In the last issue of The Beacon, we covered the basic requirements of designing and delivering a good PowerPoint presentation (please see “Death by PowerPoint,” August 2009). There was a great deal of interest in that issue, and therefore, we’re following it up with a second issue to further explore the topic of presentation skills. Here, we share several great ways to organize your content into manageable pieces that are easy for your audience to digest.

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The PowerPoint presentation is a communication medium that is entirely overused in our modern business culture – 30 million times a day, by some estimates. We are addicted to the business presentation. And this preposterous figure means two things:

• It is highly likely that you will need to be good at giving business presentations if you are going to enjoy professional advancement.
• There are, quite simply, a lot of really bad presentations given every day.

The great presentation is a combination of three things: well-organized content, clear delivery and appealing visuals, all brought together into a seamlessly integrated performance. If any one of these three components is seriously lacking, the overall performance will suffer. They all matter. But the one area where we see fundamental mistakes made every day is in the organization of content.

Most good presentations consist of three sections: the open, the detail, and the close. The open and the close are purely ways to package your detail. In the open, you should introduce your ideas, capture attention, and lay the groundwork for your main points. And in the close, you should summarize the message and repeat the key points.

In terms of total presentation time, you will spend relatively little on your open and your close. In a 30-minute presentation, you might spend a minute or two on the open, a minute or two on the close, and the rest on your detail. That’s a lot of time where you can lose your audience’s attention. It’s the detail section that is the meat of your presentation, and how you organize and package that detail will directly impact your success.

The detail section is the place where most presentations go spinning wildly out of control and ultimately fail. My colleagues and I are convinced that this is due to diminished attention spans in an increasingly time-starved world. People have too much information coming at them all day, every day. It’s hard to capture and maintain attention. If your audience has to work too hard to understand, follow and absorb what you are saying, a large percentage of them will simply stop trying and move their focus on to something else. While we don’t believe we should speak to the lowest common denominator all of the time, we do believe that we need to be cognizant of the world in which we live. We must always be diligent about organizing a clear message so our audience doesn’t have to work too hard to understand it.

So here are five things you can do tomorrow to organize better, more-clear content in your presentation:

• Make sure every piece of detail you include helps you advance towards your presentation goal. All too often, my colleagues and I witness presentations that last far too long and are hard to follow because they jump around among different points that don’t seem to connect. The great presentation always has a clear goal (build consensus around “x”; persuade audience to purchase or invest, etc.; build credibility for the speaker) and is always advancing towards that goal. Once you know what you are trying to achieve in the presentation, then constantly ask yourself during your preparation if a piece of information or detail helps you get where you are trying to go. If the answer is “yes,” then include it. If the answer is “no,” then take it out. If the answer is “maybe,” then the decision to include it is a function of how much time you have.
• Organize your detail into chapters. The great presentation has content organized into smaller sections or chapters, not just one long, uninterrupted mass. This allows the presenter to group the detail into common themes, making it easier on the speaker and the audience. For the speaker, it becomes easier to tell the story when you can break the detail into specific, logical story lines, rather than jumping around from issue to issue. And for the audience, it becomes easier to follow and absorb the story. For example, if your presentation is about four possible solutions to the organization’s main challenge, then each solution would be a chapter. Or, if you are presenting on a new product line, then perhaps there is a chapter on manufacturing process, one on cost controls, one on marketing and one on resource allocation. The longer your presentation, the more important this approach becomes. If you don’t break your information down into smaller sections or chapters, the attention span of your audience will wane. Most audiences will be able to focus on a 10- to 15-minute presentation. But if your presentation is going to be 30, 45, 60 minutes or more, this approach becomes critical.
• Treat each chapter like a mini-presentation. Once you have divided your detail into chapters, try to organize them so they can stand on their own by giving each chapter its own introduction and summary. Why is this important? When you introduce the information in that chapter well, you are preparing your audience to expect and understand it. And when you summarize it well at the end of the chapter, the audience will remember what you want them to remember. Good presenting is about maximizing what your audience absorbs and remembers. So build each chapter around some key themes or points for that section.
• Tie the key points for each chapter back to your overall themes. Use each chapter to reinforce the macro-themes of the overall presentation. Always keep in mind what the overall goal and key points for the presentation are, and whenever possible in each chapter, tie back to them. The more you can help your audience “connect the dots,” the more likely you are to have a successful outcome.
• Create good slides out of relevant content. In the great presentation, the content the speaker has chosen to include dictates the slides that are in the deck. In the bad presentation, a slide that the speaker just “likes” ends up in the deck, and that slide then dictates the direction of the story. This is a mistake. In other words, don’t ever include a slide just because you think it is a good slide. Decide what story you want to tell and what points you want to make, and then choose slides that help you tell that story. The slides are simply a means to an end. And that end is your story.

Regular readers of The Beacon are well familiar with the fact that we believe that in a complex, information-intensive world, organizing and articulating clear communication messages is critical to success. And clear communication requires that we package our information correctly. Well-packaged information requires more than just compelling introductions and clear summaries. Well-packaged information also requires that our actual content is well organized and easy to follow and absorb. In other words, we need to make it easier for our audience to remember what we say. Because, in the end, if people don’t remember what we say, what have we actually accomplished? Let’s make it easy for people to remember us – and our messages.