What shape is your presentation? Flat? Round? Spiky? It’s an unusual question, but a very effective one for diagnosing the biggest problem affecting most presentations.

PowerPoint often guides us down a bad path from the very start. The built-in templates conform us to a very rigid structure — titles and bullet points on every slide. Essentially, they encourage us to create a series of isolated lists, which is an ineffective way to structure your presentation.

Hills and Heart Rates

Before PowerPoint existed, people thought of presentations as speeches, and we tend to approach speech writing differently from presentation design.

There aren’t any visuals to rely on in a speech, so it’s up to our words to make the content interesting. For this reason, speechwriters focus on the narrative, or the overall structure of the speech.

Speeches are round, like hills. They’re usually in the story-plot structure, which consists of an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. If we abstractly charted a speech, it would look something like this.

Slide presentations look very different. The standard presentation format (template) encourages us to create an isolated series of lists (titles & bullets), and so we end up presenting our material as just that.

It goes something like this: After our title and intro slides, we toss up a slide with a single topic (e.g. “Competitive Landscape”). We say everything we can about the topic, then move on to the next slide with a new topic (e.g. “Market Size”), where we say everything we can about that. This repeats for about ten to twenty minutes until we come to a slide titled, “Conclusion”, where we abruptly stop talking and ask for questions.

Slide presentations are spiky, like the beeping heart-rate monitors you see in hospitals (EKGs). That spiky shape is the reason so many presentations are so boring to sit through.

Wired to remember

Humans love stories, and we’re all natural storytellers. Every time we chat with friends we’re telling each other stories, and we’re not usually reciting a series of isolated lists to one another.

Our minds are wired to take in and remember round information much better than spiky information. This is why you can remember the details of a famous speech or the plot of a good movie, much easier than you can remember the items on your last grocery list. Your brain processes round information better because round information is saturated with meaning, which is the key requirement for memory formation.

So when you’re working on your next presentation, remember to consider its shape. Bullet points aren’t the problem — the way we’ve grown accustomed to using them is.

Keep it round, avoid the spikes.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss some of the inspiration behind THIRST in an interview with Geetesh Bajaj from the Indezine blog.

View the full interview here.

Indezine is a comprehensive web resource for all things PowerPoint (tutorials, tips, downloads, and more). If you spend a lot of time in PowerPoint, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

I normally don’t like to bring up politics here, but this is a moment worthy of an exception.

History was made last night when Barack Obama won the 2008 US presidential election in a landslide victory. While I disagree with John McCain’s use of negative campaign tactics over the past several months, I congratulate and applaud him for his sincere and graceful concession speech. He nailed it, expressing a caring and appropriate message of unity that you can tell came from his heart.

Barack Obama’s victory speech, delivered to a crowd extending far into the night, was yet another one for the record books. Barack Obama is arguably the best communicator ever to be elected US president. He is an example of the tremendous power a strong, balanced, and confident person has to inspire and lead others. He is, without doubt, a role model to us all.

It is a very exciting time to be an American.

Keeping that fourth wall down.

When a character in a play steps out of a scene and reveals his or her awareness of the audience, it’s called, “breaking the fourth wall”. The fourth wall is the imaginary wall that normally separates the characters on stage from the audience in the theater.

In a presentation, you should be breaking the fourth wall the entire time. After all, you’re directly addressing an audience.

In fact, you never want to build a fourth wall during a presentation. That is, you never want to ignore your audience and start talking to yourself.

It sounds funny, but people talk to themselves during presentations all the time. We’ve all seen it, and most of us are guilty of having done it. It happens most often when something goes wrong.

Stop yourself from muttering little comments under your breath (e.g. “Oops. Hold on. What just happened?”). As awkward as it can feel on stage, it looks much more professional to pause silently for a few seconds when you need to regain your bearings.

Avoid talking about your presentation tools (e.g. “How do you use this remote?” “Is this video working?”). And, most importantly, don’t face your slides as you talk. Your slides didn’t come to see you speak, your audience did.

Learn to always keep your audience in mind, keep that fourth wall down, and you’ll immediately see a major improvement in your presentation delivery.

Great presentation design starts with the right approach.

The digital dilemma

How do you begin making a presentation? Most people start digital. They sit at their computer, open up Microsoft PowerPoint, choose a shnazzy theme, and start churning out titles and bullet points. A few hours (and several clipart images) later, the presentation is “complete”.

