beyond bullets

The Worst of Both Worlds

One of the reasons we might be having problems with PowerPoint is that we're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

That's what struck me the other day when I interviewed professor Dale Cyphert about the relationship between our classic ideas about rhetoric and PowerPoint. The way she put it, we're basically at a cultural crossroads between our traditional ideas of Western "oratory" from earlier periods of history, and a new global "media-age" that has embraced non-traditional ways of communicating that were previously ignored or belittled. As the two worldviews clash, PowerPoint is often stuck in the middle, reflecting the worst of both worlds to each cultural woldview:

"The result is either an 'immature' or 'indecent' use of electronic communication from an oratorical worldview, or a 'boring' or 'limiting' form of presentation structure from a media-age perspective. Neither audience will find it to be acceptable or effective rhetoric."

That would explain people why some people say we should get rid of PowerPoint altogether (they're coming from an oratorical worldview), and why other people say it's a very primitive tool (they're coming from a media-age perspective).

According to Dale, what will result from this clash of cultures is something new that blends together the engagement of in-person relationships and the power of media:

"The live presenter, taking advantage of electronic tools, is in a position to provide the first real bridge from the very 'literate' rhetoric that has dominated Western politics for the past few centuries to the more 'oral' traditions of theater, poetry and dance. Television alone taps into some of those emotional, communal, personal reactions, but loses virtually all the advantages of reasoned discussion. We certainly don’t want presenters to start to create video shows for audience members to view at their own convenience — which unfortunately has been done. There’s something about the person of the presenter that is crucial to good collective decision-making. We might be evolving from 'formal orator' to 'discussion facilitator' as the model, but rhetoric still seems to require a human personality to guide people’s thinking in good directions."

Who would've thought that creating a little old PowerPoint might be evolving human communication in a positive direction? Keep that in mind the next time you get ready to present.

Tip: Think about which worldview holds sway in your mind, and then about which worldview holds sway in the minds of your organization and your next audience. If you are a "formal orator" and consider PowerPoint to be a visual aid to hold text, select one of your slides and use a full-screen image to stretch your thinking. If you consider PowerPoint to be a primitive tool, expand a full-screen even larger and create a visual "scene" for your presentation with a PowerPoint slide. If you want to try out being a "media-enabled facilitator", use a simple evocative media technique to open up a dialogue that wouldn't happen any other way. And if you're particularly daring, walk "into" an image as Scott McCloud does during his presentations. Remember, a PowerPoint innovation a day keeps the boredom -- and culture clashes -- at bay.

Microsoft Press to Publish "Beyond Bullets" Book

I'm pleased to announce that Microsoft Press will publish my new book titled Beyond Bullets, scheduled for release in February 2005 (read the press release here).

I started this blog because I assumed there had to be a number of smart and savvy people out there who were looking for fresh ideas about how to communicate with PowerPoint. Your response has proven me right -- thank you for your comments and referrals in blogs from Japan to Italy, and many points in between.

The Beyond Bullets book will be for the same people who read this weblog, including managers, directors, vice presidents, venture capitalists, CEOs, consultants, designers, and administrative assistants. You speak PowerPoint as a second language, and this book will help you speak it more fluently.

The content of the book will expand upon many of the ideas in this blog, but present them in a more methodical and accessible way. And it will introduce new ideas and innovations well beyond anything you've seen here, keeping them all grounded in practicality.

The core message of both the blog and the book will remain the same:

You can do this.

You can apply new ideas quickly.

You can inspire other people.

I'm looking forward to reaching a wider audience beyond the blogosphere by publishing my new book next year, and to continuing to move Beyond Bullets with you.

Ready, Fire, Aim

The next time you aim to write something, the best place to start might not be paper, but your PowerPoint slides.

Silicon Valley legend Guy Kawasaki was one of the people responsible for the success of the Macintosh computer, and today spends his time helping people start new businesses. I asked him recently about the interrelationship between his live presentations, his slides, and his books; and he said:

"I work in the opposite order of most people. First, I make the slides. Then I give the presentation many times. Then I write the book. I like to perfect the slides and presentation first and elaborate on them to write a book. If your speeches work, then your book will too. The opposite is not true."

At first it might sound odd to present an idea before writing it down, but by flipping conventional wisdom on its head, Guy is helping to re-write the process of writing.

During the days of the dot-com boom, the phrase "Ready, Fire, Aim" meant that you should get out a new idea fast and early in its unfinished state, so you can get valuable market feedback before you fine-tune it to a specific purpose and market. The principle holds true long after the dot-com bust, especially for your presentations.

