Someone had to say it. And Bill Lane did. "There is a way to be quickly taken for the opposite of a leader, and to be typecast within seconds as a dork, a dweeb, a jargon-monkey, a bore,” writes Lane in the memoir of his twenty years as speechwriter to now-retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch. “It's called PowerPoint."

A tad indelicate, perhaps, but Lane is spot on. As a means to excite or inspire or motivate, PowerPoint (or any similar slide software) may surpass smoke signals, but its failings are still profound, and reports on them pop up regularly—including prominent articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. For succinctness, though, you can’t beat a cartoon published in the New Yorker magazine in which Satan is seated behind his desk in Hell and he’s talking to an underling: “I need someone well versed in the art of torture,” he says. “Do you know PowerPoint?” Or how about a real-life comment placed on the Web by one veteran of the presentation wars: “We groan when we have to attend a meeting with a slide deck as the star.”

You get the point. Yet, like the Energizer bunny, PowerPoint’s reign as the presentation medium in today’s world keeps going and going. So how to explain this? And what’s the alternative?

One explanation—as Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post put it—is PowerPoint’s “seductive availability.” It’s just too easy. You’re on the hook for a presentation? It’s due next week, and there’s no time to prepare? Just dive into the corporate server and pull up a collection of slide decks, tweak a bullet point here and there, and, voilà, pressure’s off. Only thing left to do is show up and deliver the thing.

But there’s the rub, because the nature of PowerPoint makes a good delivery—one that engages the audience’s interest and attention—a huge problem. Its “cognitive style,” as Yale’s renowned graphics professor Edward Tufte puts it, makes it fatal to a memorable, or even a coherent, presentation. He points to one instance in which the over-reliance on PowerPoint to convey information may even have had catastrophic results.

Tufte refers to the study-commission report on NASA’s Columbia shuttle disaster of 2003. The report suggests that the disaster might have been averted if mission controllers had had a full, narrative description of the situation they were looking at. Instead they got PowerPoint. In particular, there was one crucial detail that NASA had apparently overlooked in making the decision to go ahead with the shuttle’s re-entry into the atmosphere. That detail was buried as a cryptic sub-sub-bullet item at the bottom of one slide in the large PowerPoint deck.

Inherent Defects

What’s the remedy for the PowerPoint Syndrome? The remedy is thinking in terms of story, not charts. The story’s the thing, and charts are lousy at telling a story. They’re also lousy at distinguishing the more important from the less important, or the less important from the unimportant. Chart language typically consists of incomplete thoughts or meaningless fragments. The connective tissues are missing—the transitions, the explanations, the elaborations that might persuade the listener to buy into the speaker’s position.

Equally serious is the problem of divided attention. The human mind doesn’t do well in processing multiple sources of information at the same time. This point is wonderfully demonstrated in a video clip you can find on YouTube. There’s a group of five or six people gathered in a circle, and there’s a basketball, and viewers are challenged to count the number of times the basketball is tossed back and forth among the group members. Another person—a stranger as it were—strolls into view as the ball is being passed around, and he’s wearing a gorilla suit. The “gorilla” pauses right in the middle of the group, he mugs and jives for the camera for a moment, then strolls off. With their attention riveted on the ball as it’s being passed around, fully half of the viewers fail to notice the gorilla.

A PowerPoint addict is risking the same result; he’s trying to force the audience to read bullet points and to listen simultaneously to his spoken words. Ain’t gonna happen. A chart is either a distraction from what he’s saying, or he is a distraction to those who are trying to decipher a chart.

However that may be, the deadliest defect in slideware as a speech-support tool, from a pure performance standpoint, may be that a speaker is left to wing it when trying to stretch a list of abbreviated, acronym-plagued bullet points into a coherent—let alone compelling—narrative. A coherent narrative is one that not only makes sense but is free of the stammering and the “ums” and “uhs” and other verbal tics that, instead of keeping an audience interested, makes them flee to their BlackBerrys and Treos. Captive audiences are a thing of the past.

Chock Full

So stop thinking in terms of slide decks. Think story, and “story” here means a narrative that stimulates basic human interest or emotions and draws people in to your message. It means connecting with your audience on a gut level. If you don’t do that, the amount of detail you shove at them matters little. The good news is that any human organization is full of stories—either motivating or inspiring or aggravating or simply entertaining.

How, then, do you connect? How do you develop a story?

One: Make it personal. Think of something that has happened in your life that can be related to the message of your talk. Something about yourself or your kids, your spouse or your uncle, a friend, a colleague, anybody you know. If it’s about some failure or misstep on your part—some doubt or fear or confusion—so much the better. They’ll be vastly more receptive to what you say next.

Your message may involve a subject you fear is dreadfully dull. Computer visualization, let’s say. Maybe you can begin with a story of how you, or somebody you know, first realized that you or he or she was color-blind. That kind of stuff can’t be put on a chart.

Forcing Thought

Two: Develop and organize your presentation—in writing. This, together with the subsequent expansion into a full draft (naked commercial plug here), is what a professional speechwriter can help you do. A written narrative forces you to think through the logic and persuasiveness of your argument, enabling you to spot any flaws or weaknesses, and correct them, before the audience gets its shot.

Three: Only after that process has begun should you start thinking about what charts and visuals might be used to reinforce or punctuate your main points. That’s their proper role. Whatever visuals you choose, try to make them impactful—like big animal pictures, or cartoons and the like. And the smallest number of words possible.

Four: Refine and rehearse the narrative—aloud—until you’ve got it internalized. And internalized does not mean memorized. Don’t worry if you find yourself unconsciously straying from the exact phrasing in the script. Internalized means you know the thrust of what you mean to say and you have a way to say it one way or another. Once comfortable with the flow, the logic, and the messaging, you may then choose to use the full script as your podium or teleprompter support. Or you may shrink it down to a set of notes, to whatever level works for you. Whichever way you do it, you want the audience focused on you and your ideas.

Is this hard? Sure it is. But no pain, no gain. Or as a senior GE executive instructed Bill Lane: “Tell them [other GE executives] they are going nowhere in the General Electric Company if they can’t do a great business presentation.”

That means story first, PowerPoint later.

© by Bill Dunne, managing partner, Dunne & Partners, LLC

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Dunne started his executive-communications firm in 1993 on a foundation of work in journalism and corporate communications. “The heart of business activity is persuasion, and we help our clients persuade.  We write speeches. We coach speech-makers. We write copy. We research and write marcom pieces, by-lined articles, op-ed pieces, white papers, case studies, strategy presentations, video scripts. We do CPR on ineffective scripts and PowerPoint presentations. In short, we help our clients with their most important communications.”