Four ways to improve your work presentations

The first time I conducted a work presentation, I remember being nervous and wanting to prepare as much as I could. I searched for ‘presentation tips’ and devoured as many articles as I could. Out of all of the research, the one tip that I remember was “don’t read off of the slides”.

Guess what I ended up doing. Yes, I read off of the slides.

As I tried to improvise the conclusions and takeaways from each slide, I looked at the text-heavy slides and found that the text was just as good, if not better, at explaining the slides than I was. But I could see that my audience was not happy with me wasting their time. Nor was the audience as engaged or as interested as I wanted them to be.

Recently, I picked up Dan Roam’s Show & Tell, which has the subtitle How everybody can make extraordinary presentations. You know that a book is good when it says all the things that you have been thinking about in your mind, but had a hard time putting it down into a single word or concept. Dan’s book was like that for me. Even with 10+ years of workshops, facilitations, lectures, and in parallel, active Toastmaster participation, I learned a few new things that will change how I present at work. Here is what I learned:

1 — The ideal slide structure

Dan Roam is the founder of a company called Digital Roam, which helps organizations create visual clarity in the things that they do and present. All of this to say that he is a master at helping organizations come up with the right narratives and using that to make extraordinary presentations.

Over the years, he has learned that an ideal slide should contain the following:

• A headline — the main point of the slide
• A picture — a visual that helps describe the key insight
• A brief caption — a summary of the key insight (this is not what you will say during the presentation)
• Nothing else

Takeaway: Look at each slide in your work presentation. Does it have the ideal slide structure? How can you change it if not? Try the following:

• Text-heavy? — Add a visual or drawing that can explain the key idea
• Too many graphs or figures? — Ask what the key conclusion is that you want your audience to take away. If there are multiple key conclusions, you have too many ideas on the slide.
• Is there one large table full of information? — Can you pare down the table into one row or column of what you want to show?
• Too many ideas? — See point #2 — one idea per slide

2 — One idea per slide

One of the biggest challenges I had with my work presentations was having multiple ideas to present on a slide. As a management consultant, I liked to pack in analysis, research, footnotes, and more so that the client would say “yes, you have done the work and I believe in what you are saying”. Okay, so they didn't actually say this, but I wanted them to think it. This meant that slides would often be cluttered with text, graphs, figures, or even all three. At one point, some of my slides had 6 point font and required a magnifying glass to read.

To keep our slides tight, we limit each to a single idea — and that is all — from Dan Roam’s Show & Tell

Why try to cram five ideas into one slide when you can present five ideas over five slides? You will have room for some text that will be large enough for people in the audience to see, a visual, and you can flip through the slides a lot quicker (and engage the audience more) when you don’t have to give a lecture for each slide.

Takeaway: As you look at your work presentation, do you have more than one idea on any one slide? If so, break it up into one idea per slide.

3 — Four storylines

Dan says that there are only four types of presentations that anyone can ever do. And the way to identify what type of presentation is by how you want the audience to feel at the end of the presentation.

1. We change their information (we add new data to something they already know)
2. We change their knowledge or ability (we show them how to do something useful)
3. We change their actions (we persuade them to do something new)
4. We change their beliefs (we inspire them to understand something new about themselves and the world)

These four changes in our audience correspond to the following four storylines, respectively:

The report

All good reports help the audience to see a connection they had never seen before or understand something they never thought of before. A good report has what Dan calls, a 6-mode storyline. The 6-mode is the idea that we can break down any type of idea, problem, or story into six modes of information: Who and what are we talking about, Where are they located, When do they occur, How much is there, How do they interact, and Why is this so?

When presenting reports, present the why first, then cover each of the five other modes before looping back to the why at the end.

The explanation

How do you know you have done a good explanation? Ask yourself the following questions:

• Did you tell a true story?
• Did you change the audience’s knowledge or ability?
• Does the audience know enough to practice the new ability and is it practical enough to apply?

All good explanations follow this step-by-step storyline of the lay of the land (where are we now, where are we going, what’s between here and there), the roadmap (how we will get there), the first step, subsequent steps, almost there (let’s take a look back to see how far we have come), and the arrival (the audience has some new knowledge or ability).

The pitch

A good pitch, according to Dan, establishes common ground with the audience, identifies a common problem that everybody recognizes and understands, and then provides a new solution that resolves the problem. If the pitch is convincing, the audience will buy your idea and take the action you recommend.

A good pitch contains the windup (summary of where you are today), the hurdle (the problem), the vision (a glimpse of a way over the problem), the options (two ways to reach the vision, a boring one, and an inspiring one), the close (show why the inspiring option is the only option), the fine print (the details of how to make it happen) and then the hook (an added benefit).

The drama

The drama’s storyline structure is something you will recognize if you are familiar with Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”.

From Wikimedia Commons

The dramas we present can follow a similar arc: one fine day (things aren’t perfect but they are okay), the challenge (a problem comes up that we can’t ignore), descending crises (problems go from bad to worse), rock bottom (all hope is lost), the discovery (we suddenly see a way out), the rise (through abilities we never knew we had, we fight our way back), the return (we don’t just make it home, we enter a whole new world of possibility) and the lesson (we come away with something we never forget).

Takeaway: How are you trying to change your audience? How can you use the storyline to structure your slides? It’s also not a good idea to present two different storylines at once.

4 — Practice, fail a lot, and don’t be afraid to feel silly

Dan suggests a ‘plugs out’ practice, which is a NASA term for creating an environment as close as possible to the real thing and then practicing.

For example, if you have access to the same room that you will present in, have your presentation set up, get all the audio and video working, and then practice as if it is the real thing. Don’t sit in the back of the room, click through slides, and say “this is where I talk about blah blah blah”. Practice as if it was real.

There are several benefits to practicing as if it was real: you will learn what works and what does not work so you are not stumbling during the real presentation, you will gain valuable feedback on where you stumble in your presentation, and you will feel less nervous during the real presentation having already done the same presentation in a similar environment multiple times.

I would add a few things here to help improve your practice sessions:

• Record yourself speaking so you can watch what you do, what you say, and how you say it. You are often more critical of yourself than others are on you, so you will find a lot more mistakes than if you asked your friend to give you feedback.
• If you are trying to deliver your presentation without notes, practice in different ways. Start at the end. Start in the middle. Start at the beginning, go about a third of the way, and then jump to the end. Practice starting at different points in your presentation (because who knows, maybe your boss will ask you to skip different slides).
• You are going to feel silly speaking with no one else in the room, and that is great. Better to feel silly now and hone your presentation, than to mess up your presentation and feel silly during the real thing.
• Failure is a sure thing. In my experience delivering speeches and work presentations for a decade, I have never delivered a perfect presentation on my first try. But the point with practicing is to work out the kinks so you can deliver the presentation in a way that even if you make mistakes, you can recover from them.

Final thought

Dan’s book Show & Tell shows us that anybody can make extraordinary presentations, as long as they follow four simple rules:

• One idea per slide
• A headline, picture, caption, and nothing else on a slide
• Follow one of the four storylines (a report, explanation, pitch, or drama) as a structure for your presentation
• Practice as if it was the real thing

I originally published this article on Medium on Sept. 15, 2020. If you are interested in more of what I (Wang Yip) write, please follow me on Medium.