The Hindu Business Line : PowerPoint rules

It was one of those soporific afternoons when a person’s deepest desire is to take a leisurely nap after a sumptuous lunch. God proposes and seminar organisers dispose. There was to be no napping that day as I was attending the post-lunch, graveyard session of a seminar devoted to some no-doubt important subject. The speaker, a person of great eminence, was literally droning on and on. One mind-numbing PowerPoint slide followed another and each one was read out verb atim with little voice inflection or pause for effect. Many of us in the audience were a wink away from doing that most embarrassing of things in a public place — nodding off suddenly and waking up with a sudden jerk and looking around sheepishly to reassure oneself that no one else had noticed.

The emergence of presentation aids such as PowerPoint has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it has made it easy to structure and present one’s thoughts in an electronic slide format; on the other it has also made it easy to forget that display and graphics are only tools to effectively communicate content. This is one more instance where, if it is not used properly, the medium can overpower the message.

It has been established that in any person-to-person communication, almost two-thirds of the effectiveness is attributed to non-verbal cues. Body language, the tone and the connection to the audience form the essence of successful communication. In an age where essentially impersonal means of connectivity such as e-mail and SMS dominate, the art of communicating to a live audience is also increasingly getting infected with the same rules of usage. Thus, we see many presentations that are delivered in a staccato style, read verbatim from the slides and with very little tonality or inflection. Most importantly, there seems to be very little attempt to establish a personal connection with the audience. In addition, the ease with which glitzy graphics can be tagged on makes it even more difficult to concentrate on the essentials.

In presentations to a live audience, the attempt should be to establish a pipeline of personal connection and enlarge the size of this pipe through smart usage of relevant content garnished with contextual humour. Once the attention of the audience is secured, the slides should only be used as reference markers to the points that are to be elaborated upon.

In the olden days, public speakers had to shout to make themselves heard and then came megaphones. Later on, we had microphones and speaker systems and one could save the vocal chords undue damage. The visual impact came in with slide shows and overhead projectors (OHPs). The possibility of being overwhelmed by these tools to the detriment of effective communication of content perhaps started with the OHPs and has reached its apogee with the PowerPoint presentation.

If Murphy’s Law holds true and we assume that Mr Murphy visits us during the presentation and makes sure that things go wrong, a time machine would carry us back to those primitive days when we did not have any visual aids. Expert communicators from those days would probably tell us that our job is to paint word pictures that catch the attention of the listeners and linger in their consciousness long after the presentation is over. They may probably also advise us that we should resist the temptation to confuse technology with effectiveness of communication. If there were a Moses in our midst, he would give us something akin to the Ten Commandments to light our way. He would say: Thou shall not

Read verbatim from the slides

Use too many slides

Look only at the slides and not at the audience

Use too many graphics

Use too much colour

Insert too many dynamic images that flit across the slides

Pack too much data in each slide

Use different fonts in each slide

Use incomprehensible charts and tables

Believe that the PowerPoint will speak for you

The gift wrapping can be very colourful, but ultimately it is the gift that matters.

(The writer is advisor to 3i Infotech, Manipal Education & Medical Group and IDFC Pvt Equity.)