The key to this approach ties back to your fundamental mindset that gives form to your presentations. Is your PowerPoint static, inflexible, and fixed in stone; or is it fluid, flexible and living? Is your presentation a bucket for you to pour data and information into an audience's head, or is it a river for you to nourish a conversation and engage with your changing environment?

There may be times a static PowerPoint might help you get the results you want, but if you choose a fluid version, consider how entrepreneurs approach their presentations every day. These days, it's common for startup CEOs to "write" their business plans in PowerPoint slides first, before they write out the ideas in longer, narrative detail. Then they hit the road and show the presentation to anyone who will listen -- friends, family, co-workers, and potential customers.

During one of these presentations, the CEO will ask what people think, and someone in the audience might say, "I just don't get it", or "There's no way that's going to work," or, "Your basic premise is flawed." Some less-hardy entrepreneurs might view this negative feedback as reason to pack up the PowerPoint and go home. But the hardier breed will look at every comment as an opportunity to improve the ideas and the message. Every disagreement is an opportunity to engage, reflect and either strengthen or adapt. Only after going through these rigors of reality will the CEOs develop out the ideas in more detail, and then approach investors about it.

This approach can actually reduce the risk that an idea will be rejected, because it's been pre-tested in the marketplace of ideas first, and pre-qualified against 3 principles:

1. Your idea grows stronger as it moves from the abstract to the concrete. An idea in your mind doesn't do anyone else any good until you communicate it to other people. Get your idea out early and find out what the world thinks.

2. Whatever doesn't kill your idea makes it stronger. Ask people what they think, and appreciate people who disagree -- they're the ones you can give most credit toward strengthening your idea. Get feedback, find out what works, discard what doesn't, and keep moving forward.

3. Your excitement for your idea is what gets other people excited. As you share your ideas with other people in person, you have the unique opportunity to demonstrate the passion that will help you overcome the forces that will surely work against your idea. Without your passion, no one else will become passionate.

Whether you're writing a book, a business plan, or any other media document to communicate an idea, try a "ready-fire-aim" approach to make sure your idea stays on target.

Tip: The next time you have a new idea, try field-testing it first in a PowerPoint presentation. If it's a brief idea, present the idea on a single slide, and then ask other people what they think about it. Or if you have a much larger idea or a sequence of thoughts, put a single idea on each slide and develop it out in a storyboard. It may be easier for people like Guy who are professional speakers to make a presentation, but that's all the more reason why you should stretch yourself to do something you're not comfortable doing. If you limit yourself to only a single media expression, you're limiting yourself to only your known universe. Challenge yourself to do what's most difficult for you. Anyone who is a writer should stretch herself to speak and design. Anyone who is a speaker should stretch herself to write and design. Anyone who is a designer should stretch himself to write and speak. When you challenge yourself to do the counter-intuitive, like writing your slides first, you open yourself to new possibilities you may not have seen from a previously limited view.

Mystery Media

What kind of medium is PowerPoint? And where does it fit in the range of other media including film, TV, photography, comics, websites, and paper?

Scott McCloud is one of the smartest people I know when it comes to understanding media, and when I asked him the same question in an interview recently, his response was basically:

"I don't know."

Not only was it refreshing for someone to honestly admit he didn't know something, but it also struck me that Scott's answer was absolutely right. We really don't know what PowerPoint is today. But in order to use the tool most effectively, we need to honestly admit that it doesn't fit into any other media category, and begin an honest exploration of what it really is.

In his classic 1993 book Understanding Comics, Scott wrote:

"Ever since the invention of the written word, new media have been misunderstood. Each new medium begins its life by imitating its predecessors. Many early movies were like filmed stage plays, much early television was like radio with pictures or reduced movies."

Likewise, a new medium called PowerPoint imitated its predecessor, the 35mm slide projector. It made it easy to create and assemble a series of static slides of bulleted lists on a computer, and eventually project them onto a wall. But things have changed over the years as the software gained more and more features, to the point today that this computerized slide projector has transformed into something entirely different.

Although PowerPoint can still present a series of static slides, it can also display full-screen video, animations, motion graphics, and other multimedia elements including sound. This weblog has documented a number of applications that a slide projector cannot accomplish, including storyboarding, clarifying your thoughts, painting a canvas, collaborating, opening a presentation dashboard, cross-media documents, splitting meaning, and more.

