In this episode, David and Drew delve into what makes a good PowerPoint presentation. They explore the evolution of PowerPoint and its importance in modern business communication, referencing Associate Professor Mitch Ricketts' 2018 paper, "No More Bullet Points: Research-Based Tips for Better Presentations."
The discussion provides an in-depth examination of the principles of multimedia, modality, and redundancy, all of which are crucial for optimizing learning and information retention. The episode also offers a wealth of practical strategies for interactive design and meticulous preparation, aimed at enhancing audience engagement and comprehension. These strategies include the use of visual aids, storytelling techniques, and audience participation elements to create a more dynamic and immersive experience. By adopting these methods, presenters can not only convey their message more effectively but also make the learning process more enjoyable and impactful for their audience.
The Paper’s Abstract
Active training techniques are effective because they engage learners in tasks that promote deep thought, discussion, problem-solving, social interaction, and hands-on learning. Passive training is less effective because learners are relegated to merely listening and watching as an instructor does all of the mental, social, and physical work. Bullet-point lectures may be poorly suited for meaningful training because they usually adopt a model of passive learning and they tend to combine spoken words and displayed text in ways that may actually decrease comprehension. PowerPoint can serve as a tool to promote active learning if we eliminate lengthy bullet lists and use instructional images to guide group discussions, problem-solving activities, and hands-on experiences.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
“This is what you might call an applied literature review. It's someone taking the literature and interpreting that literature for a particular purpose.” - Drew
“There's a lot of research that says that a lot of high school and university teachers rely on fairly outdated and disproven theories about these different modes of learning.” - Drew
“If that's the important bit, then blow it up to the entire slide and get rid of the diagram and just show us the important bit.”- Drew
“if you're a learner and you see a giant pair of goggles on a PowerPoint slide with just the word “goggles”, then all you're going to be doing now is just listening to what the presenter is saying. And hopefully they're saying something about goggles.” - David
“Slides aren't there to look interesting and slides aren't there to carry the weight of the content. Think of them as visual support.” - Drew
Resources:
The Paper: No More Bullet Points
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
David: You are listening to the Safety of Work podcast, episode 122. Today we’re asking the question, what makes a good presentation? Let’s get started.
Hey everybody, my name’s David Provan. I’m here with Drew Rae, and we’re from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to the Safety of Work podcast. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examine the evidence surrounding it.
Today’s discussion isn’t (I guess) specifically about safety, but it is about a very important communication medium that we use in organizations. We last talked about PowerPoint in episode 18, so more than 100 episodes ago. We asked the question, do PowerPoint slides count as a safety hazard?
Today, we’re looking at some more recent research that takes for granted that we’re probably going to be using PowerPoint slides a lot in business today. I guess we’re going to be looking at how we might do so more effectively.
Drew: David, you picked the paper for today. What drew your attention to this particular topic or this particular paper?
David: I don’t mind a good title, Drew. You’ve definitely influenced me to pay attention to good titles. When it came through, I think Ben Hutchinson, who we mentioned in the last episode, seems to be tagging us in interesting research summaries that he does and suggesting that we might like to talk about it.
Just the start of this presentation, which was No More Bullet Points, that really attracted me to reading it. Yeah, I just think PowerPoint is such a central communication medium, and I think this is going to be a really interesting episode today for people because a lot of us are making a lot of mistakes with our PowerPoint slides.
Drew: Let’s try not to make this episode into Dave and Drew’s gripes with bad presentations we’ve seen, but I’m sure we’ll get into a bit of that. The author of this paper’s a little bit older than either of us, and he starts the paper by saying he vividly remembers when he first encountered a PowerPoint presentation, and was impressed with the technology but not with what it was used for. Do you remember vividly your first encounter with PowerPoint?
David: I don’t remember the first encounter. We were talking about this a bit yesterday, you and I, and I know in the early 2000s it came on really, really strong in my role, and I was starting to prepare my health and safety reports to boards and executives in PowerPoint templates. I don’t remember doing that in the late 90s as much. I don’t vividly remember, but as I think back now, I can very much recall that time period where we started using a lot of PowerPoint.
