beyond bullets

Join me for a LIVE Presentation Makeover at 9am Pacific on May 12!

Interested in seeing for yourself how you can transform your PowerPoint approach Beyond Bullet Points? I'm pleased to announce that the nice folks over at Microsoft Office LiveMeeting have invited me to present a free web seminar at 9am Pacific on May 12 via a web browser near you.

In one action-packed hour titled "Transform Your PowerPoint Beyond Bullet Points", I'll show you how you can unlock the power of a persuasive story buried beneath all those the boring bullet points.

I'll begin the session by quickly reviewing a typical bullet-laden presentation that we've all seen too many times before. Then I'll apply the approach described in my new book to spin it into a new communication experience that balances the emotional power of visual storytelling with the focused clarity of logical reasoning.

In a single hour, you'll see how you can write a presentation script based on a 3-act structure, transform it into a storyboard, and then bring it to life with clear visuals and your engaging delivery.

To register for the event, or read the full writeup, click here. 

Two publications that I frequently contribute to -- MarketingProfs and Presenters University -- are joining Microsoft Office LiveMeeting in co-sponsoring the event.

I hope you can join us!

A Storyboard Field Goal

With a strong motif running through your communications, you are sure to play a winning game.

Just ask Kim, who has developed a great recurring theme for the script she is writing for her PowerPoint makeover.  The latest round of revisions go something like this in the first five slides of Act I of her story:

1. Setting: The rules of retirement today are being re-written on the fly
2. Protagonist: It is late in the game. To win, you need a new playbook
3. Imbalance: Only 20% are outfitted to replace their income in retirement
4. Balance: But a financially secure retirement is still an achievable goal
5. Solution: Call the right play. Tap the power of the Snider Method

A motif like the one Kim has chosen also can be carried through the three high-level points in Act II, by pivoting off of the Solution statement:

Call the right play. Tap the power of the Snider Method (how?)

1. Play offense by withdrawing money in retirement at a high and consistent rate
2. Play defense by protecting yourself from a prolonged economic downturn
3. Make the winning pass by effortlessly taking control of your financial future

A strong motif like this can play multiple roles in your own presentation, like it will for Kim:

1. It unlocks Kim's passion, because she happens to like football and she knows her audience does too.
2. It will make the job of finding visuals for these five slides easier (any guesses on what the photos or art will look like?)
3. It helps the audience integrate the information more easily into their long-term memory, because it relates to something they already know.

As another example of a motif, we started working today on a theme for a different presentation to a legal audience in the discussion board, that relates to the "scales of justice" in these first five slides from Act I:

1. Setting: Communicating effectively in or out of the courtroom can be tough
2. Protagonist: As an attorney, your challenge is to make things clear and simple
3. Imbalance: Overloaded PowerPoint slides can easily tip the scales against you
4. Balance: Find the right balance, and juries and judges will understand you better
5. Solution: Harness Hollywood media savvy and research into human learning for a successful verdict

These are just two examples of the limitless motifs that can help your communication cohere. What's your motif that sets up your story, and helps people understand your message?  It may not come to you in the first draft of your Act I statements, but rather may come in later rounds.  And if you're really stuck, or if you just want other people's opinions, post your Act I statements on the discussion board, and we'll offer our thoughts!

Emotion vs. Reason?

The next time you structure your communication, is it more important to appeal to emotion or to reason?

It turns out that question may be a false dichotomy, because according to neuroscientists people need both emotion and reason in order to make decisions.

A recent BusinessWeek article titled "Why Logic Often Takes a Back Seat" describes how different parts of the brain engage with the decision-making process.  A quote from the article:

...emotions grab people's attention and motivate them to focus their rational brains on the issue at hand, says Antonio R. Damasio, a University of Iowa College of Medicine neurologist...

If this is true, it threatens the sacred cow known as the "data-driven presentation"; which is based on the assumption that you can simply display a stream of information and people will magically "get it".  Instead, the research points to a different reality, where there needs to be an emotional context to motivate the rational part of the brain in the first place.

How can you test this out for yourself?  Place your rational information within an emotional context by structuring your presentation using a 3-act structure, where Act I engages your audience emotionally and Act II engages them rationally.

