Sometimes we just need to open our junk drawer and ask ourselves, is this for my audience or is this for me?

You need to have someone like Mary Kondo on the team, to help you simplify. Simplicity does not mean to take away or make it shorter; it is not the same as minimalism; simplicity is not found in the amount of the content – Simplicity is more in relation to time. The time it takes for your audience to understand what you’re trying to say. For example, an abbreviation actually adds more complexity because it might take the audience a while to decipher. Shorter? Yes. Simple? Perhaps – if the abbreviation is used a lot and has been made very clear to the reader. In that case it will bring more simplicity because we get it and now we can focus on other things. Yes, in a way, simplicity is very complex.

Those ideas you came up with that once worked really well for that one presentation. I know you love those ideas, but do they still work? I’m sure you’ve kept those slides in your deck, but it has run its course. In my work I help speakers with their stories and visuals, and a big portion of what I do is discovering the non-essential so it can be removed. When you are the expert and you are trying to present to an audience, you need to know that there is a distance between you: a knowledge-gap. You need to figure out how big of a distance this gap is so you can work your way back and actually build a story that resonates with your audience. I’ve seen so many decks that contained people’s entire junk drawer, and they start calling it ‘their master deck’. But it’s mostly your archive combined with even more current slides. What this creates is a presentation that is all about you. Sometimes we just need to open our junk drawer and ask ourselves, is this slide for my audience, or is this slide for me? And if Mary Kondo was helping you with your presentation: Does this slide spark joy in my audience?

I went there a few years ago. The point is to make you more aware of the world that blind people live in. Most of the staff are actually blind. It is so impressive to experience how smoothly the staff operates in this environment. After the first course I got more comfortable eating (with my hands, because I couldn’t navigate my fork properly), and I started to notice that I struggled to keep the conversation going (so now you know how to shut me up). This was such an eye opener, because I started to realize how much of my conversations are actually triggered by visual cues. Now, let’s think of all those virtual meetings that we’re having. What has changed – and why does interaction seem to be so much harder? My perspective on this is that with limited visual triggers (the non-verbal stuff) we struggle to keep the conversation going. Voice (verbal) is now the weapon of choice, and we all need to get used to this different presentation style.

If you’ve seen both Birdbox and A Quiet Place, combine both and you know what virtual meetings can feel like if everyone is on mute, and they have the cameras off, too.

In virtual meetings, you usually don’t see your audience (except for the occasional webcam), so you have to figure out how to engage them with your voice. For this blog I want to focus on just one thing: Helping you engage in virtual meetings by asking the right questions. We should see every presentation as a conversation. Asking questions helps us discover what is relevant to our audience, and this way we can steer our message. Therefore you should never have a slide at the end of your presentation with the word ‘Questions’ on it. We all have it or at least have seen this slide and it’s used too often without questioning why we do this. I’ve seen people that have it on screen but don’t even want the audience to ask something- it was more or less part of the standard format. Please remove it, there are better ways to end your presentation and this way you might only find out at the end of your talk that what you just shared was irrelevant.

For virtual meetings, don’t say something like ”any questions?”. This is too open-ended and no one will respond.

Note: I do understand that this can be cultural. For example, when I work with Japanese clients, they politely write down their questions and those will be asked at the very end of the presentation. In some cases, you simply need to adjust your talk. A good way to help adjust your presentation based on culture is this book: Kiss, Bow, Or Shake Hands. Again, you don’t need a slide that says ‘Questions?’ for this. You come across more sincere when you ask your audience yourself, without the template-slide. Really, you should welcome questions at the start of your talk, and at any point during. You have control over this.

Questions, when asked in a virtual meeting need a warm-up. If you say something like ”any questions?”, no one will respond. This is too open-ended. Your audience does not know you are looking at them. You can look directly at your webcam, and people will not be triggered to react. It works in a face-to-face meeting because you are directly looking at someone. We need to help our audience and guide them a little bit to make it easier for them to speak up. So this is how that is done:

1) First, let your audience know you are going to ask a question. Assume they are disengaged. This will help then to zoom back in again.

2) Direct your question to a person, and mention their name. This way you activate someone. It’s up to you to select this person. You can always tell the other people in the meeting to jump in after your asked your question. For your question to be picked up you need to direct it.

3) Warm-up the question by introducing where the question is coming from and what it will be about. Again, assume they were zoned out.

4) Now ask the question!