Drew: I went down to a bit of a rabbit hole trying to work out, like when PowerPoint was around. One thing that surprised me was PowerPoint existed before digital projectors existed. There were people on their Max in the late 1980s using PowerPoint to create 35 millimeter slides or RHP slides. The modern idea where we have PowerPoint connected to a digital projector apparently was as early as 1992 when I think we were both still in high school.
As far as I can remember, all through high school, university, high tech was a whiteboard instead of a blackboard, or maybe one of those weird visualizer projectors where it looks down from the top and you can write rather than putting a transparency on.
David: When I did my undergraduate degree at Griffith University mid- to late-90s, I was still taking handwritten notes off overhead transparencies. That was my experience then. But then definitely by the early 2000s we were often racing with the use of PowerPoint in business.
Drew: Just as an advocate for the university, if you haven’t been to university recently, now every classroom is set up for blended learning. There’s a video camera hiding in the corner creating a video of it.
Don’t get the impression that we’re still using overhead projectors, but this is something that went from nothing to now everything. I can’t remember a conference I’ve been to where they didn’t just assume that any presenter would have a PowerPoint pack or any teaching engaging more classroom that wasn’t set up, with the assumption that people are going to be using PowerPoint slides.
Yeah, if it’s a technology that everyone’s using, it’s important that we use it as effectively as possible. Any other thoughts before we get into the paper?
David: No. Hopefully, our listeners are now thinking, oh, this is going to be interesting because I do a lot of PowerPoint slides. Do you want to introduce the paper, and then we’ll cut to the important findings?
Drew: Sure. The author of this paper is Associate Professor Mitchell Ricketts or Mitch Ricketts. Mitch doesn’t have a very strong research profile. He’s a safety practitioner who did his PhD in the 2010s, looking specifically at professional communication for safety, and looking at questions like whether telling safety stories improves or doesn’t improve the way people remember the hazards and act better in response to those stories.
This particular paper is called No More Bullet Points: Research-Based Tips for Better Presentations. It was published in 2018 in the journal Professional Safety. Technically this is peer-reviewed research in a peer reviewed journal, but Professional Safety is more like a professional society magazine rather than an academic journal. This stuff is written for a practitioner audience, and as in this case, the articles are often conference presentations that have been turned into articles.
This is very applied, but it’s by someone who knows the academic field behind the work. David, you and I are both familiar with this, and we are pretty comfortable that it is fairly representing most of the research. Maybe simplifies in a few places, but particularly at the PowerPoint end, it’s really solid in what it covers.
David: And I think that’s an important point just about the research quality. We talk a bit about the authors, then we talk about the topic, and then we talk about the journal or where it’s published. I think for this sort of a topic which does lean heavily on learning research and principles, and given the author’s PhD background for the decade or so leading up to when this article was published, it’s fair to conclude that based on the body of work that’s drawn into this paper and the author themself, that even if we might think professional safety has maybe a weaker peer review process, we can still have a bit of confidence in this paper itself.
Drew: Absolutely. There’s been some great stuff published in Professional Safety. I don’t want to denigrate it as a venue. It’s just that it’s not intended for an academic audience, so it doesn’t have that academic peer review.
This is what you might call an applied literature review. It’s someone taking the literature and interpreting that literature for a particular purpose. In this case, what does all the stuff about learning theory tell us about how we can make better presentations?
They actually start with a summary, but we might come back to that, David. because I think yeah, the summary we are going to talk about in the takeaways anyway. Anything you want to say before we get into the science?
David: No, I think we should just launch in.
Drew: Okay. First thing he talks about is the idea of active learning. I think we’ve all probably heard at least the words active learning and passive learning.
The general idea here is that passive techniques like lecturing come from this idea that learning is a teacher who teaches and a student who’s a fairly passive recipient of the information. It’s a transfer of knowledge from one direction to the other. It works well when the teacher knows their stuff and when the student is able to absorb and remember.
Contrasted with active learning, which are things like discussion, problem solving, hands-on experience, where the idea is that the learner is the one doing most of the work rather than the teacher doing most of the work.
David, I think—feel free to say more about this—we find it’s fairly artificial, maybe more complicated than just breaking it into active and passive learning, but the general principle is just like the old-style lecture is well understood not to work very well for learners learning compared to a whole range of alternatives.