In spite of this reality, discussion and criticism of PowerPoint remains essentially stuck in slide projector mode. Take any critical article or essay about a PowerPoint slide and insert a full-screen video there instead, and the critical model simply falls apart. This is an important issue, because if we judge PowerPoint too quickly or too superficially, we're rejecting not only what we’ve seen, but also what we haven’t yet seen.

Part of the problem is that once the slide projector metaphor is gone, it's hard to classify PowerPoint into any other media category. Is it like film or TV? Although it can show video, we normally would show only a clip and then comment or converse about it, which you wouldn't usually experience in a movie theater or a living room. Is it photography? It can display photographs, but on a wall instead of paper, and we can crop, edit, add text or juxtapose them in an instant. Is it like comics? It is a sequence of images, but as Scott points out, they reside in the same frame rather than in a series of panels. Is it like paper? People often treat PowerPoint as a piece of paper when they design slides, but it's not the best use of the medium for group reading. That said, with a unified design approach you can create a media document that works equally well across paper, projector and browser.

Clearly PowerPoint doesn’t easily fit into any of these media categories, but instead spans all of them. We haven't encountered anything like it, and it reveals that our media theories are not yet deep enough to help us understand it.

So in what directions can we turn to start understanding PowerPoint? Some of the most interesting thinking today that may help us understand PowerPoint better is in the emerging field of visual rhetoric. In her 1988 book Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Kathleen Hall Jamieson argues that because of our educational systems and the influence of mass media, our culture's general skills of public speaking have deteriorated. But she also describes how politicians such as Ronald Reagan have blended together public speaking and visual media into a new form of communication, and it is at this intersection that the real possibilities for PowerPoint can spring forth.

PowerPoint has quickly made it crystal clear to businesspeople and educators that our culture needs dramatic improvement in public speaking skills. But it also has introduced a new media pathway to solve the problem, if we engage the new opportunites that PowerPoint presents. In order to do that, we need to tap into PowerPoint's capabilities as a rhetorical tool to help us collect our ideas and structure our thoughts. That means clearing out all the questions of fonts, backgrounds and animations until our rhetorical structure is rock-solid, and then engage the visuals only after that core foundation is complete.

By using a single tool to improve both public speaking and visual media, we can innovate a wide range of new ways to communicate clearly with the mystery medium called PowerPoint.

Tip: If you're using PowerPoint only as a slide projector, consider how you can innovate the ways you use the tool. What about trying PowerPoint as storyboarding tool, or to collaborate with other people and gain buy-in, or to focus your message? Scroll through the postings in this weblog for a host of ideas on how to innovate with PowerPoint and transform mystery into clarity.

Aristotle's Top 10 PowerPoint Tips

Western philosophers have been mapping a course to clear communication for more than 2,500 years, but judging by many PowerPoint presentations today, you would think we completely missed the boat. That means it's time for us to hit the PowerPoint pause button, circle back and catch up with the past.

In their study of rhetoric, the ancient Greeks described how people can persuade by appealing to reason, emotion, and the character of the speaker. Has anything changed since then? Nope. The only thing new today is the additional power of projected media to help us make our case.

When you work in PowerPoint in a storyboard view, it can be a very powerful way to capture, distill and arrange your thoughts. But PowerPoint is also a visual design tool, and we've unfortunately fallen victim to an unfortunate side-effect -- obsessing over the surfaces of individual slides at the expense of the structure of the argument across slides. In many cases, there is no rhetorical structure whatsoever in a PowerPoint presentation, only a loosely-related string of lists. Instead of a strong and clear argument, we get a weak and fragmented assortment of ideas that muddy up the minds of the audience and the speaker.

We need to shift our obsessions in PowerPoint from the pretty surfaces of the slides, to the neglected structures beneath them. A practical solution is to discipline ourselves to begin every PowerPoint first without any background templates or visuals whatsover -- just headlines and storyboards. Only after the ideas are strongly in place, should we give ourselves permission to work on the visuals.

In his 1928 book titled Greek Rhetoric & Literary Criticism, classical scholar Rhys Roberts distilled Aristotle's 3 books of Rhetoric into 10 classical tips that can still re-orient our PowerPoint in the right direction today:

1. Be logical.

2. Think clearly.

3. Reason cogently.

4. Remember that argument is the life and soul of persuasion.

5. Study human nature.

6. Observe the characters and emotions of your audience, as well as your own character and emotions.

7. Attend to delivery.

8. Use language rightly.

9. Arrange your material well.

10. End crisply.

Ask 1,000 gurus for advice and they'll give you 10,000 tips, but why not make your life easier by simply listening to the guy who said it first and said it best? Aristotle may not have been an expert in PowerPoint, but he was an expert in crafting the structure upon which any successful series of PowerPoint slides must stand.