5) Always plan your way out. If you get no reply, how will you continue? Maybe you need to paraphrase your question, or maybe the person you asked is on mute. It also helps if you check who has their camera on. (Keep in mind: You don’t want to scare your audience and make them think that they sit in the first row. Everyone avoids the first row because those people are targeted too often. They might switch their cameras off and now you feel like a radio DJ again).

6) Get a moderator on the call that can help out in situations like this. If you have that option, go for it! Virtual meetings are hard to manage. Don’t underestimate the value of a good moderator. They can also monitor the chat and interrupt constructively to keep the flow going.

7) Create some breathing room for questions. When you are presenting, remember, you don’t see your audience. You can’t see if they want to ask you a question like you can in a face-to-face presentation. Please create some breathing room when you talk, so your audience can interrupt you and ask!

When people start working on their presentation, they usually begin with opening PowerPoint and writing notes on their slides. At this point the presentation is mainly for the presenter to throw notes into some sort of a structure. The sad thing is that this will barely change (maybe some colors here and there), until it will be presented to an audience. Well, at least that is what it often looks like. This is a horrible experience, not only for your audience, but also for you. No wonder no one likes presenting, because who enjoys presenting that way.

In a way, PowerPoint made you do it this way. When you open a new PowerPoint file, the basic slides are Title Slide, Title & Content and Header Slide, and so on. Before Office 365 it also had a standardized Agenda Slide. This is still the case with most corporate templates. They are all built with document-like structures, so it’s only follows that you would kick off your presentation that way. But seriously, pro tip for Microsoft: Let the user start by picking a structure.

Let’s change the way we structure our presentations.

Here is one way we can start: We can look to the movie industry, and just copy one of their story structures to use in our presentation. A good example are those movies that start in the middle, ‘in medias res’. This Latin phrase literally means ‘into the middle of things’, and it’s quite commonly used for movies. Think of Fight Club, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, (and many more)! You start with showing your audience a scene in the middle, so they can wonder how that came about. Then you go back to the beginning and have them hooked because – if done well – they want to know what had happened before.

You can create the same experience with your presentations. Start with a bold statement, or maybe show them part of the product, a teaser. Then you can go back to the beginning and tell the story behind it all. When you reach your starting slide again, you continue from there. And you can play with this too. Just like in the movies, the situation is never what is seems to be! Compared with a document-like presentation, presenting like this is a lot of fun!

My homework for you:

Go watch a movie, series or documentary, and try to discover the structure of the story. Find out how you can use that approach for your own presentations. Stop presenting what should be shared as a document – and start telling stories.

I can think of a few situations where this could work, but a virtual meeting is not one of them. Quite the opposite.

A virtual meeting should use more slides.

I am really support using slides. I think visual support can bring many ideas to life, and in this case it’s for a pitch, a short presentation, so slides can be a great asset here. Images are just really hard to forget, and you absolutely want your idea to linger in the mind of your audience so they can heed your call to action! That action usually comes some time after the presentation anyway. So let’s make sure it sticks. Let me give you my perspective on the number of slides you should use. And please ignore the image used for this blog. It is just as useless as the slide-count-rule.

1. To start with, I’ve seen brilliant presentations with probably 100+ slides presented in maybe 20 minutes. I’ve also seen many brilliant presentations that only use a slide or two. In both cases, it was the presenter that made it work with the situation they were in.  

2. If you give a limitation on the number of slides, people will find other ways to achieve the same, and with that compromise the experience. ‘’You can only use 10 slides!’’ Okay, then I’ll just throw in a gazillion animations. Good luck with the distribution of the hand-outs.

3. There is no correlation between the number of slides and the time needed to tell a story. If you tell me I have 30 minutes, that is a clearly understandable limitation, and we can all work with that. It’s now up to me to figure out how to use that time, and how many slides I will need.

4. Our example at the start of this blog was about having your idea on a single slide. It’s always nice if you can pull that off, because this limitation can help you bring the idea back to its core, and focus only on the essential information. But please don’t present this, as it means that all information would be presented at once. And this is virtual; we don’t even know where you are on the slide. This way your audience is reading – and when they’re reading, they are not listening. I always use the Billboard-rule (or 3-second rule): if it take the audience more than 3 seconds to understand what’s on screen, you need to split it. Just like Billboards, they only need our attention for a few seconds.

5. If anything, a virtual meeting should use more slides, because the attention span is just shorter. When something changes on screen it pulls people back in; it startles them, and wakes the up. This is a great tool to keep their attention just a bit longer. But make sure you reduce the amount of information presented on each slide, to keep it digestible. And you should be fine.