David: One of the researchers who was a bit absent from being drawn in from literature here is Dr. Michelene Chi and her work around learning. She always talks about more of four distinct (I guess) ways of learning and their relevant impact on learning outcomes, and definitely talks about passive learning where I’m just listening to something, maybe just listening to a podcast.
Or that active learning the way she talks about it, people are starting to highlight things, write their own notes, and start to pull out what’s important to them.
Then talks about constructive learning when we’re starting to answer questions, so we’re starting to think and explore the limits of our own existing knowledge and build more onto our own knowledge but it’s still a very individual process.
Then the fourth is interactive learning, where we’re in discussion and dialogue with other people, we’re sharing our knowledge and understanding, gaining their knowledge and understanding, and working together. In her view, once we go from passive to active, to constructive to interactive, where we’re actually greatly increasing the learning outcomes as adults.
I think in this paper the author combines a lot of those things into the active learning style, but there is actually quite a lot going in there, all of which the authors touched on about asking and answering questions and engaging in discussion. But there is a big body of learning research underpinning these active learning techniques.
Drew: Listener, let’s pause this podcast for a moment and we’ll get you to turn to the person next to you and share an experience you’ve had with a presentation you thought was particularly active or particularly passive, and whether that helped you learn or not. We’ll come back in about five minutes and we’ll resume the podcast.
David: Okay. Welcome back. After your short break there, we hope you have a chance to increase your learning by having that discussion with hopefully some random person sitting on a bus or on a treadmill next to you while you are having a listen.
Drew: How, how does this relate to what actually goes on to our slides? The point that Mitch is making is that when you’ve got a lot of written text on your slides, that tends to draw you as a presenter into that very lecturing mode. I’ve certainly experienced this myself when I’m teaching. The more I have on my slides, the more I end up just in this I am presenting, saying what’s on the slide, making sure I get through everything.
What I’ve tried to do as a discipline to myself is actually to specifically have slides that just have a question written on them. The idea is that it's a discussion prompt and it’s a signal to me in the class that we are breaking from a lecture mode into a pair or small group mode. The questions there on the slide so that people don’t then ask, hey Drew, what are we supposed to be talking about? What was the question again? So it’s just sitting up there and then I get people to talk amongst themselves about it before we come back.
That’s a good use (I think) of text on a slide is specifically to give a question, but bullet points tend to lead you into more of just a, I’m sitting here talking going through the points.
David: I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about this in the paper where Mitch talks about who are the slides for and bullet point–related slides are typically, generally in service of the person presenting so that they remember all the points that they want to want to cover as opposed to maybe being in service of the learner.
He also spoke about having these content-related slides where we are sharing information, and we’ll talk about how best to support that information sharing with the slides themselves. Then doing exactly what you’ve said there, Drew, actually having break points in the presentation where we actually encourage more thinking and reflection through a question.
I really liked the way that he thought about how we prepare presentations, that I’m sure we’ll get to it at the end in terms of what the speaker needs and then what the learner needs, and even what we might want the people to take away afterwards. It might mean we want three or four different versions of a presentation for those different needs.
Drew: The second bit of research that he gets into is the idea of combining words and images, and what that does for learners. This is something that I think some people have got a fairly naive idea on. In fact, there’s a lot of research that says that a lot of high school and university teachers rely on fairly outdated and disproven theories about these different modes of learning. There are fairly well-established principles, and we’ll go through three of them here.
The first one is the multimedia principle or the multimedia effect. It is true that people tend to learn better from a combination of words and images rather than words alone. Note that’s words and images. It’s not listening and looking. It’s words and images. Combining those two things does increase comprehension.
You have to remember the second one, the modality principle, which is that learners benefit more from spoken words rather than from displayed texts. Putting those two together starts to give you the clue here. You want spoken words and printed images, not written words and spoken words at the same time.
There are a few caveats here. There are times when you do want words. You want words as things like labels and headings to help people make sense of things. You want words for people to take away. Particularly, the more complicated something is, the more someone needs a written artifact that they can go and study and revise afterwards, whether that’s their own notes or something provided by the presenter.
