Thomas Hager, creator of the SPICE PowerPoint add-in, recently interviewed John. Here’s an excerpt.
John, with all your years delivering training and services to business leaders in the art of making crisp presentations for decision-making – what are some of the typical challenges your clients face?
There are four broad challenges our clients face.
The first challenge is clear storytelling. It’s almost cliché to talk about the power of storytelling. However, presenters tend to focus only on facts and data in a business setting, especially when analytics are involved. And they miss the emotional aspects of decision-making.
The second challenge is effective visualization. Wall-of-text slides are why many people hate PowerPoint. Presentations become dense because experts want the audience to know everything about their work, and they haven’t learned how to convert numbers and text into charts and visuals.
The third challenge is reducing visual noise. Unaligned boxes, inconsistent formats, grammatical issues, and typos increase the effort for the audience to digest content, and they hurt the presenter’s credibility.
The fourth challenge is increasing confidence. Everyone suffers from stage fright, but if that leads to visible nervousness or stumbles, the audience won’t have confidence in the presenter or their ideas.
What does your “recipe” for support to your clients look like?
In workshops and coaching, our recipe takes a structured approach to address those four challenges and applies the solutions to real-world presentations.
We teach business storytelling archetypes and how to choose the right one so clients aren’t starting their story from scratch. We also teach them how to balance data and logic with emotional stories illustrating how business insights play out for their customers.
We show clients how to visualize their data in ways that make the business insights evident to their audience. We also show them how to “graphicalize” non-data slides with frameworks and images.
To demonstrate the impact of visual noise, we show clients messy “before” charts and slides and then clean them up one step at a time. That way, they see how seemingly small changes add up to a noticeable difference in slide effectiveness. To reduce noise, clients must learn the software, so we inevitably teach PowerPoint tips and tricks and name-drop our favorite add-ins and tools outside of PowerPoint and Google Slides.
The first step to boosting confidence is to manage the fight-or-flight response caused by stage fright. We can do that through mindfulness practice, exercise, self-affirmation, or listening to music. Our mnemonic device is BEAR: breathe, exercise, affirm, and rock!
Here’s the complete interview: Discussion with John Polk.