Unfortunately, this method often leads to the boring presentations we’re all used to. It puts the emphasis on your bullet points instead of the story you’re telling.

Effective slides emphasize the important messages in a presentation. They don’t double as a giant TelePrompTer to read from. Remember, bullet points are not talking points.

The right foot

Instead, try starting analog. Grab a pen and paper, find a comfortable place to work, and dedicate an hour or two to brainstorming your presentation away from the computer.

Consider these questions: What’s the purpose of your presentation? Why were you asked to speak? What does the audience expect? What does the audience already know? What’s your main point? What’s your most important message? Why should your audience care?

Initially, pretend your presentation will be a speech without slides. Sketch out some talking points for how you’d deliver that speech. How would you frame your content to make it compelling? What stories would you share to emphasize your message?

After you’ve put your ideas down on paper, then start thinking about your slides. What sort of visuals will enhance your message? Approach each slide as a blank canvas, not just a space to list your talking points.

Starting analog yields better results because it helps you focus on the story you’re telling, instead of lists of bullet points.

I like starting with a pen and paper because it gives me the freedom to write haphazardly and sketch pictures at the same time. If sketching isn’t your thing, a word processor works fine too. The point is just to avoid presentation software and slide templates at first.

Give the analog approach a try. Keep your focus on the story you’re telling and you’ll be surprised by how much better your next presentation turns out.

The results are in, and I am thrilled to announce my recent presentation, THIRST, was selected as the best presentation in the 2008 World’s Best Presentation Contest on SlideShare.net!

THIRST is an educational presentation designed to spark the conversation around the impending world freshwater shortage. I’m proud to report it’s working. Since it was first released just two months ago, THIRST has spread across the web and has been viewed over 60,000 times.

This year’s World’s Best Presentation Contest attracted 2,415 presentations from over 130 countries across 5 continents. The judges were four top gurus of the presentation world, Guy Kawasaki, Bert Decker, Garr Reynolds, and Nancy Duarte.

It’s truly an honor to have won the contest for a second year in a row. I extend a warm thank you to everyone who showed their support.

Jeff -

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Check out this presentation I created and entered into this year’s “World’s Best Presentation Contest” on SlideShare.net. The contest attracts entries from all across the world on a myriad of topics and is a great source for design inspiration. This year there are some very creative entries, so be sure to check them out and vote for the ones you like best. You can vote for THIRST by visiting this page.

THIRST is an educational presentation that explores humanity’s water use and the emerging worldwide water shortage—topics I deeply believe people need to be aware of. I designed it to function as a stand-alone presentation, which means the slides tell the full story (no need for person to deliver it). I’d love to hear what you think. Enjoy!

World’s Best Presentation Contest

Dazed and confused

I’m sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a dimly lit room. A projector screen is reflecting royal blue while a voice drones from up on stage. Bullet points. I know I should be paying closer attention to this presentation, but my brain just can’t focus.

I look around the room and see I’m not the only one drifting. The eyes of the woman seated two rows behind me are staring straight ahead, glazed. Her mind is somewhere far from here. The man on my right has totally jumped ship—he’s halfway through a game of Blackberry Solitaire.

The only one in the room who doesn’t seem to be drifting is the presenter on stage. In fact, he seems to be smiling. This poor guy is contently working through his slides, oblivious to the fact his audience has abandoned him.

How does this happen? How can this guy not realize his presentation is so boring? I know he can hear himself speaking, the problem is he’s just not listening.

“Hearing” happens in your ears. “Listening” happens in your brain. Listen to yourself from the mindset of your audience and you’ll notice a dramatic improvement in your presentation skills.

Listening is an active process that involves asking the right questions at the right times. In delivery, you want to focus your listening on two areas: “what you’re saying” and “how you’re saying it”.

1. What you’re saying

Question to ask yourself: Does this make sense?

If I start speaking in Spanish to an audience of non-Spanish speakers, I’m obviously going to lose their attention pretty fast. The same thing happens in a complicated presentation.

You’re the expert. You’ve taken the time to do your research—immersing yourself in your content for days, weeks, maybe even months. Steeping in your content and its associated lingo for so long makes it easy to fall into “expert-speak” mode.

Unless you’re presenting exclusively to other experts, expert-speak mode is something to avoid. Things that make sense to you will fall flat with your audience since they don’t necessarily know all the things you know.

It’s your job to simplify and explain your content in such a way that it makes sense to your audience.