It’s not that written words don’t matter, it’s just that when you’re presenting short ideas, you don’t want to be speaking and have the same words behind you. You want an image instead.
The third thing just drives that home. That’s the redundancy principle, which says that if you have text displayed and you are speaking at the same time, that makes it hard for learners. Basically, when people are trying to read and listen at the same time, that creates a really high mental workload because they need to do both tasks and they need to integrate those two tasks.
Even if what you are saying is exactly the same as the words on the slide, they need to do it at the exact same speed. They need to read and listen at the same speed, which is an extra level of synchronization that just makes it really hard for people. They’re putting so much effort into that integration. They’re not actually putting effort into understanding and remembering.
David, anything you want to say on those three principles?
David: A couple of things. I think they’re really useful principles. Two things that reflect on. The first is I’ve been doing some presentations recently with Beth Lay at some conferences in the US and in Canada.
For every one of her presentations she does, she always prepares a one page handout, which is a summary in words of the core thing. Rather than send around a copy of the presentation, here’s a handout to take away, which has got the content, which is like you said there in your caveat where learners need some written text that they can take away, revise, study, and remember.
We don’t do that a lot in business. It feels a bit like something we do in more formal study or at school. Here’s a handout, here’s a handout. I’ve found that to be incredibly valuable to leave with people for the purpose that it’s designed for to take away. I think that’s one point.
I guess the second point about this article itself is what I really liked about this article is the author put in a whole lot of practical examples that really helped me. I could see the principle in action. I was reading the text about these principles—the multimedia principle and modality principle—and then I saw a sequence of two or three slides that he’d put in there as an example.
I could just imagine this image of one of the examples he had was a plumbing system and here’s the image. Then I could just imagine someone explaining how that system works and then being able to look and see that image with a few key word labels to point some things out.
I guess how much I’d learned from that as opposed to just a bunch of text on the PowerPoint. He does these examples in the paper, which I found really, really helpful.
Drew: It’s a bit hard to convey when we are giving a verbal view of the paper, but this is filled with different examples of slides, images, and cutout boxes with particular examples or key points. That’s one of the advantages of not being a traditional journal, is they can actually present the information in a visually strong way as an article. I guess we could go into a whole extra podcast about what’s a good way to do your article so that people learn from them.
David: Good point. Do you want to move on and talk about the coherence principle?
Drew: Sure. The coherence principle is basically just if you want to convey the main points clearly, then you need to avoid unnecessary information. This is the idea that people don’t just keep learning more, the more and more you add to a presentation. There is a point where you actually start subtracting with each new detail that you add because it’s not like diminishing returns. It’s actually people start remembering less overall because they focus on the irrelevant stuff instead of on the most relevant stuff.
David, I don’t know about you because you’ve done a lot of your courses from scratch yourself. I’ve been involved through my life in a lot of team teaching where you inherit a course or where multiple people need to present the course, and you might be giving the same one week course three times in a month with three different people.
What happens is everyone has these things that they think are important that need to be added in. Over time, these slide plaques get more and more complicated with extra slides or just an extra bullet point, or sometimes even a footnote on a slide of a point someone thinks is really important. People just forget that they’re not adding. They’re taking away from the learner experience.
Organizations do that with things like inductions as well, as they just keep adding content, extra things that people need to be told about. You’re forgetting that beyond your first five slides, every new slide that’s something from the previous five slides that people aren’t going to remember. So if you’ve got your five most important things, you’ve got to stop.
David: It sounds a little bit like safety clutter. When everything’s important, nothing’s important. I sometimes see presentations where people have got a 30- or a 45-minute presentation and they turn up with 60 slides or something. Even if you do the max, you’re going to do one slide every 30 seconds or something.
I’m always reminded of things like attention spans and cognitive load. This is where I love things like 10 minute TED Talk–type of things, and cognitive load, which says seven plus or minus two things only in working memory. If you’ve got a presentation that’s got more than 5 really key points, 5 really key slides that you can talk about in 10 or 15 minutes, I think this principle suggests that’s what you should go after.
People have been listening to you for 45 or 60 minutes across 30 or 40 different slides. I think Drew this principle suggests that who knows what in their presentation they’re taking away from it, and they’re very unlikely to be taking away the 5 key things that have been buried throughout that 45 minute presentation that you actually wanted them to take away.
