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The Trouble with Powerpoint

I once had the privilege of attending an Analysts’ Conference for a well-known US telecommunications company. Most of the presentations were a little on the dull side, but I was there as an observer rather than an industry analyst so it wasn’t my job to criticise. Until, that is, they wheeled on the guy from the technical department.

Now I understand that telecommunications engineering people know a lot of stuff that’s beyond your mere scriptwriting mortal. And I understand that this man was speaking for an insider audience, who probably know a lot more about switches and packet streaming than I do.

But he was speaking a foreign language. I swear to God.

Not only that, he’d chosen (in his wisdom) to support his presentation with Powerpoint slides. Also in a foreign language. To wit: enormous flow diagrams containing hundreds of interlinked circles and overlapping lines with arrows in all directions and every coherent word reduced to a letter in an acronym.

I didn’t have a tape recorder switched on but it sounded something like (cue broad Midwest accent):

‘…so if we hook up the EBLD to the neuro SNS switch, then we can access the BDR thru-put via the LBL synchro of course if we use the MVR at the SQLD hub we can rechannel the PPLB to the packet switching network at the central MBVU. Using RGR, naturally…’

And so on. For 45 minutes. I swear to God.

Now I can’t speak for the other people in the audience but the immediate effect on me was hilarity. I cracked up. Two minutes in, I realised the entire presentation was going to be like this and I couldn’t contain my giggles. At least I could contain them, but only by clamping down hard on my bottom lip till it bled and sliding down in my seat so no-one could see the manic grin on my face (especially the speaker – it was a well-lit hall) and then closing my eyes and thinking hard about Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and any other equally unfunny visual images that came to mind.

It worked. I got through. The rest of the audience got through. One or two brave souls even managed to come up with what sounded like coherent questions at the end. But it did set me thinking about what had gone wrong.

The poor man wasn’t an experienced speaker. That was clear. Like all inexperienced speakers, he had way too many slides. And he was making some dangerous assumptions about the level of knowledge in the audience. But the real problem, I suspect, is one that has started to beset speakers and presenters the whole world over: he let the Powerpoint do his thinking for him.

Picture the scene (and this is one that’s repeated in companies large and small every working day). Our engineer gets told he’s making the presentation, probably at too short notice. He panics. He finishes doing all the other things he’s supposed to be doing that day. He panics again. Then he remembers another presentation he made – probably for a seminar audience of half a dozen fellow engineers. He rushes to his computer and prints out the Powerpoint slides from that presentation. He shuffles them for a while, throws some of them out, adds a witty quotation or two at the beginning and end, and rushes off to the conference. He might rehearse, but I doubt it. More likely he shows up on site, hands the Powerpoint operator a CD with the presentation on it, and steps up on stage without any preparation.

He’s the expert, after all. Knows his subject better than anyone in the company. All he needs is the comfort blanket of those familiar Powerpoint graphics to act as a prompt, and he’ll happily extemporise for 45 minutes.

In the process, he’ll bore his audience to near-hysteria.

This goes on all the time. There’s a whole generation of management out there that thinks writing a presentation means laying out bullet points. Occasionally backed up by obscure diagrams known as ‘models’ (I’ve lost track of the number of companies I’ve come across whose operating philosophy can be reduced to the front elevation of an ancient Roman temple).

All of which is fine – if you’re speaking to six people round a boardroom table. But if you want to use the same approach with an audience of fifty upwards in an auditorium or cabaret environment you’d better make sure you’re one heck of a charismatic speaker. Most people aren’t – and a big audience requires special skills. That’s why a select few people get to earn their living as theatre actors: they know how to reach out to an audience.

None of this means you have to work to a script. There are people who can communicate very naturally with a handful of cue cards or a few reminders on a prompt screen. They’re usually the ones who’ve been around for a while, and they usually manage with the barest minimum of speaker support. A chart here, a key statement there: the rest of the time there’s just the human voice and a holding logo.

The reason it works is they know who’s sitting out front – and they know what they want to say to them. They’ve thought about the audience, and constructed an argument that’ll fire them up. You can do that working to a written script, you can use aides-memoire, or you can learn the whole thing by heart. The important thing is you don’t need the visual support to make the presentation. Because the visual support is just icing on the sugarcake: a little gloss to help the audience understand your point.

And that’s the trouble with Powerpoint. All too often it’s presented (and used) as the heart of the argument itself. Almost as if the speaker and the content are optional extras. Just pile up layer on layer of Powerpoint and anyone can make the pitch. Hell, why bother even presenting it? Just email the thing out and save yourselves thousands in travel expenses (exactly what happens a lot of the time, now I come to think of it).

It’s a damn shame, because Powerpoint is a useful tool. We don’t have to generate speaker support photographically any more, thank God. But just because a thing is easy to do doesn’t make it right to do. Death by Powerpoint hinders good communication. It bores audiences, on screen or in their email. And it makes inexperienced speakers - and their companies - look sloppy, stupid, and unprofessional.