By balancing the informational load between emotion and reason, you just might find that you can align your communication approach with our new understanding of the brain, and give your audience the right mix of meaning they need.

Finding Your Center of Gravity

If you want your communication to be coherent, find your center of gravity.

Whenever I look at a PowerPoint presentation for the first time, I go to Slide Sorter view to get the lay of the land: Can I see a clear story across the entire experience?  Then I'll shift to Notes Page view: Are the projected visuals and spoken words planned together? And last I'll go to Normal view: Can I easily understand the main idea of this slide?

It's usually the case that the answer is No to all three questions.  More often than not, the presentations are very difficult to understand, packed with more text and data than anyone's cognitive ability can process; and little if any narrative structure.

What I commonly find is that any single presentation is actually multiple presentations that are yearning to be liberated. Where we might try to load up the slides to save time by creating a one-size-fits-all presentation, we actually end up with a situation where one-size-confuses-all.

One solution to the problem is the discipline of completing Act I of your story template, which we're discussing in a few of the presentation makeovers now underway. When you write the statements that form the headlines of the first five slides, you are making purposeful decisions that will sort, distill and structure information in a way that makes sense to your specific audience.

Completing Act I forms a center of gravity for the entire communication experience, around which your spoken words, images, story and interaction will rotate.  Without Act I, there is no center of communication gravity.  But with a coherent Act I, your center is solid and will ensure that the rest of your presentation unfolds in an elegant and understandable universe.

Tip: Take a look at the discussions about Act I we've had with Mike, Bren and Kim.  What do your first five slides look like?  Email or post your first draft and let's take a look.

Visual Persuasion

Visually persuasive? Or not?  That's one of the important questions you have to ask about a slide once you've moved beyond bullet points.  When you approach each slide as a full-screen palette, there are endless things you can do with images to communicate your message. Fortunately there's a rich resource of visual rhetoric techniques you can mine, which are being pioneered in the field of advertising.

For example, in his 1997 book Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising, Paul Messaris describes a political ad whose goal was to associate one candidate with "change" and the other candidate as "not". According to Messaris:

The ad consisted of four pairs of images shown in sequence. Each pair was accompanied on the soundtrack by the words, "This is change [Image #1]. This is not [Image #2]." The entire sequence went as follows:

• an astronaut in a space suit ("change")
• a mummy wrapped in gauze ("not")
• a Boeing 747 taking off ("change")
• a man peddling an old-fashioned flying machine ("not")
• a computer-graphics display ("change")
• an old-time telephone switchboard ("not")
• (Candidate A), casually dressed, with supporters ("change")
• (Candidate B), in business suit, in front of lectern ("not")

Messaris comments on the ad:

This ad provides a clear and straightforward illustration of the possibility of combining two different forms of visual syntax in a single, interlocking design.  Each pair of images contains a contrast, whereas the overall sequencing of the pairs generalizes this contrast and extends to the final pair... The implication that emerges from these two contrasting streams of images is that (Candidate A) is in touch with what is happening in today's world, whereas his opponent is out of it, stuck in the past.

This example is only the tip of the iceberg of the simple yet powerful things you can do with the slides in your PowerPoint storyboard. The act of placing two photographs side-by-side on a single slide takes you into a different universe well beyond the quaint concepts of pre-designed templates, bullet points and Photoshop backgrounds.  Compared to the simple technique above, the techniques we normally limit ourselves to in PowerPoint are all "not". Instead, the profound power of visual persuasion is the revolutionary "change" you should be looking for.

Tip: If you're looking for a way to apply a technique like this to your PowerPoint storyboard, a prime candidate is the pair of slides that form the "Balance" and "Imbalance" statements in Act I of your story template. Like the example above, these two slides indicate the "Point A" where your audience is, and the "Point B" where they'd like to be; or vice versa. See page 176, "The Split Screen", for details on how to construct this sequence of slides.  With a simple juxtaposition technique like this, you can break open the visual persuasiveness of your ideas and change your communication results for the better.

Show me your storyboard

If you say it's important to use a story today to communicate your ideas, then here's a challenge for you:

Show me your storyboard.

It's been quite a while since we stopped telling stories around campfires, and started telling them around movie screens, TV sets and computer monitors.  Hollywood learned long ago that if you're using media to tell your story, the best way to structure and illustrate that story is with a storyboard.  But how, exactly, do you do that?