Drew: I thought I was fairly good at keeping this principle myself, but then he added in this bit that really makes me feel called out. He says we need to avoid sidetracking audiences with irrelevant seductive details, such as captivating stories and images that fail to convey the main points of the message.
Anyone who’s been in one of my classes knows that I can’t resist. I’ll be making a simple point and referencing an accident that I think really shows that point, and then I’ll feel compelled to just tell the story of that accident.
I gave a talk recently. It was only a 20-minute talk, but one of the points I made, I was trying to back it up by some comment about risk matrices. It’s very clear afterwards that lots of people came away just really worried about this one little thing I said about risk matrices, not the bigger point I was trying to make by referencing it.
This is something that’s easy. It’s seductive (I think) for the present presenter as well as for the audience, if you tell a story or you throw in a juicy detail, and it just distracts people from the main information that they need to remember.
David: I saw the comment about the five-by-five risk matrix being statistically or something invalid or something, or mathematically wrong or something. I do this as well. I’ve had some feedback that people haven’t been able to follow certain presentations that I’ve done because suddenly a point that I’m making, I think a story is useful.
I think it’s important that in this principle we don’t say storytelling’s bad. It’s just when we are presenting a point and then we suddenly sidetrack the audience, and the audience becomes disconnected from our train of thought or the logic or the sequence of the argument.
The way I understand this, Drew, is if this is something that was a signal, which is here’s the point and now here’s a story which shows how that point applies in a real situation, I think that allows the learner to to follow and potentially deepen their learning. I think what he’s talking about here is where we actually get sidetracked.
Drew: You made an important point there, David, which is the difference is whether it’s about the learner or the presenter—are we telling the story because it genuinely helps the learners understand? Or are we telling the story because it’s a good story and we like telling it and it’s going to distract us?
David: We got three more principles to talk through, so I’ll let you keep going if that’s right, if you want to talk about the signaling principle.
Drew: I’ll go through fairly quickly then. The signaling principle is fairly straightforward, which is that people tend to understand things when they’re told which bits are important. These are things on the slides having highlighting, arrows, labels, or things telling them what they’re supposed to be noticing, telling them what the most important information is. My immediate thought was that the simplest way of doing this is don’t put anything else on your slides.
One thing that really frustrates me—particularly PhD students like to do this in their presentation—I’ll put up this big complicated diagram, and they’ll get out the little laser pointer and say, okay, this bit here, this is the bit that you’ve really got to notice and pay attention to. It’s like why? If that’s the important bit, then blow it up to the entire slide and get rid of the diagram and just show us the important bit.
But there are cases where you need to understand where something fits into context. You want someone to know where England is, give them a map of Europe, but then give them a big arrow also pointing to England. Don’t make them have to work out where it is, or specifically label it where England is.
David: I think this is really good. This is really just leading the learner and supporting them to see those things. I really like that. Again, there are some good examples in the paper which point this out. In this principle and the coherence principle that we’ve just spoken about, is really just about being much more clear with the learning outcomes and what’s important for the learner to understand, than maybe we are sometimes with our business presentations.
Drew: This next one is really interesting and it’s one that I don’t tend to pay a lot of attention to myself, but I probably should. It’s the contiguity principle, from the word ‘contiguous.’ The idea being that text and images need to be as close as possible in time and space.
It actually makes quite a difference when you have a picture and a caption versus a picture with text actually labeling on the picture itself. Or if you’ve got words, then the next slide is a picture or a picture, and the next slide is words versus them having them on the same slide. It actually makes quite a big difference.
It’s worth that effort to make sure that things are properly integrated rather than just sitting next to each other or near each other. Often that means having to draw your own diagram so that the text and words are properly put together.
David: The example in the paper, like he talks through a few images and one image is just a full screen PowerPoint with a pair of safety goggles. It just got the word goggles and the word goggles overlaps parts of the image. There’s no question that in this part of the presentation we’re talking about goggles, and here’s the word and the picture to look at.
