Simplicity in Slides

Imagine you had to give a presentation on the difference in Western and Eastern cultures. How would you make the slides for these?

Here are some pictures that arrived as forward by email and stayed forever in my memory. These icons were designed by Liu Young who was born in China and educated in Germany.
You can see them for yourselves below. Even if you have seen these before, I would urge you to look at it with fresh eyes; the eyes of a person interested in learning more about creative slide-making.

Look out for the following:

1. Simplicity in conveying idea clearly
2. Pictorial representation which makes it unforgettable
3. Colour coding to differentiate between the cultures
4. Humorous touch in some of the aspects and emotional as in roles of elderly
5. All the ideas that the designer wanted to convey are covered.

Blue --> Westerner

Red --> Asian/Chinese

Life and Role of the Elderly




















Way of Handling Problems















Transportation

Concept of Punctuality

Wonderful aren't they?

Kill the bullet and other boring things

Sites like Presentation Zen already talk a lot about how slides should look. So I won't go into that. But let’s talk about making slides a little creatively to alleviate audience boredom. They tend to get fed up looking at the standard bullets and zooming animations. So, how do we work with PowerPoint more as a blank canvas, open to creativity rather than using it as a templates wizard?

It is the standard layouts in PowerPoint that makes slides look the same. It stifles creativity. So the next time when you start a new PowerPoint presentation, try the following procedure:

- Got to the slide master and delete the standard text box- which contains the same old bullet points and standard formatting
- You are left only with the Title master. You can play with this and place it anywhere or change the fonts and font colours. You can easily increase the font size to anything like 60-80.

The advantages are as follows:

DIFFERENT: This gives a good starting point to work on the presentation without being bound by its standard templates. Having a single Title box also eliminates the tendency to put in bullet points or copy sentences from documents.

ATTENTION GETTING: Each slide starts to look different – thus making the audience notice that something interesting is happening. The title box can be moved around in your normal slides and placed anywhere- experiment with placing them to the left/ right/top etc. especially when you have an image accompanying the words.

MINIMAL: As the font size is quite big and space available less, you are automatically forced to pare the words to a minimum and make them more dramatic.

Finally, if you MUST absolutely put in multiple points on a slide, avoid the tendency to use the bullet points. Try and use the something different in the form of a puzzle with multiple pieces or multiple thinking bubbles or Pyramid or steps or a using a picture with different parts.

Burgerizing your presentation

Have you ever eaten in McDonalds or KFC or a Pizza hut in India? Have you ever tasted these abroad? In India, McDonalds offers Salad sandwich and Aloo Tikki burger. There are people who clear up the tables after you. You will never find so many people working in a McDonalds anywhere else. Neither will you get anything but a blank stare if you ask for a veggie burger. A Pizza Hut still sells Pizzas but do not offer a Malai Kulfi or a Paneer topping anywhere else outside India.

These are all international organizations that try to have as much consistent products and delivery styles as possible. Yet there is a lot of difference in the experience and taste in each of these restaurants. This is because while people’s needs are basically the same, i.e. everyone feels hungry and needs to eat, their taste buds demands different kind of food. The varied cultures also dictate the range of food offered.

Imagine if you have to travel to Timbuktu or Texas or Tokyo to make a presentation. How difficult can it be? Do you think everything is ok, as long as they speak English? It is like food, they also eat Pizzas but their Pizzas are customized to their tastes. So you need to change your speech like the pizza and burger outlets have. The effort to customize is yours since you are the “foreigner” in their midst and if the audience does not understand you, you are losing in the bargain.

Here are some things you would need to check before crossing the seven seas…

- Simplify English: take out all the jargon, complex sentences, words that can have more than 1 meaning from your speech and slides. This might involve a lot of rework and practice. But if you want your audience to understand you, the effort to bridge the gap is yours. For example, ESOP is a word common in India signifying Employee Stock Options. But others do not understand this word. You may also need to tone down your humour because that is one thing that does not translate well.
- Localize: If you are telling any stories, using any names or locations try to localize it – so that your audience can relate to you easily. It also shows the effort you have put in to reach out to them.
- Speak Slowly: Your accent is probably quite new and strange and your pronunciation very different. So start slowly with information that is not so important so that your audience can acclimatize their ears to you.
- Ask questions: This is the best way for you to know their jargon, their problems and also understand if they are following what you are saying.
- Dress appropriately: Take their cultural niceties into consideration. Ask in advance. Wearing a sari is fine in India but it is NOT formal wear anywhere else.
- Be sensitive: You might try to contact colleagues and friends who have been to the country before to understand any social fine points. For example, in the U.S your audience may be quite sensitive to politically incorrect terms like “chairman” because they now use “chairperson”. They try and use genderless sentences (without using he or she). Making adverse statements about race or disability or hurting sensitivities in any other way can not only alienate your audience but also get you arrested. No, I am not joking!
So ask beforehand. Also remember that their body language and common gestures may be different to yours. Pointing a finger at someone for example can be considered extremely rude in one country and “ok” in other countries.

All said and done, remember your audience may have interacted with a number of people from outside their country. They may be willing to overlook small lapses as long as they know you have made the effort to connect with them.

How to cross the road and other learning

In this blog, I will be talking about the importance of Structure in presentations

As a child when you crossed the road, you were told to “look right, look left and look right again” and wait till there is a green signal for pedestrians to cross. This was your parent’s way of providing you with a formula to cross the road in a safe manner. For adults, crossing the road becomes an ingrained activity. We hardly blink before taking on half a dozen BEST buses zooming down the road.

As children, crossing the road is fraught with danger. Children are more likely to dash across the road without thinking. This is the reason why parents give the formula or the “structured approach’– to reduce the chances of making a mistake.

Structure ensures that we take all aspects into consideration. This is one of the reasons why so many managers and economists advocate their models – be it BCG growth matrix or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. These structured approaches give a good starting point for analysis and ensures that you do not miss out on anything important.

So now let me apply this simple example of crossing the road, to one important thing that you do at your workplace: making presentations. Do you have a structure in place to create and deliver them? Is it still an ad hoc activity where you put together stuff from old presentations or documents? What do you do when you are asked to make a completely different type of presentation – like address your flagging sales team and motivate them?
This is where structure aids you. You have a starting point and you know you will not miss out anything really important. You also have the confidence that you are somewhere close to the mark because you have used a tool created from experience.

There are 2 ways to get this structure in place. The first is to build it slowly from your own experience of giving and attending speeches. The second is to use a tool provided by someone else – like a trainer or a book.

When you use a structure provided by external trainer or a book – thousands of others may have access to the same resources. Does it mean that everyone will start making presentations exactly the same way?

Let us go back to the simple example of crossing the road. Some people may not mind making a running out in front of a car just 3 feet away. Others may wait till there is nothing to be seen 20 feet on either side. Even with a structure in place, people twist it around to suit themselves. The structure makes it easy to understake a new acivity the first time. Once people get used to it, they start playing with it based on their speaking style and reaction from audience. An experienced speaker thus ends up with his/her own unique style of presenting, even if he has started with a canned structure.