End Notes
May I have your attention?
By Jon Hallberg, M.D.
Confessions of a reformed PowerPoint user.
I think I owe several of you an apology. Over the years, I’ve given dozens of presentations to groups large and small on topics ranging from bubonic plague to steroid use in athletes. Perhaps you were present for one of them. If so, it’s to you I owe the apology.
I gave many of those talks using royal blue slides with yellow lettering. (I was told this color scheme would make them especially easy to read.) I loaded the slides with as much information as I possibly could, although I tried to limit the number of bullet points to six per slide. (I was told this was the optimal number.) I made sure my slides would be easy to print. (Six per page.) I often read directly off my slides, as you read along with me—or ahead of me. I wonder now, how in the world did I keep your attention? (I suspect I didn’t.)
As I think back on some of those talks, I cringe. They must have been awful—dull, text rich and image poor. Where was the story? The pull? The hook? What was I thinking? And when did I fall into the trap of giving visually boring presentations? I can tell you. It was 1997, the year I discovered PowerPoint. But this is about to change. I’ve become a reformed PowerPoint user. And here’s why.
I discovered Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds. If you give presentations, you need to read this book. For me, a single read-through changed the way I give talks and view them. I’ve been so taken by Reynolds’ message, I’m now on mission to improve the quality of medical presentations. Encouraging you to read his book is the simplest way I can do that.
I stumbled on Presentation Zen by accident. Early in 2008, I read another great book, Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. I was so intrigued, I went to Pink’s website. There, I saw a link to his next book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, billed as the first U.S. business book in manga, or Japanese comic book form. For a description of the Bunko book, I was directed to a slide show. I navigated through the more than 100 slides in about five minutes. They were simple and stark, mainly black and white with a little red for accent. They contained few words (sometimes only one), and each slide presented no more than a single idea. I wondered who created this thing. I clicked on another link and found out it was a guy named Garr Reynolds.
Reynolds is an expert on presentation design and delivery who lives in Japan. He loves simplicity, elegance, and white space. Reading his book (itself a thing of beauty), you immediately begin to see why most of our presentations are really awful. We cram too many words (and graphs and charts and data) onto our slides, and as speakers, we literally read off of them. (I think this is often the fault of conference organizers who ask for a copy of our slides ahead of time.)
In this slim book, just over 200 pages, Reynolds covers such ideas as creativity, crafting a story, simplicity, being present, and connecting with the audience. He shares several sample presentations, covering everything from sustainable food to aromatic chemistry. (If a presenter can make the properties of tetravalent carbon visually interesting, then those of us in medicine can surely make an update on congestive heart failure more engaging.) Reynolds also recommends a number of other books and websites, including my new favorite, the TED (for Technology, Education, and Design) conference site. (If you want to see how master presenters make superb use of PowerPoint and other visual tools, check out www.ted.com/talks.)
So why should physicians care about improving their PowerPoint presentations? As long as medical schools and medical conferences continue to offer lecture-like teaching, PowerPoint will continue to be the medium through which information is shared. And if that’s going to be the case, we presenters have a responsibility to improve our presentations. I can’t think of a better place to start this sea change than by reading Presentation Zen. MM
Jon Hallberg is medical director of the new University of Minnesota Physicians’ Mill City Clinic.