creativity tips ~ thinkit creative

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.

Heck yes, you need to write better headlines: here’s how and why

By Patrick Gant

Pay more attention to headlines in what you do.

Sure, you might be tempted to say “but I don’t write headlines in my work.”

Oh yes you do.

Ever find yourself needing to send an email but struggle to get readers to respond or to take some kind of action? Do you do analytical work that involves creating in-depth reports? Maybe you’re trying to find a stronger hook for your fundraising letter. Or maybe you’re looking at ways to get better at giving presentations that connect with people.

These are just a few examples where headlines can be valuable. We just don’t often think of them that way.

With email, we call it “coming up with a good subject line.” With reports and presentations, we ask ourselves “how can I cover all these complicated ideas in a way that doesn’t lose the reader?” See my point? Part of a headline’s power is its ability to compress an idea.

Sure, a great headline can attract attention (a practice that was alive and well 2,000 years ago in Rome when the first gazette, Acta Diurna, couched hard news with salacious stories).

But what they really do is give your reader a good reason to keep reading.

David Ogilvy—the true original MadMan of advertising—once said that “on the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

He wasn’t kidding about that last part. Even in my own work, I spend an inordinate amount of time crafting and refining headlines and subheadings, because it’s “the ticket on the meat” (another Ogilvyism).

Why does it matter so much? Because as I like to regularly remind: people are busy.

We live in a world now where the thing that is most scarce is audience attention.

You have to earn it and keep earning it. With that in mind, here’s what I know about how you can write better headlines that will help you keep earning those readers and find more homes for those ideas you want to share.

Make friends with action verbs
Cut out the fluffy features behind your idea until you’re left with a raw verb that describes what it can do for the reader (e.g., “Do…Grow…Make…Get…Take…Expand…”). It might not seem stylish to use them, but action verbs never get dull and they deliver the goods on answering that one question every reader has: “what’s in it for me to keep reading?”

Be more specific
Boring writing happens when you don’t know where you want the reader to look. As fiction writer Nancy Hale tells us: “The more specific you are, the more universal you are.” That applies to more than just fiction. Headline writing is compressed storytelling. And that’s something you can apply to any business. Find the glowing core in your story.

“How to” is your BFF
Veterans of advertising copy will tell you that you can’t write a bad headline that starts with “how to” (see what I did in the subject line of this email?) Granted, this is more relevant to email subject lines and presentation copy, but never say never when it comes to creating a surprising header even in dense analytical reports. I’ve seen it done.

But say no to link bait
You might think it’s tempting to mimic the linkbait strategies of Buzzfeed and others who peddle McContent (e.g., “You’ll never believe what happened next…” or “Seven ways to do X”). But don’t do it. That’s a race to the bottom and one that’s become so common now that readers are wise to the game. No amount of link baited traffic is going to erase the impression that you’ve snookered your audience into reading something that just wasn’t all that good or memorable. Your best ideas and your readers deserve better than that.

Do the unexpected
“State the opposite, not the obvious.” That’s what Sam Horn says in her book “Pop! Stand Out in Any Crowd.” Sometimes the best way to present an idea is to turn it inside out and say something that goes against conventional wisdom. Often that’s where real insight lives. Longtime CreativeBoost readers know that I’m quite fond of that particular strategy.

Yummy, tasty morsels
Break your ideas up into smaller ones. Assign a subheading to each one. Notice how I do that with by blog posts and newsletter? It’s a great way reward your readers for their attention and to honour their time. The trick is make it look like it’s not work to read things all the way though.

Hey, much like what you just did! See how that happened?

Six ways to remain creative and passionate about getting things done

By Patrick Gant

In business, it can be hard at times to maintain an unwavering focus. Even the most accomplished pros will admit that at times distractions get the best of them. Let’s face it, you don’t have to look too hard in any office to find things that can pull you away from your work.

There’s this great piece by Tony Schwartz, author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, that sums up how to best keep your eye on the ball and remain passionate about the work you do. I’ve included my own thoughts as a writer and business owner to accompany each of their six points:

Do the hardest work first.
This is one that took me a long time to fully appreciate, but it’s vital. It’s better to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work when your energy level is at its peak, plus it helps to give yourself an excuse to reward yourself later.

