If You’re Using PowerPoint, Excel Or A Digital Tool To Communicate A Message… How Many Of These Mistakes Are You Making?

My conversations with clients this month have focused on presenting information more usefully.

Too many town halls, team meetings, project updates, sales meetings and more are filled with noise… a lot of talk, data, slides, visuals, writing… but much less clarity, rigour, focus on what needs to be communicated, debated, decided and acted on as a result.

We’ve all been there; not listening, doing other work, chatting to colleagues whilst someone else is presenting… the list of ‘bad habits’ goes on.

So, if you need to present/share/update anything to your colleagues where you must use visuals then please, please, please, can we avoid the following:

1. Making your presentation look like a reading document. There’s simply no point in doing this. If you’re showing me something - should I read it or listen to you - because I can’t do both simultaneously. Our association cortex in the brain becomes overwhelmed. Less visual, more verbal is better and if it’s a document for pre-read, put the ‘talk track’ in the notes.
   
   
2. Failing to set context immediately. Why are you telling me this? Make this question your ‘north star’. If you’re telling me all this to provide ‘an update’; then that’s just not good enough. Why do I need an update? Dial up the rigour on why I should care about what you’re saying.
   
   
3. Just throwing a load of numbers at the audience. Set context first before discussing numbers. If you don’t frame the question/challenge/issue/priority before showing me lots of data, then I must work this all out for myself. Again, I won’t because the association cortex is, once more, in meltdown. I’m not listening, you’ve moved on, and the audience is now lost.
   
   
4. Failing to help the audience know where to look at visual material. If we don’t take responsibility for this, then we have no idea where our audience’s attention is focused, and so we’ve lost control. Use ‘embedded commands.’ This is where you direct the audience where to look when showing them something. Very effective for breaking down a complicated visual message to guide the audience through your narrative. If you don’t, we’re all processing different things, at different speeds, whilst looking at the same visual. It simply does not work.
   
   
5. Believing our technical expertise will win the day! Often it won’t because I don’t have your technical expertise and more importantly, I don’t care. That’s your job, not mine. Translate your expertise by explaining your visuals clearly, crisply, concisely to me so that I understand the relevant information easily and nothing more. Avoid minutiae because most audiences don’t need it, don’t want it and are not going to understand or remember it anyway.

Are these the only mistakes? No. More next month. Let’s start with getting much better at avoiding all these.