Dave Woodbeck of Three Deep Marketing emailed me the other day to say:

"My firm is a small but growing marketing agency. I think it is a no-brainer that your book would apply to developing marketing campaigns for our clients. Powerpoint is just a tool that can be used to lay out a story that could be used to develop integrated marketing campaigns, from mass media and print publications all the way to the sales presentation and closing the deal. Just interested in hearing your thoughts."

Dave is articulating something that other people must be thinking, because lately the most-used search phrase that leads people to my blog is "PowerPoint storyboard." Judging by the increasing interest in this topic, could it be that you already have at your desktop a storyboarding tool even more sophisticated than the one Hollywood uses?

The answer is yes. As I describe in Beyond Bullet Points, with a coherent story structure and a few clicks of a mouse, you can quickly create a storyboard using PowerPoint.  And in the process you even do Hollywood one better because the same tool you use to structure your story is ultimately the same medium you will use to deliver it; whether in person, on paper or over the web.

Whatever the size of your audience - from one person to 1 million, or more - if you have an important story to tell you have to be able to communicate it today using a blend of images and narration with a unifying narrative.  This includes marketing messages, strategic plans, investor pitches and educational sessions.  So with all that communication to do, why not use a storyboarding tool you already have at your fingertips to show other people what you mean?

Tip: If you don't have a storyboard that maps out your communications in a visual way, it's time to get started. Download the free Storyboard Formatter available here, then open the file and ask: What will my storyboard look like when I'm done? Who is the protagonist? What is the inciting incident? How does the action develop? As you put mouse to slide, your own message is sure to begin to emerge in the form of a coherent and and engaging multimedia story.

Beyond the Japanese Bullet Train

One of the fascinating things about the conventional bullet-point approach to PowerPoint is that it produces remarkably consistent results, even across international borders. That's why I was particularly interested to hear what happened when Naotake Murayama tried out the Beyond Bullet Points approach with a Japanese audience. He just emailed me about how things went, and said he would be glad to share it with other readers:

"Probably for most Japanese audiences the idea of being shown pictures and photos with no text is almost heretical; I wouldn't be too surprised if some audiences complain that they're not getting their money's worth since they don't have something to READ, with lots of detail. Having said that, I've always been bored by those endless series of bullet points, charts and schematic diagrams called 'presentations'.

"So I wanted to try out your approach. When I was asked to speak to a a group of Japanese college and graduate school students who were visiting Silicon Valley, I figured that this was a 'no risk' (wasn't work - related to my non-profit activities) environment in which I could employ the approaches in your book.

"The end result was a presentation that was not entirely text-free, but NO BULLETS and quite a few 'image only' slides that I used to tell my own career story. Since it's in Japanese I don't think it's worth sharing with you, but I attached one slide that I used to talk about my cross-cultural background (i.e., spending 40% of my life in the US).

"The reception was quite good; I sensed that the audience (students and faculty members) were at first somewhat surpirsed, but it turned out to be a refreshing experience for them. At a minimum, I can claim that I kept them awake in their jetlagged condition by avoiding the 'reading the slides' approach. They may have thought my presentation style with lots of body language and asking questions instead of just being asked 'very American', but that's another story.

"Anyway, I think I need to try out your approach a few more times to come up with something that I can use effectively in both 'work' and 'non-work' situations, but one thing's for sure; you got me thinking more about presentation delivery as a total package that requires a trinity of the presenter, the visuals, and the STORY."

I suspect Naotake's last word, story, is a universal communications structure that easily crosses borders. What's been your international experience, either with or beyond bullet points?  Post a comment and share your thoughts - I'd especially be interested in hearing from those of you who present to non-English speaking audiences.

The Narrative Backbone

Stop thinking of PowerPoint as a visual tool and you will dramatically improve your visuals, not to mention the quality of the entire communication experience.

My friend Frank Blair invited me to be a guest speaker last night at his UCLA Extension course in business planning, and I thought it would be fun to work with students in real-time to write a story template for a business plan and then transform it into a storyboard.