Practice intensely.
In my line of work this means write every day. Not all day (even writers need a break), but for a sustained period until the words start to flow. I’ve stuck to this principle for over 20 years and it is without a doubt the #1 thing that has helped me improve my craft so that I can do better work in less time.

Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses.
I’ve had mentors throughout my entire career and each one has provided me with insights that have reshaped what I do and how I approach problems. Often it has been a much-needed shot in the arm, but at times the feedback has been tough to hear. You need both.

Take regular renewal breaks.
One of the most common mistakes to make is to assume that breaks are to be taken when you’re tired. The trouble with that approach is that it conditions you into thinking that problem solving only happens in the office when you’re not on break. Go for a short walk during the day, or even just put on headphones for a bit and listen to a podcast or a song or two. Some of my best ideas and most comprehensive solutions to problems have come to me while I was doing something other than work.

Ritualize practice.
This is related to the point about practicing intensely, but it deserves its own mention. As Schwartz notes: “Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it.” When you make a habit of doing something, it eventually stops being a task and becomes a natural part of your day such that you don’t even have to think about why you’re doing it.

Pursue what you love.
Sounds trite, but really it isn’t. Doing what you love is really about finding something you give a damn about. That’s where your ability to gain mastery over a subject can truly take hold.

Writing advice: what to do when you’re stuck

By Patrick Gant

[Updated] Anyone can be a writer, it’s true. But sometimes—whether you’re writing for the web, crafting an article, a direct marketing piece or a book—you’re going to get stuck and it can seem as if no amount of rewriting is going to fix your copy.

Don’t wait for that sinking feeling to set in.

Here’s the first thing you must do.

Keep writing.

Don’t give in to that feeling that says you need to walk away.

Giving in is easy. It’s what many people do.

There are cases where you need to shift gears for a bit (and I’ll come back to that). But unless you keep working at your craft and your ideas, you’re going to lose any momentum you started with.

There’s an even bigger danger.

Unless you’re in the deadlines business like I am, there is also a good chance that if you put that writing project away, you might not come back to it. Ever.

Stop with the Point-A-to-Point-B thinking. Be more abstract.

Ideas and the business of writing them down is not a linear practice. In fact, it’s rare to be struck by a fully formed thought that’s ready to share. That’s just the low-hanging fruit, my friends. The rest takes time to ripen. And often it’s going to take you in directions that may surprise you as much as your reader.

Here are a few methods I use when I get stuck. You can use any of these, too.

The tangential method

Find a good quote about the subject you are writing about. Don’t just slap that quote into your copy.

The writer’s first devotion is curiosity and you feed it by asking questions.

Who is the speaker behind the quote? Are there any articles posted online about this person? Book reviews?

How might what they have to say about one thing relate to another thing in an entirely unexpected way?

A few minutes of satisfied curiosity can provide you with an entirely new angle on what you’re writing about.

Here’s a secret: it’s one of my most reliable ways of coming up with new topics for my newsletter.

The switching gears method

I said earlier that you have to keep on writing when you’re stuck. But that doesn’t mean you have to keep bashing your head against the wall and wishing for a different result. Some ideas need to simmer. In the meantime, write something else.

Creativity is a weird visitor (click to tweet). It often walks into your house, puts its feet up on the sofa, grabs pen and paper and tells you it’s working on something. Let it do its job. Just don’t let it switch on the TV.

Switching gears means that you might not be working on the thing you started on in the first place, but you’re still producing.

Practice and discipline. These are your best teachers.

The backstory method

This one applies to fiction writing. Having trouble making a character believable? Invent a backstory and write it down. Need help asking the right questions? Go to one of those free online dating sites and look at the questions they ask of people when creating a dating profile. Fill it in. The answers you’re being asked are meant to help other people decide if you’re likeable and compatible. This is a good resource if you’re stumped.

With a fact-filled backstory (okay, made up facts, but I’m sure you get where I’m going with this), you have new ways to approach your subject and write convincingly. After all, you totally know this guy now.

The undoing method

Some ideas are just not ready for primetime. Some are just crappy ideas. A good way to test yours is to turn them inside out. Play devil’s advocate. Write a short piece arguing the opposing point of view.

One of my business lines is speechwriting. I sometimes use this method when I’m finding the copy isn’t as persuasive as I need it to be.

Undo your arguments.

You’ll quickly reveal the cut line that separates the facts you know are true from the rest of the points that you simply feel are true.