Again, the clarity, but just that temporal alignment between the picture, the image. Then if you’re a learner and you see a giant pair of goggles on a PowerPoint slide with just the word goggles, then all you’re going to be doing now is just listening to what presenter’s saying. Hopefully, they’re saying something about goggles.
Drew: I started thinking at this point that a lot of these tips are asking for a little bit of extra work from the person preparing the presentation. Some of these things are fairly straightforward. Others, you’re going to have to do a little bit of extra thinking, a little bit of extra work.
Something I remind myself often a lot is when I’m presenting, it’s half an hour of my time to give the presentation, but it’s also half an hour from everyone else in the room to take part in that same activity. My half hour isn’t more important than their half hour.
It really is justified if you’re going to ask time of 20 people to put some extra time into making good use of that time. Even if it takes you twice as long to prepare the presentation, overall that is probably a better use of everyone’s time than having a bad presentation that lots of people are sitting through.
David: Absolutely correct. I absolutely agree. In terms of a bit of extra work—we might get to this in the practical takeaways—just to mention that now one of the things that Mitch (the author) suggests that we would do is prepare our presentation, which is how do we want this presentation to run? And then that’s one presentation that we prepare.
Then it’s like, okay, so what are the slides that we’re going to display to help the learner with this sequence? And that’s literally preparing an entirely new presentation that’s just geared around what the learner needs.
Then sort of said, okay, so what are we going to let them take away? And then it might be an entirely new presentation which has more words and more summaries that they can take away. So ultimately suggesting you might prepare three presentations, one for you, one for the audience, one for the takeaway.
There’s a big trend a lot of the time with presentations is, oh, can you send me the presentation after? If we are doing the PowerPoint presentation slides, if we send them around afterwards to someone who wasn’t there or whatever, they would be absolutely useless for understanding what the content of the presentation was because they’re just a bunch of words and pictures.
I think that’s the bit that I thought about when you said the extra work. That’s the extra work that this research suggests is really, really important to do.
Drew: Absolutely. One final bit of science, then we’ll get into a few little side topics and then takeaways. The final one is the segmenting principle, and that’s the idea that people understand better when presentations are in smaller sections.
This is something that educators have had to grapple with a lot with the shift to online and blended learning, is the science is now pretty definitive that an hour-long lecture is terrible. A more ideal learning encounter is under five minutes.
If you’re giving someone even a video, it should be four or five minutes. If you’re giving a talk, it should be four or five minutes. If you’ve got half an hour or an hour, then you’ve got to break it up into those smaller chunks.
A good way to do that is to use different learning activities. You might give your 5 minutes, maybe you might push it up to 10 minutes of just talking, but then you change it to another activity. You ask a question, you break them into small groups, you get them to discuss what you’ve just been talking about with their neighbor and work out what they least understand and report it back to the class. Something to break that up into smaller bits.
David: And the way that the author talks about this is, again, like you mentioned that you try to do, which is okay, here’s a slide of content. Now here’s a question. Let’s think about this. Then, okay, we wrap up that particular topic or that particular learning outcome, and then we move on to the next one.
I think the idea of just, I’m going to talk for 50 minutes and then we’ll have 10 minutes of questions at the end is an unscientific, lazy way of trying to help people learn and take useful things away.
Drew: A few little topics that we might touch on quickly, David. The first one is the author is a big fan of videos in their presentations, which is something that I’ve always not been a fan of just for technology reasons. When I’m teaching people how to do PowerPoint presentations, I just say like, cardinal rule, just no videos because it’s unreliable shifting from computer-to-computer on site-to-site and terrible for your audience if it doesn’t work.
But he’s got some reasonably good reasons for believing that it does actually do just very short videos to demonstrate key concepts, particularly where there’s something that’s very visual, like putting a piece of equipment together or how an equipment piece of equipment works, I think does make sense if the technology is reliable.
David: I think when we did our episode—I’m not sure which number it was in virtual reality—it was in and around when we did the PowerPoint episode, we looked at VR training versus PowerPoint training. It was mixed, but for certain types of contexts when you’re trying to explain how something works that was in the VR training, if you recall Drew about bricklaying and things like that, it can really help people with their comprehension and learning.
