Bad presentations are bad for business

It’s been said that Al Gore lost the race for the White House in 2000 as he couldn't relate to his audience and tell his story. Years later, in his powerful presentation and narrative story telling of “An Inconvenient Truth” he showed just how to use modern multi-media communications tools. Businesses could learn a lot from Al Gore.

Tens of millions are wasted every day by business people whose presentations simply bore people to death. Businesses spend millions not only on making bad presentations but paying for their staff to attend seminars and other events that don’t work. From routine information days to high powered presentations on which success or failure depends, businesses simply fail to make the grade. Few invest in understanding how to craft and deliver effective presentations that engage their many audiences.

Gradually evolved over the 20^th century, the business presentation has become the primary and most important of communications channels. In the past twenty years, business people have become captive of one particular form of presentation, the slide deck. Rather than use modern presentation software as an aid to communicating, many have allowed the software itself to dictate how they present.

Called “Death by PowerPoint” after Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation software, business people have learned how to excel at delivering mind-numbing presentations. They expect us to sit passively as tables of figures, lists of bullet points and, even worse, entire paragraphs are thrown up on screen across which our eyes’ are jarringly dragged. All too often the speaker, back turned to us, either reads from the slides or from pages of notes that have nothing to do with the slide at all. By the time the second slide pops up or flies in, we are left perplexed, annoyed and slightly angered. No wonder we switch off.  

Addicted to stock templates that encourage the relentless, lazy use of bullet points, business organisations churn out near useless material which their highly paid people struggle to communicate to audiences fed up with being bored silly by one slide after another crammed full of largely meaningless information. More recently in an effort to spice things up, businesses have turned to graphic designers to layer boring presentations with glossy pictures, videos and flash animation.

Far too many presenters ask us to do three things our brains simply cannot accomplish. They expect us to read what’s on the screen, process the graphics and listen to their monotonous narrative at the same time. Few of them spend time in considering the one thing that matters most – their audience.

Some years ago, addressing the pervasive use of PowerPoint, leading communications expert, Edward Tufte wrote “rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most fundamental rule of speaking. Respect your audience”.

Yet fewer than one in four business people say they spend more than two hours in preparing for an important presentation. Most say they spend less than thirty minutes. They cut and paste from their previous presentations, borrow from their colleagues’, or get their assistants to run one off. Many presentations are assembled on the fly in a last minute rush to generate enough slides to fill the allotted time.

Studies on how adults learn from multimedia presentations have found most that most business presentations cause cognitive overload. Neurological research shows how we process visual and verbal communication along two channels. Asking us to look at pictures, read words and listen overloads our short term memory. We become numbed by the sheer volume of information we try to process using our audio (hearing) and visual (seeing) channels.

In ground breaking work, educational psychologist Richard E Mayer proposed design principles for communicating using multimedia tools. These include carefully designing presentations and creatively understanding what active-learning is and isn’t. It most definitely is not treating an audience as some form of passive receptacle for a data dump.     

Conservative estimates put worldwide PowerPoint users at between 250m and 400m making upwards of 30m presentations a day. With the majority boring their audiences to death, businesses are estimated to waste over €220m.

The ability to communicate, persuade and encourage people to act is a key managerial and leadership competence. A presentation well made, reflects well on the presenter who is seen as a competent manager, effective leader and skilled communicator.

Yet how many executives have taken the time to understand how to craft compelling presentations? How many know how to tell their stories using pace and narrative that inspire others to act or at least recall the message or story teller?  Rather than remaining captive of a software genre that, when badly used, stifles proper communications, businesses should invest time and money in ensuring their people appreciate how to craft and deliver compelling presentations. In straightened times it would be money well spent.   


A version of this article appeared in the Irish Examiner, Business Section, Monday 25th July 2011.