2. How you’re saying it

Question to ask yourself: Is this interesting?

This one is a bit more subjective and a bit more difficult. “Interesting” is different for everyone.

Think back to a great teacher in your life, someone you learned a lot from. For me, one such person was my 9th grade English teacher. He was able get a bunch of high school kids revved up about Shakespeare and grammar because he knew how to relate the material in a meaningful way. He knew how to make it interesting.

Are you presenting to the company’s sales team or a group of programmers? The two groups tend to find different things interesting, so the lingo, metaphors, and examples you use will also need to be different.

Take some time to learn about your audience; frame your content so it’s interesting to them.

Lights, camera, you!

You may even want to take your listening one step further and record yourself practicing your presentation.

Listening to your recordings will bring to light things about yourself you had no idea existed. You’ll discover mannerisms you didn’t know you had, phrases you didn’t realize you used. It’s a humbling but valuable experience and something all the pros do.

At the end of the day, your goal is for your audience to understand and enjoy your presentation. If you want your audience to listen to you, begin by listening to yourself.

Do you really need those slides?

These days it seems the very act of giving a presentation comes with the expectation that at least a few PowerPoint slides will be involved. If you’ve ever tried telling your boss you don’t want to use slides in a presentation, chances are the response you got was a shocked, gasping, “why not?”

Well, because slides aren’t always necessary, that’s why. In fact, sometimes a presentation is better without them. It just depends on the content and context.

Too often people forget the purpose of slides. They are a useful tool to support your message, not take its place. When they’re used well, good slides can take an ordinary presentation from good to great, but it’s important to remember they are never as important as having a good story to tell in the first place.

I was reminded of this when I came across a talk recently given by Michael Pollan in the Authors@Google series. Michael is the author of five books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, both New York Times bestsellers. He also happens to be an expert storyteller.

Even without a single visual, Michael’s presentation is vivid and engaging. He skillfully uses words and stories instead of slides to paint the pictures of his narrative. He even includes several statistics throughout his speech, not skipping a single beat as he recalls them from memory (an indicator of good preparation).

Michael’s presentation is a reminder that while slides can add a lot, having an interesting story to tell is what ultimately makes or breaks your presentation.

With no slides distracting our attention, we listen more closely to his words. It’s almost as though he’s telling us a few stories from across a dinner table, which is a style that works exceptionally well for his context and content.

Check out his Authors@Google presentation below, as well as his 2007 TED talk.

If you’re not familiar with Michael Pollan’s work, you’re in for a treat. I can guarantee you’ll find his perspectives on food and nature fascinating, potentially even life changing. Enjoy!

I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times, but it always helps to hear it again. Public speaking is all about preparation. It’s great to know how to think on your feet, but there’s no question the best presentations are the result of lots of practice.

So what’s the best way to prepare? Well, it depends. The chart above depicts the quality spectrum of speeches with varying styles of preparation.

At the boring end of the spectrum (the end you want to avoid) are the 10% of speeches that are prewritten word-for-word and read out loud from behind a podium. Think most graduation speeches. The people delivering these speeches don’t bother rehearsing the delivery since they assume there’s no need to—it’s all written out. But if you can think back to your high school days, you’ll recall that reading out loud to a room full of people is a lot harder than it seems. The rigid, stuttering delivery falls flat on the snoozing audience.

In the middle of the spectrum are the speeches delivered from an outline. For almost all of the presentations you will give, this is the best way to prepare. Speaking from an outline forces you to use conversational, natural language in your delivery, which makes the speech much more appealing to the audience.

The quality of your delivery will depend entirely on the amount of time you spend practicing. I don’t mean thinking about practicing while sitting at your computer writing your outline. I mean actually standing up in a room, facing a mirror or wall or lineup stuffed animals, whatever, and delivering the speech start to finish. The more times you can talk through your speech entirely, the more confident you’ll feel when the time comes to deliver it for real. Confidence is success.

Then, at the highest end of the spectrum are the greatest of great speeches. Like the worst speeches, these too are written out word-for-word beforehand, but unlike the worst speeches they are rehearsed so many times they practically become memorized. The process of delivering a speech like this has more in common with acting a scene than it does with reading words from a page or prompter. Think Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

Writing a speech out in advance gives you the ability to choose every word, to predesign every metaphor for the strongest impact. It requires an enormous amount of preparation, weeks worth of it, so save this method for the speeches that really matter.