Order! Order!

When presenting information, most people hate ‘Death by PowerPoint’, where the speaker has hundreds of slides. The popular solution is to cut down the presentation to just a few key slides. However, in many situations it isn’t the number of slides that’s the main problem – it’s the order in which the information is given.

Addressing the issue
The classic problem of presentation style goes back to school. We were all taught that the way to present the results of a science project is: Objectives - Methods – Results - Conclusions. However, if you use this approach in a business presentation which has involved a large amount of work and has produced loads of data, you’re likely to send everyone to sleep before you reach the answers!

Also, although you may have spent a lot of time interpreting the data and drawing your conclusions, you’re asking your audience to assess all of the data in as little as an hour. Inevitably, many people may draw different conclusions (particularly if they have a different agenda, or if a few pieces of data just happen to resonate with them).

The problem is akin to taking a two year old child somewhere on their tricycle. If you need to get there as quickly as possible, the best way is to pull them from the front. That way, you are in control. But if you try pushing from the back, they will veer off all over the place. A presentation is just the same…

Changing your approach
If you ‘push from the back’ – by delivering vast amounts of data first – your audience will all interpret it in different ways. Instead, try ‘pulling from the front’:

• Start with a short, sharp summary of the issues that your presentation will address
• Then go straight to the answers
• Follow these up with the supporting data and the details

This way, there is much more chance that everyone will end up with the same messages (as long as the supporting data is conclusive). Those who are only interested in the key results can leave early if they want to, whilst those who like the details can stay and hear the whole story. (In fact, this approach may actually stimulate people to stay and find out how you came to your conclusions!)

With a large project, you may feel the urge to present all of your data, if only to prove how much work was involved. And cutting everything down to just a few key slides may leave some people feeling that they don’t know the whole story. By simply changing the order of the presentation, you could still present most of your data, whilst keeping your audience interested. They’ll be able to see how your results support your conclusions.

This is a standard approach used by consultants and is based upon a book by Barbara Minto called ‘The Pyramid Principle’. Her book goes into much more detail about the way to structure all the elements of a presentation – but more of that in future ‘5-Minute Insights’ articles!