SlideMagic Blog

I realised that most presentation slides I create fall in two categories:

1. Data charts that have information in them that would be impossible to convey verbally (a graph, a table with financial information, a ranking of competitors)
2. Place holders with some powerful visual (picture, typography) and is merely a placeholder for the story told by the presenter

Things go wrong if you mix them: showing hard core data with a cute picture will not work, putting up a detailed consulting framework as your place holder will not work.

Back in the old days at McKinsey, my first project manager explained to me that I was supposed to “present the slide ” (Exhibit in McKinsey speak) to the client. This involved taking the audience (a small conference room) through all steps of the analysis.

And also we found… And then we found… And also we analysed… And also the team discovered…

Presenting a slide is probably still useful in internal team meetings among management consultants or scientists, but in most story-driven business presentations slides are there to support you in a subordinate role rather than claiming the lead role. The slides run in the background, as you tell your own story.

I try to keep ugliness completely out of my design work. Ugliness tends to spread like a virus that wants to take over your work.

Even if you make a quick mockup or even a paper sketch of a slide, it should look orderly, balanced, clean. This is what I learned on my first day at McKinsey, when a client walks in you should be able to talk her through the hand-written deck.

Business school books and consulting reports have a clear hierarchical structure. This is great for reading a document: you can skip what you do not need, and go right into then detail when you do need it more explanation.

In short stories, hierarchy can be boring, you sound like you are given a university lecture. I often flatten that hierarchy, making the presentation more sequential. Out go the slides with the 3-5 setup bullet points, and instead I just let the story flow. If I have to, I bring back the structure at the end of the presentation to sum things up.

This works great for 20 minute presentations, for marathon presentation days we might have to revert back to the business school rigour though. But there is a reason why marathon presentation sessions are so stimulating for the brain…

Most business meetings are about getting to some sort of decision or agreement on next steps. So why not focus your presentation completely on that?

Take out or put in the appendix:

• Long-winded sections with historical backgrounds
• A detailed description of the process your team took
• All the dead ends you hit and excluded from the analysis
• Vast analysis that proofs a point that everyone already agrees on
• Market analysis for the sake of market analysis, without supporting a point you want to make
• Explanations of management theory and frameworks you used, extensive parallels with other industries
• Elaborate competitor profiles

Instead:

• Frame the options that you see
• Provide a summary why you think you need option C
• Quickly mention the evidence that everyone agrees on
• Boil things down to the decision about the more controversial parts of your argument
• Provide your logic, and provide deep fact-based analysis that support the points you are making.

A business school professor would not agree to this violation of providing an academic argument, but you ensured that your meeting will be as short and to the point as possible.

Not all PowerPoint presentations are in front of 500-seat TED audiences. Many presentations get emailed around and read on screens.

Strategic decisions are usually a careful trade-off between options. Some choices are clear, fact-based and objective. Others are qualitative, and yet others are complete leaps in the dark.

To make a decision you need to have all of the factors on some page somehow. Yes, this dense slide violates all the rules about good presentation design. But there is one big difference: the audience that will appreciate it are insiders, who suffer from the Benefit of Knowledge (the opposite of the Curse of Knowledge [what?]). They have heard the arguments before and they are ready for decision time.

How to design a good decision slide for these people?

1. A table: options in the columns, arguments in the rows
2. Group the options and arguments somehow, sort options by risk, how radical they are, something. Group arguments: similar arguments go together, if they are sort of the same thing, you collapse them into one. Group the factual arguments, to make the more contested ones stand out.
3. Label your options and arguments for the audience with the Benefit of Knowledge, short labels or placeholders that are enough for them to understand the full picture. After months of discussions “Blink first” might be enough to describe a strategic scenario covering 25 pages.
4. Frame the options so that the answers are in the same direction: I usually pick positive ones: no cannibalisation, retention of talent, limited competitive threat. Etc.
5. Now the tricky bit: score options (1, 2, 3, low, medium, high) and use colours to distinctive good or bad. Re-group, re-sort options and arguments until you get the maximum number of continuous good and bad fields.
6. Look at the result and tweak scores and weights until you reach your conclusion. If you had the push up the weight of the leap-of-faith type of arguments a lot to balance the factual criteria, you know what you will have to explain in your presentation
7. Once you reach your conclusion you can make a hugely simplified version of this matrix, collapsing all similar arguments together and boiling it down to the 2 or 3 points that will tip the balance

I get asked this question frequently by people who are considering a career change. Here is my story.

The first 10 formative years of my career were spent with McKinsey, a strategy consulting firm, working in the London and Amsterdam offices with projects pretty much in every country in Europe. My stay there was a bit different than the norm: 1) I stuck around for about 10 years, versus 2-3 on average, and 2) I did not specialise in one industry (banking, consumer goods, etc.), but rather did a functional specialisation: mergers and acquisitions, usually on the sell side. In short, I helped big Fortune 500 companies sell themselves to other big Fortune 500 companies. As a result, every project that I worked on was in a different industry, and I had to adjust rapidly to understand a completely new field of work (beer, pet food, DIY retailing, petrol retailing, grocery, retail banking, asset management, insurance, private equity, e-commerce, mobile payments, postal services and logistics just to name a few). Little did I know then, how useful this skill would come in a decade later in a briefing for a new presentation design project.

After leaving the Firm, I moved with my family to Tel Aviv where I started out as an independent strategy consultant. Soon, I got in touch with the Israeli high tech industry. The small startups could not afford (and probably did not need) me as a strategy consultant for 6 months but saw value in my PowerPoint slides for meetings with potential investors (these charts were still B&W, highly organised, full of consulting speak at that time). It was here that my gradual transformation to a presentation designer started. Gradual is important here, I think no freelancer figures out exactly his professional niche from day one. In my case it probably took around 2-3 years to stop calling myself a strategy consultant.

Most PowerPoint decks are not designed for standup presentations to large audiences, rather they are documents that are used to get a smaller group of people to agree business decisions (the implementation plan, next quarter’s budget, etc.). The language used in these documents has changed over the years.

First, there was the memorandum that was dictated and written on a type writer, later replaced by a word processor. It was full of fluffy and formal language and people quickly learned how to skip most of it by jumping straight to the “Executive Summary” on the first page. All of these documents looked sort of the same.

In the 1930s, the management consulting profession was invented. Engineering mixed with business resulted in scientific charts full of frameworks with fancy names and buzzwords. Like the executive summary, managers had to acquire a method to skim through the content quickly, ignoring padding and business school speak to cut through what the document really wanted to say. All of these documents looked sort of the same.

I think it is time to create a new business language that injects good design into the management consulting-style charts and I am trying to write my upcoming presentation app around it. Yes, all of the documents it produces will look sort of the same, but it will make business decision making easier and more beautiful on the eye.

Young companies often have an ambiguous strategy. Nobody is really clear, and everybody has a different interpretation. The moment you need to write a press release or an external presentation it all has to be clear. That is why it can take a long time to agree on 1 single page of text.

Sometimes it is useful to frame your entire story in 1 table on 1 page. The other day, I had a client in the semiconductor industry. The story centred around 3 things that matter (the column headings). Then, the rows were: first: current product features, next row: why they cause problems, next row: what bottleneck you need to overcome to solve this, next row: how the bottleneck is overcome, next row: alternative product features. In a written management consulting report, you can stop here. A live presentation requires more work. The presentation design challenge is now to take this boring table and turn it into a compelling story, spreading it out over many pages and many minutes. The table is a little cheat sheet to make sure you have captured everything.