"Steve" volunteered his presentation, which was intended to raise investment capital for a dog-walking business. Together with the class we wrote the statements of his story template while they were projected on the screen - the first five slides of Act I went something like this:

1. Los Angeles today is an affluent area ripe with opportunity
2. Investors are always looking for ways to tap into this market
3. Busy professionals feel guilty that they can’t care for their pets
4. They will feel liberated when they don’t have to worry anymore
5. Invest in my venture and we can tap into this growing market

After we finished the rest of the story template we turned it into a PowerPoint storyboard like Jim's, consisting of only plain white slides with headlines.  Then I handed Steve the remote control and asked him to give us an impromptu presentation using only the headlines of the PowerPoint slides as he advanced one to the next.

The results?  Although it was a first-time presentation, it was fantastic. The simple headlines on a plain white background guided Steve through what he was going to say. Once he glanced at the headline, there was no more text for Steve to read so he turned to the audience and engaged them. He told funny stories. The audience laughed. He was natural and relaxed. The audience was very clear about what he wanted them to understand.

Importantly, all this happened without graphics on the slides. We would've gotten to that later if we had more time, trying out a range of creative options such as using a headline with a full-screen photograph to serve as a backdrop, or using screen captures or clip art. But in the meantime, only a simple headline, a speaker and an audience produced clear communication, goodwill and enjoyment. 

What carried the experience through was a strong narrative backbone in the form of the headlines from the story template. Without a visual to be seen on the slides, an engaging story emerged.  What we would've added to the slides later in the form of graphics would've only contributed levels of improvement to something that was already rock-solid.

When you treat PowerPoint first as a story structure tool, and later as a visual tool, you too can build a more beautiful body of communication experiences.

Tip: When you transform your story template into a PowerPoint storyboard, rehearse it with your very simple slides that feature only a headline. Stand up to give the presentation, and gather some co-workers as an audience if you can. As you advance to the next slide, read the headline and look at the audience and improvise what you want to say at this point. If a transition between slides is rough, or you need to change the wording of a headline, make a note. Then click to the next slide. You'll find that at this early stage you will have a solid level of confidence in the ability of your headlines to serve as the backbone of a very solid story.

7 x 20 = Overload

Put 7 bullet points per slide on 20 slides and you have 140 reasons why you are creating cognitive overload for your audience.

Jason Kottke pointed out the results of a new study in cognitive science that found that people have a hard time processing more than four variables at a time, let alone 140:

"In their experiment, 30 academics were presented with incomplete verbal descriptions of statistical interactions between fictitious variables, with an accompanying set of graphs that represented the interactions. The interactions varied in complexity -- involving as few as two variables up to as many as five...

"The researchers found that, as the problems got more complex, participants performed less well and were less confident. They were significantly less able to accurately solve the problems involving four-way interactions than the ones involving three-way interactions, and they were (not surprisingly) less confident of their solutions.

"And five-way interactions? Forget it. Their performance was no better than chance. After the four- and five-way interactions, participants said things like, 'I kept losing information,' and 'I just lost track'."

The findings are right in line with the work of short-term memory expert Nelson Cowan, who updated the classic 1956 George Miller article which had placed the capacity of short-term memory at seven items, plus or minus two. Nelson told me in an interview that our updated understanding is that "people can retain in mind only about 3 or 4 independent ideas on average; though individuals vary from about 2 to about 6."

Many people justify 7 bullet points per slide by citing the George Miller article, but what's always missing in the arithmetic is the total number of bullet points across all of the slides; e.g., 7 bullets per slide times 20 slides equals 140 bullet points. Any single slide is part of a whole experience in which you're trying to help someone understand something, so to get the whole picture you really have to add up all the bullets.

If our short-term memory can hold 3 or 4 items and we're seeing 140, you're probably not surprised that there is a scientific validation for those times you've felt overwhelmed, confused or bored by an information presentation approach.

But an interesting tidbit from this new research is the relationship of cognitive overload to confidence. I think this cuts both ways - when an audience is forced to watch 140 list items with no cognitive guidance, it undermines their confidence in their ability to understand. They think there's something wrong with them, not the presentation approach. But it also debilitates the presenter - when you are unclear about the underlying coherence of your message beneath all of those bullets, your confidence is shot too, diminishing the quality of your public speaking.  Nobody wins here.