I think the author’s pretty fair in this discussion about animation in the paper where he says, look, something that has been shown to work in one context doesn’t mean it’ll work in another context as well. I am also someone who tends to avoid videos for technological reasons, but I can understand that if we’re trying to present or teach on a particular process-related topic, then showing an animation or a video of that process working could really help the learner.
Drew: Yes, and just in case anyone needs to be told, when we’re talking about animation here, we are talking about things like progressively building up a picture. We are not talking about slide transitions or having text fly in and fly out and things like that. No professional presenter ever does that anymore. Just in case you need to be told, PowerPoint does still have features for animations and transitions. Do not use them.
David: All right. Side topic number two, drew.
Drew: Decorating your slides. These are things like you’ve got a set of bullet points or a question, and next to them there’s a picture of a person scratching their head. These are irrelevant images made to make the slides look more pretty. I have to admit I am sometimes guilty of that.
David: I did this last week, Drew. I had slides with bullet points, and a person while trying to solve the equivalent of a Rubik’s cube. I made both of those mistakes last week.
Drew: Ricketts’ argument is basically that they’re really just distractions, and any distraction is going to reduce comprehension. His main concern, which I think is fair, is that when we do that decoration, we deceive ourselves into thinking, oh, it’s not so bad that we’ve got bullet points, and it’s the bullet points that are really the problem. So having bullet points and then decorating them just makes bullet points worse from a learning point of view. It doesn’t get rid of the problem of bullet points by making a slide slightly more interesting.
So yeah, basically just don’t deceive yourself by thinking that just because the slide is decorated, it’s therefore more interesting and better for the letter. It’s not. And yeah, guilty too.
David: Hopefully, this episode is providing an opportunity for us all who use PowerPoint a lot to think about our technique and approaches with PowerPoint. I must admit, Drew, for as long as I’ve known and worked with you, you’ve always been someone who I thought I used to be a fairly text-heavy PowerPoint person, and I always looked at your presentations that were always just a photo or something was very different to my approach.
Now I understand why, and hopefully our learners have had an opportunity to think about their own approach to PowerPoints and opportunities that they might do a bit differently. Do we want to talk about some practical takeaways and point out what we think might be important?
Drew: Let’s start with the underlying principle to take away, even if you ignore the details. Slides aren’t there to look interesting, and slides aren’t there to carry the weight of the content. They don’t do either of those things.
Think of your slides as a visual support to help the listener understand and integrate what you’re talking about. If you are not doing that, they'll just have one fewer slide. The slide’s there to help them understand what you’re saying, not to have the content on or just to be an interesting backdrop to the content. You happy with that as a general?
David: Absolutely. Keep going, please.
Drew: Specific things you can do is strip your slides, get rid of anything that doesn’t help your listeners. Get rid of decorations. Get rid of words. If you’ve got bullet points, replace each bullet point with a two word term that captures the heart of that bullet point that you want to stick in people’s mind because the term matters.
If you’re showing an image or diagram, get rid of the bits that aren’t the important thing or put a big arrow or highlight to point to the most important thing to make sure the readers don’t have to comprehend the whole image. You never be caught saying, I know this is a bit complicated and hard to read, but if you’ve got to apologize for it, get rid of it.
David: Keep going please, Drew. I’ve got a few ideas at the end, but I’d love you to get through your takeaways.
Drew: Third thing, don’t think of it as a presentation in the first place. Think of it as a teaching and learning engagement. What do you want people to get out of that engagement and what’s going to help them? It’s probably not you giving a presentation. It’s using that time wisely, breaking up the time into smaller activities, designing each of those activities around what is the key takeaway you want from those activities.
David, you’ve already touched on this, but good practice I think is basically to prepare your talk three times. The way I do it is I start with one set of slides that is full of bullet points. But that’s for me. That’s for me to plan out my talk, to plan out what I want to say. Then I put that aside.
Then I prepare another set of slides, which is for my audience, this is what they’re going to see designed strictly for them. There’s nothing on there to prompt or remind me that’s in my own bullet points.
Then one thing I don’t do which I probably should do is that third set, which is what am I actually going to give people when they ask for a copy of my slides. I don’t really want the notes that I have prepared just for me, and the ones I’ve presented are useless because they’re basically just a set of photos. It’s going to have to be some other more useful learning material for them.
