn’t scare you from time to time.

7. Learn the World of Food

I would have put this one closer to the top. If you choose to make a career out of creativity, you have a responsibility to yourself and to everyone you serve to have well formed, thoughtful opinions on your tools, processes, influences and choices. Learning your world means you know exactly why you do what you do. That is the trademark of mastery.

8. Know the classics

If you’re anything like me, when you were young you assumed classics was just another world for old. Look around you: most things do not survive even 100 years on this planet. The rare things that do teach us two things: having a good sense of taste is a timeless trait, and any problem you struggle with today someone long before you also had…and had the good sense to write it down.

9. Accept Criticism

This gets easier as you get older and realize—paradoxically—that the more experience you gain, the less you are sure of. That’s not an excuse for being thin skinned when you’re younger. You only own the first draft of what you do: after that, it becomes something that’s beyond you.

There are two ways that ideas can be polished. First, through self-criticism and self-reflection. Second, by welcoming a process that allows your work to be challenged by having it bump up against the opinions, beliefs and biases of others.

10. Keep a Journal of Your Recipes

This is why my newsletter, CreativeBoost, exists. It is as much a travelogue as a record of what’s new to me. Keeping track of what you’ve learned is as much a gift to your readers as it is a letter from the past to your future self.

Being a rule-breaker is a compliment, not a criticism

By Patrick Gant

I’ve been following Richard Florida’s work for a number of years since The Rise of the Creative Class. In this presentation (see below), he makes several excellent points about the growing role and value of creativity today.

With parallels to the 1930s and earlier eras of hardship, the rush of new ideas and finding a better way of doing things tends to come about most often when a society’s back is against the wall. It’s when rules get broken that people start doing interesting, daring things.

This isn’t just executive-level challenge. Real creativity—the kind that makes things, and makes them better than before—has to take root in every level of an organization.

What your business card absolutely must do

By Patrick Gant

The modern-day business card is carry-over from the Industrial Revolution and dates back possibly as far as 15th century China. It once was a tool to communicate status. Later, it became one of very few ways—other than the phone directory—to help people know how to reach you.

Things don’t work that way anymore.

It’s not hard to find someone’s contact information anymore. What is difficult today is finding the right tools to attract and sustain someone’s attention—to be memorable.

Your business card communicates an experience to your audience.

I know it’s old fashioned, but…

Let’s just get this out of the way. Some don’t believe business cards anymore.

I still do. I believe that little things count for a lot in business.

The information your card contains and how it is presented instantly defines the way your audience perceives you, along with what you have to say and what you are selling.

Even with something as simple as a business card, when you design with your customer in mind, you’re creating a powerful suggestion about how you work and of how you can help people.

Taking the time to ensure your business card delivers a great experience isn’t all that hard to do.

Let me share with you what I’ve learned”

Print on the best stock you can find.
This is the number-one thing you must do. Buy the very best paper stock you can. Print in smaller batches if you have to. Good stock looks professional and avoids the frayed, dog-eared look that afflicts so many flimsy cards. Personally, I’m quite happy with the stock they use at moo.com.

Avoid glossy finishes, but ensure white space.
There’s a practical reason why you should say no to glossy and yes to generous use of white space. Business cards can be really handy to write on. Don’t underestimate this benefit. A short note jotted down on the back of your card can do amazing things. It’s one of the subtle ways that something mass produced can become personalized. People like things that are made just for them.

Don’t be clever at the expense of being useful.
Look online and you’ll find lots of examples of clever business cards. Some of them are even useful. But many are just wasted expressions of vanity. What am I going to do with an all-steel embossed card that’s impossible to read in low light and that I can’t write on? I mean really.

Be selective.
Most people today are drowning in too much information. Make it easier for them to reach you by being selective about what you include on your card. If phone, email and your website are the top-three places people go to reach you, then include just that. Unless you’re in a business that predominantly uses fax (and you have my sympathies if you are), then cut that from your card. There’s no penalty for leaving some things out. Keep it simple. We’re not living in the 1970s anymore. There are other places people can go to find additional information about you if they need it.

Include a photo, but only pro-grade.
Since all business is personal and so much of marketing today is relationship-based, including a professionally-shot photo of yourself on your card is never a bad idea. But do this only if the photo is a professional headshot.

Short and sweet.
The life of the modern business card is short and sweet. Gone are the days when the cards you give to people would be tucked into a rolodex and used repeatedly when someone wanted to call you. Most people today aren’t going to keep your card for very long: just until they can enter it into their address book or CRM. Keep your card simple, purposeful and memorable: that’s what sells. Complement it with other products to serve as leave-behinds that can deliver substance: free ebooks, guides and reports are just a few examples.

Think about the reader’s experience.
Focus less on what matters to you and instead ask what creates the best experience for the person who receives your card. Remember: the more information you put on that 3.5 x 2 inch piece of paper, the smaller the typeface you’ll need, and the less white space you’ll have.