We can move forward by figuring out the 3 or 4 most important things out of those 140 bullet points. One effective technique is a classical logic tree, which is built-in to the story template and can help you create a hierarchy out of your ideas. Bren had an apple fall out of the hierarchy tree yesterday when he encountered it while working on his story structure for his makeover and said:

"At first I wasn't sure about the 3-step roadmap (I thought: There's more than three things to do!), but then I realized there are only three boxes in the 5-minute column. I'm starting to 'get it'."

The need for identifying top-level ideas is not new - what's new is giving it appropriate expression through a PowerPoint platform. 

When we make it to the top of the tree of clarity, both audiences and presenters will greatly improve their confidence and we can move on with the business of understanding one another.

Tip: Look at your PowerPoint presentation in Slide Sorter view - exactly where are the 3 or 4 things you want people to remember and apply in their lives? Watch how Jim and Bren find out as they work on their own story templates, or give it a try on your own presentation makeover.

The 5-Minute Storyboard

When you start off with a good story structure, you can transform it into a storyboard in a snap.  We just proved the case by taking Jim's story template and transferring it to PowerPoint to create a 5-minute storyboard (Download jim_storyboard.ppt).

A couple of readers thought it might be tough to scale down the Beyond Bullet Points approach from the 45-minute example in the book to a much shorter presentation.  Here's how to do it, using the 5-minute column feature that's built-in to the story template.

Jim completed Act I of the story template yesterday, and today he quickly took care of Acts II and III to create the foundation of a 5-minute story.  He did that by following the steps in Chapter 3, except completing only the first column of Act II.  Here's how it unfolded:

If you remember Jim's Act I statements, he ended Act I with a clear recommendation of what he wanted to persuade the audience to do:

Adopt Kansei to discover new packaging opportunities

Now in Act II, Jim pivots off of this clear statement and answers the question that naturally pops in to the audience's mind now: "Jim, why should we adopt Kansei to discover new packaging opportunities?"

So Jim completes the 5-Minute Column with the three main reasons why:

1. Connecting feelings with packaging creates more satisfaction
2. Kansei will widen the scope of packaging design innovation
3. More satisfying packaging forms platforms for other innovations

These three statements are Jim's appeal to reason in Act II. (If he had more time to present, Jim would continue to explain his reasons in detail by completing the 15-minute and 45-minute columns.) Recall that in Act I, Jim appealed to emotion, by setting the context for the presentation in personal terms.  This balance between emotion and reason aligns with what neurologists including Antonio Damasio have found in their research -- that emotions are essential to rational thinking.

With the first three scenes of Act II complete, we move next to the turning point, which is a rephrasing of the emotional engine that drives the presentation forward and will pivot us into Act III, in this case:

Can Kansei open understanding and successful innovation?

I don't know, Jim, but that's an interesting question that engages the audience to consider your whole argument, because it reaches back to remind everyone of the balance in Act II, "successful innovation".

Now begins the final Act III, which ties everything back together:

1. Overcome the limitations of knowledge with a new approach (this statement summarizes the gap between the balance and the imbalance in Act I)
2. Adopt Kansei to discover new packaging opportunities (this restates the solution from Act I)
3. Unfolding opportunities of innovation (this is a simple summary statement to appear on screen during Jim's verbal conclusion)
4. Got Kansei? (this is an interesting phrase to appear on screen during Jim's Q&A session)

Now with the statements of the storyboard complete, it only takes a few minutes to prepare the Word doc (Download jim_storyboard_prep.doc) and transfer the script  to PowerPoint (p. 78) using the Storyboard Formatter (p. 217) that you can download for free; or the process goes even quicker with the Add-In. 

The resulting storyboard looks like this: Download jim_storyboard.ppt. When you save the file to your local computer and preview it in PowerPoint's Slide Sorter view, you can easily see all of the major acts and scenes because of the hidden Storyboard Guides (p. 88) that were included in the Storyboard Formatter. View it in Notes Page view to see how the slide area and notes area are designed to work together.  We'll use all of these features as we begin working on visuals.

In the meantime, I recommend that Jim do an initial rehearsal with the PowerPoint file "as-is" (p. 68), using the headlines of the slides as his prompts as he spends about 25 seconds per slide (p. 69) . Doing that will give him the confidence to know he has a strong and coherent story here, and that the next stage of adding visuals and narration will be the icing on the (story) cake.