David: I was even thinking, Drew, even the third set doesn’t have to be slides. I was thinking it practically in business, which is if you gave a presentation you might say, hey, look. What I’ll do is I’m just going to send an email around after this session to everyone who attended with a bunch of the key summary points and things like that, or even writing it as a log article.
Today, it’d be so easy for you to just give your presentation, turn on your voice memo notes on your iPhone while you’re presenting, take it as a transcript, throw it into AI and say, prepare a 500-word summary of this talk for the learners to take away, and just email that around to people. It’d probably be a far better solution than just preparing a third set of slides.
Drew: Or you could be like Mitch Ricketts who gave a talk at an SSP conference. He has to tell his listeners in more detail, I’m going to publish a full article in the professional magazine, peer-reviewed with lots of evidence, reference, photos, and examples that you can take away. [...] mouth is on that one.
David: Drew, I struggle enough with my time management, and I happen to do as you do quite a few presentations. That would be a sure way to not deliver on a commitment if I told any audience anywhere that I was going to prepare a full peer-reviewed paper on the talk.
Drew: David, you mentioned you might have a couple of takeaways as well.
David: What I’m interested in here is about the unlearning that might need to happen, because I’m hoping that our listeners may have had the same experience that I had when I read this paper, which was the opportunity to self-reflect and think about the way that we do our own presentations for the benefit of the audience.
I had an experience recently where I try to, when I’m doing professional development with safety teams, follow this. A lot of the learning sessions that I do, I don’t use any PowerPoint slides. I rarely ever use PowerPoint slides because they’re meant to be interactive sessions.
The way I talk is that if I’m just going to present a presentation, then I’ll just record it and email it around. The fact that we’ve all taken the time to get on a session together means that the purpose here is discussion. But so many people still ask for and expect a share screen set of bullet points. Can you provide the summary?
I think one of the takeaways here is that safety teams, if you just suddenly significantly change the way you’re doing presentations, you may want to actually just help people understand why you’re presenting the way that you are, and that it is geared around them having a better understanding of your presentation. Even though the science suggests this is the way it should be, there are still a lot of people in your organization who probably think that bullet points are a fantastic way to present PowerPoint.
Drew: And meeting some of those expectations may require some careful compromise or preparing material in two forms.
David, there was actually one other meta takeaway that I thought might be a bit important to say, which is, if you’ve seen really, really good speakers that have impressed you, or people who you go along to conferences and they just wow you for how naturally and confidently they present, I don’t want to deny that there is a bit of natural talent behind what makes a good speaker, but most of it is professional craft.
The gap between someone who has trained themselves to do it well and someone who is naturally talented is barely distinguishable. I can guarantee that all of the really good ones put a lot of attention into this stuff. They don’t just, you throw it together and appear naturally good. They’re following advice like this and following guidance like this. They’re revising their presentations several times to get it from the early ugly version into the version that looks so slick and easy. It’s something that you can put a bit of effort into and get significantly better at yourself regardless of your level of talent or confidence.
David: I think that’s a really great meta takeaway is leaning on this science and investing in the preparation time. I can think of great presenters even in our space, someone like yourself, Drew. I think you’re an amazing presenter. I think someone like Todd Conklin is a great presenter. The slides always feel so organic and such an in-the-moment type of presentation.
Then you hear a presentation again a few weeks later and you go, gee. That sounds almost word for word like the last presentation, but it still feels so natural and so in the moment. I’d agree with that, Drew. I think this is something that deliberate practice, people can get pretty good pretty quickly.
Drew: Absolutely. David, the question we asked this week was, what makes a good presentation?
David: The short answer here is the title of the paper—no more bullet points. That would be the first criteria for people. Have a look at your presentations, go through, delete anything that’s got a bullet in front of it, then recreate your slides thinking about what’s the most useful image or label here on the screen that’s going to focus people’s attention on what you are talking about, not on the slide.
Drew: Thanks, David. That’s it for this week. As always, you can reach us on Safety Exchange or LinkedIn. We hope you found this a bit thought-provoking and maybe actually practically challenging and useful in shaping your own work and your own future presentations. Or you can send us any comments, questions, or particularly ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.