Please note that it’s about the change on screen, not the need to use slides. If you share slides virtually, via Zoom or any other tool, at this time you are hardly visible to the audience – your slides will over about 90% of the screen. Sometimes it’s better to stop sharing and get everyone’s webcam on screen. This help you to create that human connection again.

Let us start with the main difference:

Physical presentations are mostly non-verbal. Meaning that most conversation aspects are visual cues, like facial expressions, hand gestures, body movement. Virtual presentations are mostly verbal. Your voice is your most powerful weapon. This is especially true if everyone decided not to turn on their webcams. I must say that people are getting more comfortable with turning their cameras on but most of the time, good luck reading your audience.

Check out this episode of The Big Bang theory where they removed the laughing tape – this is how a virtual presentation feels.

This is the point where we start feeling like radio DJs. Just like virtual presentations, radio DJs have an audience they can’t see. They have limited (synchronous) feedback. If you make a joke, did it work? You don’t know! That can feel very awkward. Maybe your audience is rolling on the floor laughing. Again, you don’t know. So how do you work with that? Ever tried the silence-technique they teach in presentation101 in a virtual presentation? Also awkward! Works great in a face to face presentation where you prompt the audience to participate and you build in breathing room. But a moment of silence virtually really feels like one of the phone silences where you just want to ask if they are still there. Check out this episode of The Big Bang theory where they removed the laughing tape – this is how a virtual presentation feels. Every time a joke is made there is a silence and the actors are just waiting for the tape to finish.

I can go on about what works for a face to face presentation and does not work virtually. So, we need to learn from different masters! In this case Radio DJs are great teachers because they make it work. I know we are not driving anywhere so we hardly listen to radio but if you do, try to find out how they ask questions, how they use humor and other ways with just your voice to make it work. I love to hear your finding. Please leave those in the comment section below or just reach out!

The right imaging can help the audience to better understand you and even better, make sure you are hard to forget.

I’m a visual storyteller so a big part of my job is hunting for visuals that enhance your voice (not usually for your blog post but for presentations but many of the same rules apply). The right imaging can help the audience to better understand you and even better, make sure you are hard to forget. So how to we find those images?

Finding good visuals is a creative process. I often see that people can manage visuals that speak to a more abstract level. They pick words like flexible, partnering or changes and other alike because abstract words usually speak to the core of the post. If you than try to find an image based on those words on Google for example, you get nothing of value. For example, we’ve all been overloaded with posts about virtual meetings because that’s really hot topic right now. I am sure that more than 90% of those are images that include a laptop (and titles like ‘this is the new normal’). So it’s slowly losing power.

So let’s finish this blog with 3 tips on how to get images that do work:

1. Try to think of an analogy for what you are trying to say. Analogies usually help because they put your message in a different context. This will make photo-hunting a lot easier.
2. Use a personal photo. Those usually have lots of emotional value and they are unique to your viewers. And you probably have a good story tied to that photo.
3. Humor is very difficult, and it’s usually designed wrong (I’ll do a blog on this later) but memes work really well (if used right!) and they are easy to create with generators like this. The nice thing about memes is that they are known to a big audience. But you know your audience the best and only you can determine if they are the right audience for humor like this.

Let’s start with this. Like I said, it’s a creative process. Take a step back, thinking hats on and try to make the image part of your context.

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

I always loved this quote from Pablo Picasso. It shows us that simplicity is really hard to achieve. When we start our thinking process, we usually dump all our thoughts on the table, and than we try to glue it all together so it somewhat fits on a slide. As presenters, we are all guilty of doing this; but when we are in the role of audience, we hate listening to all of that. Adding more is all to easy, but it’s really difficult to remove all the things that don’t help bring our points across, and only distract from it. But that is our goal!

We can learn another lesson from Picasso by examining the supporting image of this blog. This is Picasso’s The Bull. In 10 steps It shows us how to get from a more classical, realistic image to the essence, abstract version of the same animal. With every step we’re seeing a more abstract version of the bull, with as final image the most simplistic version. And to quote Albert Einstein on this: ‘’Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”. If would be, it would lose its meaning and we can no longer call it the abstract version of the original. I use this example to show that getting to the right level of simplicity is a complex process. You can not just go from Bull 1 to Bull 11, you gradually work towards it.

In my work I help professional speakers with their material and the majority of my work is removing the noise, trying to find the core of what they want to present. As an outsider it is usually easier to do so, because you already have a certain distance and have no emotional attachment to their ideas.

I’m going to stop here because I made my point and if you got this far, I consider you a reader (a rare species nowadays). And stay tuned, this is going to be the first of many blogs about Simplicity In Design (S.I.D.)