Tip: Before you start working on your visuals, view your PowerPoint slides in Slide Sorter and check them against this 10-point checklist of tips. Are your headlines logical, and orderly? Have you researched your audience? Do you have a crisp ending? Practice giving the presentation to your team with only the headlines, so you can attend to your delivery. When your headlines, storyboard structure and delivery have all passed the bar of Aristotle's Top 10 Tips, then it's time to start working on your visuals, confident they have a solid foundation to rest upon. This way, even if your laptop fails and you don't have a PowerPoint to work with, you'll know you have 2,500 years of history to guide your sails on a clear course toward results.

Signal to Noise

If your PowerPoint slides are generating more noise than signal, it's time to fine-tune your approach and re-engineer your headlines.

The engineering term signal-to-noise ratio describes the relationship between meaningful information (signal) to meaningless information (noise). The higher the ratio of signal-to-noise, the more meaningful information is being communicated.

The same idea applies to the human mind, which also requires a high signal-to-noise ratio in order to understand information clearly. Cognitive science explains that the mind has only limited capacity to process information and integrate it into memory. In this context, the research-based signaling principle says that in a multimedia environment, the mind processes information more effectively when a headline or outline signals the most important information the mind needs to process.

An effective way to signal meaning in PowerPoint is with a clear headline -- the information you write at the top of a slide. We're already literate in the language of headlines from newspapers, which use them at the top of every article to quickly indicate the idea of the article that follows. This is an inductive technique -- a headline makes a conclusion about what the story means, which is then supported by the story itself. Journalists have developed an art and craft of writing headlines that serve 3 very important functions -- they quickly communicate the main ideas of the article, entice you to read more if you have the time, and allow you to skim the paper if you don't.

A good headline can do the same for you on a PowerPoint slide -- it quickly signals what you're talking about, intrigues people to listen to the words you're saying and the visuals you're showing, and frees them from the burden of excess information they don't have the time to process in a multimedia experience. However, the bullet-point approach that dominates PowerPoint today actually discourages effective headlines, and encourages less effective list headings that offer no clear signals.

Let's say you're going to the grocery store and you want to remember what to bring. You pull out a sheet of paper, write the heading, "Grocery List", then you make your bulleted list of chicken, cheese, strawberries and low-carb bars. None of the items necessarily mean anything in relation to one another. The same goes for slide headings like "The Market" or "Product Benefits" -- they only establish categories of lists, but offer no meaning about what the list items mean together, or in relationship to one another. In a deductive approach, you could present a list of points like this and then come to a conclusion at the end; but since bulleted slides have no conclusion, the burden rests on the viewer to guess what you're trying to say.

Why put additional cognitive load on the minds of your audience, when you can make it easier for them to see what you mean? Instead, transform your "Grocery List" heading into a useful slide headline like "Low-carb diets are healthier than high carb diets". Then you and your audience will have a meaty idea to chew on as you support, defend and discuss your case with your spoken words. Re-write "The Market" to say "The Market Has Split into 2 New Segments". Edit "Product Benefits" to say "External Drives Reduce Risk by 10%". Each of these new headlines stakes out a specific conclusion, that you can then support with the visuals on your slide along with your spoken words. When you design your slides along these lines with a more orderly hierarchy, you end up with an effective media module that works well across paper, projector and browser.

By re-engineering your list headings into more meaningful headlines, you signal a clear starting point for you and your audience to begin your mental or verbal discussion, and ensure your signal-to-noise stays at a very high level.

Tip: Improve your PowerPoint signal-to-noise ratio by working on your headlines. Read through your favorite newspaper with a sheet of paper beside you, and write down only the headlines. When you have a page of headlines, read them out loud to hear how they sound. Observe how they are each constructed to inform, entice and distill. Now return to PowerPoint and try your hand at headline-writing. If you have an existing PowerPoint file, you can break up all of your bulleted points into separate slides, so you can begin to distill them down to their essence. Or for a faster result, open up a new, blank presentation, and for every existing bulleted slide, create a new slide and write a headline that summarizes each main idea. Test out your headlines by showing them to your team for a reality check. It may take some time to develop your headline-writing skills, but when you start to engineer better focus, you'll signal dramatic clarity too.